Oceans Yet to Burn

nuclearspaceheater:

prokopetz:

Thesis: the narrow focus on public performance over substantive action in certain activist circles has less to do with cynical schemes to game the system for progressive brownie points, and more to do with the fact that many folks basically think social activism is a form of ritual magic. Popular histories give us images of Great Men making speeches and leading marches and circulating petitions, and completely erase all the ground-level infrastructure that made all that stuff work; the end result is that a lot of folks seem honestly to believe that bringing about social change is a matter of performing the appropriate symbolic actions and waiting for reality to reconfigure itself accordingly.

Also, for any issue that society gradually comes to a new position on, the popularity needed to stage mass activism is almost the level needed to simply institute the desired policy. So, for those issues determined more by material circumstances, it’s possible that the policy would have happened without any activism whatsoever, but you’ll still see the most activism just before it’s accepted, creating the illusion that it was accepted due to activism.

Interesting thought.

@discoursedrome: in the grim darkness of the far future, the furry vs. scaly war knows no end

That’s the spirit!

discoursedrome:

argumate:

honestly I’d really appreciate it if people who dislike transhumanism point me in the direction of why

The main reason is that most people I’ve encountered were big boosters of transhumanism seemed to consider it a kind of cheat code for fundamental social and ecological problems – in other words, they conceptualize it as a way to get easy answers to hard problems, with the details left extremely vague. Very often they seemed to have a fantasy of technological wonders saving them from death and taxes. So, that all goes in the same bucket as other sorts of utopianism.

I’m not against the idea of using technology to solve our problems, even if it means changing ourselves in the process, but that isn’t some kind of new thing, it’s a continuation of the same process as the invention of agriculture, in the same way that GMOs are a continuation of ancient crossbreeding. Calling that “transhumanism” implies a quasi-religious millennarian outlook, which makes me extremely wary. It seems like a way to get religious salvation out of technology for a lot of people, and that is not the kind of outlook I want someone to have when tinkering with radical, dangerous civilization-scale technology.

I don’t think it actually solves race or gender, per se…  I mean, kind of.  It sort of explodes them instead, and new issues are created, but often dealing with the new issues will be preferable to the old ones.

What does race discourse look like when you can change your race?  Or less radically, when you can copy all the non-appearance genes from whatever race you like?

What does meritocracy look like when everyone already has the basic “good” genes and massive, expensive genetic problems only exist in the time-local version of anti-vaxxers?

What does gender discourse look like when people can change their sex easily?

Et cetera.

I think it’s net beneficial to go there, but I see it as important that we are prepared, first.

(Also, notice how totally unprepared most WNs are for these changes.)

argumate:

obiternihili:

Had a thought about a future with men being forced to take some kind of drug when their partner’s found to be pregnant that stimulates bonding hormones, with a hell dump of it when the baby’s born, to mirror bonding hormones in the mother and dissuade abandonment

don’t men naturally already get something like that?

Yeah, isn’t this already the Bonding Hormones AU?

fluffshy:

argumate:

mitigatedchaos:

argumate:

In a way it’s heartening that crooked politicians can’t raid the treasury directly and have to engage in dodgy contract kickback arrangements via foreign banks; each extra link in the chain increases the vulnerability of the scheme and guarantees its eventual exposure.

I’d like to add a few more links to that chain…

political cartoon of Leia strangling Jabba with lots of unnecessary labels like POLITICAL ELITE, FINANCIAL REGULATION, WIKILEAKS, PUBLIC OPINION, MILLENNIALS, TAX HAVENS, COST OF LIVING PRESSURE,

On the other hand, each link adds a greater chance of costs external to the pilfering of the treasury like hiring a less efficient jet manufacturing company or passing needless regulation to enable rent seeking. Directly raiding the treasury would have less real world consequences besides enriching the crook..

Ah, but you see, one of the cheaper links to add…

Is just to pay your politicians more money.

People just hate politicians, so they’re unwilling to do this, but every doubling of a politician’s income is a doubling of how much money it takes to bribe them, possibly greater as money becomes relatively less important the more of it you have.

Kickbacks have to be hidden in larger projects/funds, so going from $100,000 in kickbacks to $200,000 in kickbacks could mean an increase in costs of $1,000,000, which just makes the thing even more noticeable.

I once calculated that it would cost something like $250 million USD to highly pay the US Federal legislators and President something like $500,000-$1 million each, annually.

That sounds like a lot of money, but suppose the federal government spends 25% of an $18 trillion dollar economy.

If we got a 1% improvement in federal government spending, it would provide potentially $45 billion in value, 180x that increase in cost.  Does it seem feasible that we’d get 1% better spending out of congress if we paid them at that level?  Not from existing congress critters, maybe, but some of those seats might start to look really tempting to more talented individuals…

collapsedsquid:

Minimum wage, basic income, and wage subsidies are the perfect example of why testing won’t work.  All of them will cause effects like migration if tested in a region that won’t apply if used universally.  All of them have inflation fears that won’t be seen if tested in a small population.  All of them have work disincentive effects that won’t be visible if tested in a small region.  And all of them can have effects that are swamped out by economic fluctuations that are unrelated and therefore can have difficult to interpret effects.

And wait, don’t we have to test  miti’s iron fist control of the central government before we test any of the rest?  I think we’ve gotten trapped in an infinite recursion here, we have to test the act of experimentation before we test experiments.

To a degree, but incremental testing will have less of those effects, as would varied testing across various areas.  It should be possible to extract a decent amount of information just from testing lesser versions of all of them in multiple differing areas.  

After all, you have to test them in a world where migration exists, unless one of your tests is banning migration.  If your policy fails so badly that you have to build a wall to keep people from leaving the country, that is very important evidence in itself.  Likewise, if immigrants swarm into one of your districts to free ride.

For some items that do require national-scale implementation (aside from the rather dramatic alternative of splitting the country in two, which would have been quite interesting to see with Commies/Anarchists), the policymakers should be registering their bets before it goes into effect.  (Additional considerations modifying those bets can be worked in later, it will get a little complicated, but should be possible.)

Iron fist control of the national government was presented only as a framing device.

collapsedsquid:

mitigatedchaos:

collapsedsquid:

bambamramfan:

discoursedrome:

isaacsapphire:

ranma-official:

Socialist countries have a really bad track record of human rights abuses and a strange set of failings that are either specific to them or unusually prominent compared to the general zeitgeist, so you can draw decent conclusions like “don’t break systems a lot of people depend on, just cuz” and “freedom of press is actually really important” and “science shouldn’t be controlled by the state’s ideology ever”

instead people realize that Marx was wrong about something and the Soviet Union killed people and then go become tankies but for capitalism

I guess the real question is, “is it possible to avoid these known horrible bugs in Communism/socialism, or is it time to go look for something else and try to make that work?”

The vast majority of Communists I’ve encountered in person or online don’t seem to be trying to avoid the known problems. They either ignore/don’t know/pretend to not know about the historical issues, or they consider eg. genocide a feature rather than a bug.

Yeah the communists I know mostly just roll their eyes at this sort of objection, and, like, okay, I get that they’re tired of fielding criticisms of that sort, but it’s not like they have really solid retorts that anyone who cares to know can easily look up. If their goal is just to wait for widespread revolutionary class consciousness to develop naturally and then assume it will all work out, I dunno guys.

Even on a maximally optimistic timeline we’re something like 30 years out from the kind of mass socialist movement that existed at the fin de siècle, so if they’re serious about this then proselytism is crucial, and they’re not going to get very far with that unless they can convince people that the widespread suspicions toward communism aren’t likely to apply to their movement. Unless they’re just trying to use the threat of communist revolution as a bludgeon to extract short-term incremental concessions from the ruling class, in which case more power to them I guess.

Far leftists often get made fun of for obsessing about arcane details of ideology, having schisms over potential policy long before they ever conceivably might get actual power.

Far leftists also have to contend with a history of bad institutional and policy decisions leading to the death of millions and autocratic government.

I like to think the first is a result of the second.

I think that problem with that idea is that the schisming came before the gaining of power.  There’s a good case to make that the causality is (partially) reversed there.

Agree.  Far Leftist/Communist arguments, from what I see of them, don’t appear to be about technocratic differences, but more about moral ones.

It would be interesting to see them argue like economists over specific detailed alternative societal models, and probably more beneficial since they might run more tests of them.

Political factions in general also appear to lack the idea of running competing tests in order to assess their effectiveness.  Sadly that might be an artifact of gaining power.

I mean, you can view the anarchist/leninist debate (which is what I was thinking of) as moral, but you can also see it argued in very technocratic terms.  Anarchists argued a Leninist state would become oppressive.  Leninists argued a anarchist non-state would be either impossible, or end up a state in all but name.

And the whole concept of “testing“ isn’t really possible.  What works for small groups doesn’t for large groups, what applies to a part doesn’t apply to the whole.  Meaningfully testing these thing is hard, hell, look at the replicability crisis in the social sciences, and those are much easier problems.

For a total revamp, sure. If you have iron fist control of the central government, though, you can do some pretty extreme tests, far more daring and dangerous than I would do, with the organization of the provincial governments, however. There are ways out of this testability mess, but they don’t really appeal to the political mind IME since political justification is often from perceived moral binding.

Imagine, for a moment, that the Central Director of the North American Union wants to test the results of various new minimum wage, basic income, and wage subsidies programs, and the National Technocrats have seized power and excluded all others from the legislature. She could have the legislative factions lay out multiple plans that are estimated to have a reasonable chance of success, then have the leadership of various jurisdictions rank them according to which they would like most for their district, and use that to guide district selection with a reasonable variation to choose from. A set date could then be set for evaluation before the next round, probably 3-5 years.

Even the United States in its current form provides some evidence from differing experiments, but our politicals mostly just throw it out amd go with whatever policy they already wanted.

collapsedsquid:

bambamramfan:

discoursedrome:

isaacsapphire:

ranma-official:

Socialist countries have a really bad track record of human rights abuses and a strange set of failings that are either specific to them or unusually prominent compared to the general zeitgeist, so you can draw decent conclusions like “don’t break systems a lot of people depend on, just cuz” and “freedom of press is actually really important” and “science shouldn’t be controlled by the state’s ideology ever”

instead people realize that Marx was wrong about something and the Soviet Union killed people and then go become tankies but for capitalism

I guess the real question is, “is it possible to avoid these known horrible bugs in Communism/socialism, or is it time to go look for something else and try to make that work?”

The vast majority of Communists I’ve encountered in person or online don’t seem to be trying to avoid the known problems. They either ignore/don’t know/pretend to not know about the historical issues, or they consider eg. genocide a feature rather than a bug.

Yeah the communists I know mostly just roll their eyes at this sort of objection, and, like, okay, I get that they’re tired of fielding criticisms of that sort, but it’s not like they have really solid retorts that anyone who cares to know can easily look up. If their goal is just to wait for widespread revolutionary class consciousness to develop naturally and then assume it will all work out, I dunno guys.

Even on a maximally optimistic timeline we’re something like 30 years out from the kind of mass socialist movement that existed at the fin de siècle, so if they’re serious about this then proselytism is crucial, and they’re not going to get very far with that unless they can convince people that the widespread suspicions toward communism aren’t likely to apply to their movement. Unless they’re just trying to use the threat of communist revolution as a bludgeon to extract short-term incremental concessions from the ruling class, in which case more power to them I guess.

Far leftists often get made fun of for obsessing about arcane details of ideology, having schisms over potential policy long before they ever conceivably might get actual power.

Far leftists also have to contend with a history of bad institutional and policy decisions leading to the death of millions and autocratic government.

I like to think the first is a result of the second.

I think that problem with that idea is that the schisming came before the gaining of power.  There’s a good case to make that the causality is (partially) reversed there.

Agree.  Far Leftist/Communist arguments, from what I see of them, don’t appear to be about technocratic differences, but more about moral ones.

It would be interesting to see them argue like economists over specific detailed alternative societal models, and probably more beneficial since they might run more tests of them.

Political factions in general also appear to lack the idea of running competing tests in order to assess their effectiveness.  Sadly that might be an artifact of gaining power.

manicgothicoctopi:

neeetsocks:

death-drive-128:

neeetsocks:

hannah-ananas:

angel-ani:

mister-christmas:

angel-ani:

mister-christmas:

klubbhead:

silvershewolf247:

angel-ani:

To all y'all liberal kids that are getting icky feelings about punching Nazis and other forms of violent protest:

Voldemort was taken down by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.

Darth Vader was taken down by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.

Jeanine Matthews and the Eurydice faction were taken down by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.

President Snow and the government of Panem were taken down by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.

The Homeworld Gems were stopped from destroying Earth by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.

I mean damn. One Piece, Bleach, Ghost in the Shell, we can stretch it and say The Silmarillion, Eragon, The Chronicles of Narnia, Animorphs, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Voltron, I could probably name more if I had time, all this has in common is that the bad dudes with power WILL NOT GIVE THEIR POWER UP. EVER. It had to be TAKEN from them.

If y'all can understand this and relate to fictional characters, why can’t you do this to your fellow humans in real life?? Y'all are supporting the Death Eaters, the Empire, the bad guys you say you hate. Get your priorities in order. Get over that “Non-violence” bullshit.

I never saw Princess Leia shake hands with the Sith.

Where’s the picture, one of my followers has to have it.

@klubbhead @jetpack-jenny

I’m on mobile dammit

The difference was all those baddies INITIATED the violence. Here, you’re the one initiating violence which makes you the baddies.

Hi yes umm the presence of a Nazi/fascist is an inherently violent act. Someone saying stuff like “I want a white enthnostate!” Or “[insert type of person] aren’t really human!” IS AN ACT OF VIOLENCE.

The existence of Nazis is violence
The existence of white nationalists is violence

The antifa or any other group protesting the Nazis are a reactionary force. They would not exist if the Nazis didn’t exist, but they do so here we are.

The violence has already been initiated. These Nazis and fascists are killing people, are taking away rights, they’ve infiltrated police and government, they want people DEAD.

The violence is already here, and if you cannot/will not see that, you are complicit.

Words are not violence. Opinions are not violence. Nazis existing is not violence. The fact that you believe those qualify as violence tells me you’re either a troll or delusional and in either case having any kind of rational discussion will be a fruitless endeavor. Though I am curious what you’ll try to pass off as examples of Nazis and fascists killing people or taking away rights in the U.S. and what bullshit CNN article you’ll try to use as evidence.

Words lead to physical violence. Also, these people don’t stop at words, they stab people, they take away peoples rights, they murder and destroy lives. That’s violence. If we tolerate the existence of fascism, we allow it to grow and infect others. We are complicit in the violence to come. Also, I’m at work and on mobile, so I can’t hunt for sources right now, but give me a few hours, I’ll post some later tonight.

Jesus christ how do people think these fictional facist powers rose? With ‘charm’, guile, with WORDS. Theyre posion-tongued bastards that are trying to weasel their way into power. They know that if they start with all their views than they’ll be shunned right off the bat. So they sugarcoat it, they say its just their opinion, that theyre just exercising their right to free speech. It starts small and it depends on people like you @mister-christmas saying that theyre not doing anything wrong. Excusing their behaviour and, in the process condoning it, until its too late. Until theyve seized power and they can start to do what you qualify as violent acts. Get over yourself you milquetoast motherfucker.

WHY ARE WHITES LIKE THIS OH GOD

Don’t you have drugs to sell and police officers to bribe, neetsocks?

*white person voice* omg thats something only voldemort would say

@angel-ani

“Ghost in the Shell” a series based around an elite police unit stopping terrorist and dealing with political/intelligence conspiracies is somehow “radical antifa story” doesn’t this go against the whole ACAB shit antifa spews out? Or let me guess you only saw the live action film.

Yes, must’ve been the live-action one, “left-wing anti-fascist radicals“ is not how I would describe a group of paramilitary counter-terrorist cyborgs that report only to the Prime Minister.

Of course, that isn’t the real problem here.

The real problem is the citing of fictional evidence by which liberal society feeds its own mythology about democracy, justice, tolerance, acceptance, and so on back to itself.

Yes, mythology, dear readers.  The way Hitler is treated, the way World War 2 is treated, is not as a historical study but as the founding mythology for the post-war order.  That doesn’t mean that Hitler was a good man - he wasn’t - but he’s essentially treated as a borderline supernatural adversary figure with an inverse halo effect.

As for the OP and some of the others, true White Nationalists are not anywhere close to obtaining real political power in the United States, unless you do definitional game-playing that essentially amounts to lying.  However, every AntiFa dumbass out there hitting people with bike locks, pepper-spraying bitcoin hat wearers, and so on, is contributing to an increase in White Nationalism.  

Normally, the White Nationalists don’t have much to offer.  Normally, of course, when you don’t brand every single voter for a rival presidential candidate as “Fascist” and then say “we need to kill all Fascists” and a few people are stupid enough to take both seriously.

industrialangel:

mitigatedchaos:

argumate:

people in Melbourne regularly ask me where I am from, which causes a slight degree of difficulty if I answer “Melbourne”.

the real question is “tell me your life story and the saga of your ancestors”, but you know I’m just trying to buy socks in this exchange.

Having forgotten his Discourse Keyboard, the owl struggled to explain that the native range of Tyto Alba includes all of Australia and Tasmania, but the nuance of his argument was interpreted as little more than a confusing series of hoots by his interlocutors.  After refusing an offer of a small rodent, he retreated to his apartment in frustration, tiny owl socks unpurchased.

People make this assumption at times in the United States as well, depending on accent, frequency of tourists and international students matching the general appearance in the area, local demographics, etc.

I suspect the deeper version will die off as visible race is turned into fashion near the end of the century.

Who do you think you are to make a reference like this, some kind of guardian?

If one is creative enough, one can reference scenes they’ve never heard of from movies they’ve never seen, books they’ve never read, mangas they’ve never written.

Or maybe I really am from the alternate timeline and I’ve just been ripping off video games and movies that will never exist, Super Love Love Demon Battle included.

The proof, using advanced Time Cycle Theory, is left as an exercise for the reader.

mary-queen-of-thots:

remember capitalism made your iphone so it is uncriticizable

Originally read this as the iPhone itself being uncriticizable, which, well, Apple fanatics…

shieldfoss:

ranma-official:

“I don’t like antifa because I don’t consider political violence a hammer for every nail”: good opinion worth engaging

“antifa is a terrorist group, are the real fascists” etc: really bad political analysis here, friend

describing yourself as “anti-antifa” and talking about human rights are secondary to stamping the “antifa scum” out forever: hello, friend! we have plenty of rope left since Nuremberg, so I implore you to reconsider

Antifa is a terrorist group, they are also real fascists.

Not every dumb ideology is Fascism. There is also Communism, of both the intentionally and unintentionally authorian kinds.

argumate:

blackblocberniebros:

argumate:

blackblocberniebros:

argumate:

blackblocberniebros:

argumate:

blackblocberniebros:

argumate:

blackblocberniebros:

While I’m all for “self-criticism” of antifascists who go too far and use excessive violence or attack innocent people, that’s necessary and too often ignored, it’s worth noting no leftists have killed anyone in the US in decades, while the far right are killing people every couple of weeks now.

this kind of accusation, while tempting, gets awkward because it sort of relies on pushing all the violent people out of the category “leftist” and all the non-violent people out of the category “far right”, resulting in what is basically a tautology.

but at least we can all agree that killing is bad

I mean if you wanna include reactionary black nationalists under the category of leftist, that’s understandable even if I wouldn’t include them. They’re monstrous and have killed innocent people.

But if you ask me, and no one did, it’s the very logic of nationalism that leads to aimless murder, the viewing of entire ethnic groups as The Enemy and therefore legitimate targets, and it’s why actual anarchists and socialists in the US, who are internationalists, rarely if ever kill innocent people.

entire classes as the enemy and therefore legitimate targets is a thing too, even if ethnic hatred certainly does suck.

To be honest I don’t think anyone believes that, the entire class as a literal enemy in the military sense. No ones out there shooting landlords and business owners at random. No one but the fringest of tankies imagines that any revolution consists of literally murdering the entire former ruling class.

Me thinking it wouldn’t be so bad if someone iced an oil company CEO or war criminal US official is not at all the same as thinking every human being in the entire capitalist class and state apparatus is a “legitimate target”.

right, but we’re kind of haggling over price, now.

On the contrary, I think your acceptance of a “minimal” level of state violence that’s just allowed to go on unpunished and that doesn’t reasonably give credibility and justification to retaliation by victimized nonstate actors, is an unacceptable moral imposition on my conscience, a price too high for me to pay.

I’m not willing to take the position of a black-hearted school principal who just tolerates a certain level of abusive victimization by bullies as acceptable but would never allow for a victim to hit back and “start a fight”.

I think the problem in the scenario you describe is tolerating state violence, and the solution doesn’t involve molotov cocktails.

The unprincipled principal may punish both sides equally while the principled principal assesses the situation and delivers justice, but they still have to stop the fight!

No! The fight IS justice. Justice consists of the victim delivering a well-deserved fist to their assailant. Some investigation and punishment afterward will only ever be a second-best outcome, unless in those (admittedly quite common) situations where there’s confusion about who actually did what and who’s responsible.

The partisans shooting Mussolini and the liberated Jews who picked up a cane and beat up their former SS captors were better deliverers of justice than the war crimes tribunals as far as I’m concerned.

Extreme cases make bad principles; concentration camp guards directly committing heinous crimes are clearly asking for it, yes. But that’s hardly the typical case of political violence, is it.

And ideally we would have both more and better war crimes tribunals; Saddam Hussein may have deserved the noose, but it should have been for a clear accounting of his crimes, not because he was overthrown by a different gang of thugs.

“The fight IS justice!” says political Tumblr user, “but any unpunished incorrect state violence is too much.”

Yeah, that’s just acceptance of a minimal level of violence by another name. Confusion of who intiated what violence and/or manipulation by social adepts is the dominant case, not the edge case.

argumate:

blackblocberniebros:

argumate:

blackblocberniebros:

While I’m all for “self-criticism” of antifascists who go too far and use excessive violence or attack innocent people, that’s necessary and too often ignored, it’s worth noting no leftists have killed anyone in the US in decades, while the far right are killing people every couple of weeks now.

this kind of accusation, while tempting, gets awkward because it sort of relies on pushing all the violent people out of the category “leftist” and all the non-violent people out of the category “far right”, resulting in what is basically a tautology.

but at least we can all agree that killing is bad

I mean if you wanna include reactionary black nationalists under the category of leftist, that’s understandable even if I wouldn’t include them. They’re monstrous and have killed innocent people.

But if you ask me, and no one did, it’s the very logic of nationalism that leads to aimless murder, the viewing of entire ethnic groups as The Enemy and therefore legitimate targets, and it’s why actual anarchists and socialists in the US, who are internationalists, rarely if ever kill innocent people.

entire classes as the enemy and therefore legitimate targets is a thing too, even if ethnic hatred certainly does suck.

All we need is a revolutionary vanguard, and-

realsocialskills:

Donald Trump has spent years telling outrageous lies. He’s continued to do so since assuming office, even lying about obviously verifiable things like what he’s tweeted about or the size of his inauguration crowd.

He is attacking the idea that truth matters, and trying to make people give up on telling the difference between the truth and a lie. This is dangerously disoriented.

In order to stay oriented, we need to care what’s true. This is easier said than done. In the short term, bullshit is often much more politically convenient than the truth. In the long term, if we create a world in which the truth doesn’t matter, we will end up defenseless. 

We need to keep in mind that being on the right side doesn’t make everything someone might say true. Good people can tell lies. Good people can get things wrong. Their goodness doesn’t make the lie true. 

Being marginalized doesn’t mean that someone always knows what they’re talking about. Being oppressed doesn’t make people infallible; being wrong doesn’t make someone privileged. 

Similarly, not every rumor about a bad person is accurate. Lies told about a bad person are still lies. (And not everyone who has a bad reputation is actually a bad person.)

Be careful about spreading rumors. Learn to recognize fake news, and avoid spreading it. If something doesn’t sound true to you, ask for citations or investigate. Everyone can be wrong, and you don’t have to believe anyone without being persuaded that they are right. Evidence matters, arguments matter. (And being a good person isn’t a substitute for either.)

You can’t fight evil with bullshit. In order to fight evil, we have to care what’s true. 

The rivals have been lying/bullshitting/misrepresenting/omitting a lot in their attacks on Trump.  Every time I go and investigate one of the claims, I come back less trusting of the media and less trusting of the left and liberals, instead of more.

But it’s growing less surprising every day, since why was I ever foolish enough to think the Left and Liberals weren’t every bit the truth-apathetic political operatives as their rivals, when correct only correct by coincidence and not by process?

And I don’t mean to say that Trump is great, because he isn’t, but one can’t beat him on his level.  He lives there.