someone created a random generator that creates randomized inspirational quotes overlaid on random images in a soothing fashion and each and every image is comic gold
it’s pretty much the best thing ever and here are some of my favorites so far
so good
I’m getting this one made into a motivational poster for my home office
I leave the jeans I’m going to wear on my bed a few hours in advance of getting ready so that my cat will sleep on them and make them warm for me when I go out to brave the harsh Australian winter.
call them daks instead of jeans and make it a kangaroo instead of a cat and this would be a quality Strayan post to go viral on tumblr dot com
You’re so painfully unfunny that I’m certain you’re actually an American.
no wound ever cut so deep.
Somewhere on Earth, an Australian woman cries, because she is too stereotypical for people to believe she’s real.
If funding could be secured, it would be possible to start a think tank, because there is a lot of work to be done. These ideas are exotic, they escape the Overton Window by travelling orthogonal to it, but they have to be refined, tested, and experimented with.
The goal would be to synthesize a new scientific art of organizational design and policy incentivization from a diverse group of fields, including political science, economics (particularly behavioral economics), psychology, philosophy, and mathematics. Most existing organizations and politics are running on pre-digital organizational technology, and very few people even think of “organizational technology” as even being a concept.
Various proposals would be drafted, analyzed, refined, and then simulated using human testers (against competing speculative policies) before being refined again cyclically and suggested for institutions smaller than the US Federal Government. To improve efficiency, various competing domain experts would be hired for short periods of time.
Actually improving governance in the United States would require doing things that deeply offend both the Democratic and Republican parties and which are at odds with their ideological pre-commitments. Formation of a political party is right out due to the First Past the Post System which makes success with policies that are only inspiring to the kinds of people that read this blog extremely improbable. Policy advocacy should therefore focus on attacking avenues which are not sufficiently defended by partisan trench warfare, municipalities, and shifting politicians on individual issues through lobbying and electoral guides, functioning as a Special Interest Group.
Until then, one can follow this strange political time travel blog and dream of the future, if one wishes, in addition to whatever political activity one normally carries out.
The idea that there are no innate differences between men and women is really freaking weird! At least it’s internally consistent as a TERF narrative.
But it’s especially weird when I hear it out of the mouths of transgender people. There are no differences between men and women—but I’m really a woman!
honestly it would be better if everything Bad about men/women was innately biological, because it’s trivial to manufacture hormone supplements compared with trying to shift culture.
mautlyn said: can’t tell whether or not you agree with OP but like there are extensive studies showing that there are no brain differences between males & females
which is weird, because at least some people I know taking hormones report changes they’ve personally experienced.
but “no brain differences” is doing a lot of work in that sentence; if taken literally it would suggest that men and women are indistinguishable statistically, which is far from the truth (eg. why do men take more risks if their brains are no different to women?)
why do men take more risks if their brains are no different to women?
Cultural conditioning. I remember when people said “Men dominate at chess, that’s just biology, man.” Then Laszlo Polgar raised 3 female chess Grandmasters.
cultural condition implies resulting brain is different to women, is my point.
Did I not just reblog a link to a study in which each brain is unique and yet there are statistical distributions in structure which are overlapping but not uniform? Plus a lack differences in physical layout may not correspond to a lack of difference from the effect of hormones! “We are all neurologically the same” is liberal blank-slate wishful thinking, and, from progressive news outlets, a deliberate misrepresentation.
I know previously “but there may be differences” has been used to defend unjustified policy, the problem is that just because it was used to defend unjustified policy doesn’t mean it is false.
I think one of the key discoveries of the 20th century that has not yet been realized is that, contrary to the beliefs of many factions, including the globalist liberals and the Communists, there is not one right way to live, one set of laws which is the correct one for all people and all groups, and that all alternatives must fall away and either die off or be destroyed.
We must recognize that political policy is not a strict hierarchy of better/worse left/right, but a vector with two components - values (or terminal goals), and the means or effectiveness of means by which those values are to be realized or achieved.
Often, the failures of politics are not the result of terrible values, but ones of effectiveness. And some of the failures of modern, “rational” planning would be mitigated by the recognition and inclusion of alternate values, alternate ways to live.
If we design the political system from this perspective, I believe we could create substantial improvements, and also, perhaps ironically, a diversity of communities which are specialized according what best fits given populations without trying to transform them all into one homogeneous mass.
Please remind me to not give @mitigatedchaos any formal power if I ever become King of The World or something. Maybe I can bestow a purely ceremonial title like First Lady of The Republic of Cascadia or Vice Antipope. Grand Ideas should be kept in their ivory towers where they belong.
Ah, but by becoming World Emperor you already broke the first condition holding back those ideas - the inability to designate successively larger geographical areas to test them on live populations before larger-scale rollouts, arising from the necessities of political rivalry.
Victory for National Technocracy begins in the town of Whozawhatsit, Arkowa.
What now? Probably nothing, which is exactly the problem!
The prisoner that came back in a coma?
Because Hope my man, we are not going to war over one guy. You’ve seen where that World Policeman beat goes.
Yeah, I nether expect nor desire that to happen over one guy.
And yet the obscurantist state of North Korea continues to maintain its wretched position, oppressing its own citizens and threatening foreigners, because the alternative does not serve either of its neighbor’s self-interest. Time is being made to stand still.
Suffice it to say that I am frustrated and I think it would be better for time to stop standing still. Ideally the USA would be either minimally involved, or provide only muscle.
Warmbier probably got the same treatment as a hundred thousand North Koreans.
West Germany basically bought East Germany from the Soviets when they ran out of money.
I wish this was possible for Korea. North Korea does not even care when they run out of money or rice. I fear they just go on forever like this.
We gave up the money, blood, and political capital to just go to Korea flat out when we went to Iraq.
I’m sorry. It would have been far more justified. Maybe, in some other timeline, somewhere, there is no ISIS and Samsung’s heavy industry division is building power plants on the outskirts of Pyongyang.
I’m not sure that the national policy establishment have even learned that when you decide to play world policeman, you must play to win. The Neocons loved the idea of American Empire, but they weren’t willing to pay the ideological price it takes to do it for real.
Sweating Obama Admits Drone Strikes Have Been Happening On Their Own
Honestly, that’s kind of like how a subset of American voters experience this. The immense political and bureaucratic inertia seems to turn every President into part of the war machine, no matter what they promised before.
But like many policies that are bad, many of these military actions just don’t work for their ostensible goals.
Reflecting a bit more on the “Death: Woke or Joke?” topic, I guesspart of the gap is that the people who feel strongly about eliminating death see it as a major source of surd evil, whereas it just doesn’t seem to me like very much suffering comes from mere fact of death so much as the particulars.
It seems to me that the bulk of the suffering caused by death is the result of prolonged and unpleasant deaths, which can largely be addressed with euthanasia, or else it’s either a matter death being used as coercion and punishment (which I expect would get worse in a world with indefinite lifespan) or of large numbers of people dying at once from the same thing (which isn’t something I would expect most death-cheating technology to help with). From where I stand it looks like nearly all suffering is caused by what I would call “samsaric” issues – competition over limited resources, Red Queen’s races, and incentive structures that make suffering beneficial to us, or make it beneficial for us to make others suffer. It seems more likely that technology that permitted indefinite lifespan would make all of those problems worse than that it would ameliorate them, though the exact way this is likely to happen would vary greatly depending on how the tech worked.
If you use that as a moral principle, though, you can justify almost arbitrarily-short lifespans.
what’s even the point of living once your wavefunction collapses, really? you can never get those days back.
more seriously: my position isn’t exactly “living is terrible, and the less of it the better!” Rather, my concern is that there are fairly serious risks in circumventing humans’ senescence limit that don’t apply when simply helping more people to reach that ceiling, so if you have a mild preference for people living longer but are very wary of those risks, the safest lifespan seems to be “as far as you can get it without senescence-hacking”.
There are two separate angles on this. The first is that the more capital-dependent staying alive is, the more that dependency threatens quality of life by enabling extreme inequality and coercion. Most death-cheat proposals are extremely capital-intensive in ways that simply reducing incidental mortality is not. The second issue is that senescence is a feature, not a bug: lifespan varies widely in nature, and there are non-senescent animals, so we obviously evolved this lifespan for a good reason. Now, of course you can’t just stop at “God/evolution knows best” or it’s the naturalistic fallacy, but it seems to me that understanding why we have the lifespan we do instead of some other lifespan, what problems are likely to arise if we change that, and how we can get out in front of them, should be step one of eliminating death, and there appears to be significantly less interest in that topic than there ought to be.
Well, I mean there are two things here,
The first is that human lifespan is probably not as evolutionarily meaningful as human sexual dimorphism and various other traits are, because, like the Sherman tank, you expect to lose humans to the environment over time even without aging (including to insufficient resources), and that you’re making an engineering tradeoff for longer designed lifespan for each additional decade and if the tiger population is high and random diseases are high and there is parasite load, etc, it’s just not worth the effort.
That things like bridges aren’t designed to last forever is not a feature, it’s just something contingent on available resources, so I don’t find this particularly compelling.
The other thing is that I don’t expect those philosophers and pundits and whatnot to actually come up with much good. What I’ve seen so far has not impressed me, so it hardly seems worth increasing my risk of death just to be told some half-baked explanation about “human temporality” or some other hogwash.
Practical risks are the better argument, but, it lacks many of the worst possibilities of Transhumanism, since it’s just regular humans, but for longer.
The biggest risk I see is probably that people don’t accept limits on reproduction, but I think they’ll come around.
Reflecting a bit more on the “Death: Woke or Joke?” topic, I guesspart of the gap is that the people who feel strongly about eliminating death see it as a major source of surd evil, whereas it just doesn’t seem to me like very much suffering comes from mere fact of death so much as the particulars.
It seems to me that the bulk of the suffering caused by death is the result of prolonged and unpleasant deaths, which can largely be addressed with euthanasia, or else it’s either a matter death being used as coercion and punishment (which I expect would get worse in a world with indefinite lifespan) or of large numbers of people dying at once from the same thing (which isn’t something I would expect most death-cheating technology to help with). From where I stand it looks like nearly all suffering is caused by what I would call “samsaric” issues – competition over limited resources, Red Queen’s races, and incentive structures that make suffering beneficial to us, or make it beneficial for us to make others suffer. It seems more likely that technology that permitted indefinite lifespan would make all of those problems worse than that it would ameliorate them, though the exact way this is likely to happen would vary greatly depending on how the tech worked.
If you use that as a moral principle, though, you can justify almost arbitrarily-short lifespans.
The capital police officer who was shot in the attack on the congressional baseball practice has a gofundme to raise money for rehab, and I just want to reflect on how fucking sad that is.
Someone needing to beg money from the public after suffering injury from defending the US congress is like something out of a hamhanded parody of classic war propaganda. “Don’t lay down your lives for the US congress. US congresspeople don’t care about your sacrifice, they will let you die in disability and poverty and also are fucking your wife.“
What I wanted: US congress ready and willing to die, guns in hand, to defend this nation. National honor.
What I got: Political class both unwilling and unable to resolve the difficult challenges this nation needs to overcome to not only survive but thrive. National shame.
What I want now: A totally new system of selecting legislators that imposes radically different incentives.
You may have heard that Twitter is changing their Privacy Policy to stop respecting Do Not Track, and some other stuff. I looked into this and found that it is incredibly slimy and reeks of desperation.
They sent an email announcing this and claiming that it was protecting your privacy. This is obvious lies, but basically SOP so whatever. But it gets worse. There are two main pages linked:
Transparency and control: We’ve launched new Personalization and Data settings and expanded Your Twitter Data to give you more transparent access to your information and more granular controls over how your data is used by Twitter. These enhanced settings will replace Twitter’s reliance on the Do Not Track browser setting, which we will no longer support.
And then when you look at the heading Data Sharing, you see this:
Data sharing: We’ve updated how we share non-personal, aggregated, and device-level data, including under select partnership agreements that allow the data to be linked to your name, email, or other personal information if you give the partner your consent. You can control whether your data is shared under these partnership agreements in your Personalization and Data settings.
So if you read this, you’ll probably think that if you’re concerned about your Twitter data being shared with advertisers, you should go to the page linked there. (https://twitter.com/personalization). So, like a sensible, privacy-conscious human bean, you go to the page:
Handy, a Disable all button. Cool, I’ll press that and then move on to the rest of the settings to check. Unsurprisingly, it makes you click again to confirm. *leaves page*
Oh Wait. I want to check the wording on one of those. Wait, what? It didn’t change!
Oh, this is what’s up:
There is a second button you need to press to actually make changes. It doesn’t warn you if you try to leave without saving, and the extra confirmation that would normally be associated with this is moved to the Disable All button instead. Slime.
Also, take a look at this:
Share data through select partnerships
This setting lets Twitter share certain private data (which will never include your name, email, or phone number) through select partnerships. Partners have agreed not to link your name, email, or phone number to data shared through these partnerships without first getting your consent.
That sounds good, but compare with some text on the next page we’re visiting:
Tailored audiences
Tailored audiences are often built from email lists or browsing behaviors. They help advertisers reach prospective customers or people who have already expressed interest in their business.
You are currently part of 390 audiences from 156 advertisers.
You can opt out of interest-based advertising in your personalization and data settings. This will change the ads you see on Twitter, however it won’t remove you from advertisers’ audiences.
So, you can depersonalize your ads on Twitter, and ostensibly stop them from sharing your data, but they’ll still be sharing it with the advertiser lists they’ve already placed you on. Shiny.
Other than the paragraph mentioned above, this doesn’t look deceptive. In contrast to the totally deceptive first page linked, this one is annoying and awkward to mess around with, which is slimy, but the main concern I have is just how much data they’re collecting, which I am significantly less OK with than previously when I thought they might not be slime.
In conclusion, don’t trust Twitter further than you can throw one of their mainframes. Ceterum censeo Twittrem esse delendam.
We're deep into the point where I'd rather see how another country's imperialist bullshit played out than to continue watching and suffering under America's unique brand of it.
“Average Argumate post kills 1.3 people” just statistical error. The average Argumate post kills only 0.0015 people. “no guys, it’s totally safe to come to Australia”, which kills over 3,000 Tumblr users each year in drop bear attacks alone, is an outlier and should not have been counted.”—
I’m not a socialist or a communist, but I could probably defend socialism/communism in the wake of the Venezuelan failure much better than most lefties I see doing it are
All I simply have to do is explain that Hugo Chavez’s moronic spending decisions (generous spending on welfare/aid programs rather than infrastructure, education and industry so that the country wouldn’t be dependent on oil export money) showcased his failings as a leader and do not actually indicate a failure in central economic planning as a whole
Of course I don’t think they’ll do this because it would mean tarnishing Chavez’s legacy and his cult of personality
How I would defend it: Actually, Kibbutzes are Good
The security situation with existing bio-phylacteries is so bad that all of the worst malware deployed against them are actually believed to have been naturally occurring.
The backup procedure is, quite frankly, an embarrassment; all data transfer protocols are truly hopeless at capturing internal experiences without a massive loss rate. And despite widespread consumer opinion to the contrary, hybrid units aren’t even half of a proper backup, and even if they were, the hassle in producing and formatting them is astronomical.
Arrested on July 4, 2109 and May 2, 2112 at WW3 Reenactment protest rallies for Anti-Diverse Behavior
Known ties to American National Separationist Front, Free New England, Chinese-backed New Hampshire Peoples’ Liberation Army, pro-Kansas terrorists
K-band neurotype known for oppressive tendencies, support for imperialism, lacks tolerance stabilizer
Refuses to acknowledge own Cyborg Privilege
Supports reformation of the oppressive and bigoted North American Union, termination of the Human Dignity Act, reinstatement of the National Technocratic Pan-Asian Development Cooperative
Type-19 paramilitary cyborg body commercial spin-off of Boston Dynamics M455 combat body developed for the US Marines, purchase supported pre-unification NAU military-industrial complex
Skintone appropriates greyskin culture, but has no greyskin ancestry
Contrary to claims, has no genetic relation to snakes
On an episode of one of Vox’s podcasts, Ezra Klein said something that I can’t get out of my head, and that bothers me on a deep level. He said that in the present age, with the internet, myriads of think tanks, public intellectuals, universities, and ideological outlets, that any intelligent well-educated person can come up with a strong and hard-to-conclusively-refute argument, with copious citations, expert opinions, interpretation, and analysis, and supportive anecdotes, for almost any position they like in politics.
It really is bothering me because at some level I suspect it is true. I think of how often I see thousands of words used in internet arguments, with copious quotation and citation of experts, for many different sides of an issue, and they all seem pretty convincing if I took them on their face, and it would probably take me dozens of hours of research to be able to engage with them.
You could spend years just reading the output from libertarian intellectuals and outlets and experts, or liberal ones, or socially conservative ones, or anarchist ones, or marxist ones, etc. and still have more to consume without ever challenging your ideological preferences. If you encounter an expert or opinion that is disagreeable to your worldview, you can use Google to pretty quickly find a very articulate and well-cited counterargument to, if not that particular argument, at least that worldview and that position.
You can spend years becoming an expert on a particular issue, and read every expert and source from all sides, and still you’ll probably find people as well-informed as you with the opposite view.
I wouldn’t say this is the fault of, as many people in the rationalist community put it, the mindkilling ability of politics (I think there is truth to that, but I don’t think it’s strong enough to explain this). Rather, I believe it’s because understanding politics involves the intersection of two notoriously difficult areas of study, the social sciences of large groups/societies on the one hand, and ethical and political philosophy on the other. They’re hard because they’re subject matter is so vastly complicated, in a way that is extremely difficult to comprehend and think about.
But, we’re still political animals, and we have to do politics, so we have to keep thinking about this stuff (or, at least, some subset of intelligent people do) to keep society functioning and (hopefully) improving.
It becomes necessary to use intuition and other means of attempting to infer the truth.
I did not return to Nationalism because of overwhelming statistical evidence, but from a set of broader observations about the conditions of terrorism, the social fabric, incentives on actors, and so on.
The number of political operators using statistics badly is high, and they often either fabricate statistics using bad methodology (occurs in Feminism with things like the formation of the Duluth Model), or just exclude any statistics that don’t agree with them. Sometimes they don’t even realize they’re doing it.
Other times they just don’t even think of things that are against the argument. To take a recent example that many of you will disagree with me on, “but we gained so much economic value from immigrants from the middle east!” in response to wanting to limit travel and immigration. It doesn’t account for the estimated $2 trillion cost of 9/11, which then created the “justification” for the Iraq War (also very expensive) and further erosions of civil liberties and the advancement of the surveillance state. It also doesn’t account for the fact that the US’s immigration demand exceeds immigration quotas, and therefore every one of those slots could have been filled from another country instead.
Eh, wouldn't the borg comparison be the opposite ? While all borg change others to be like them, McDonald's and similar corporations change themselves to best suit the area and predominant culture of residence. Maybe Similar to the evolution by environment of doomsday from superman.
you are at a trump rally and suddenly the floor is equal rights
“D-drugs!” Trump shouted as the floor became the physical embodiment of an abstract concept. He began to scramble - not because he was afraid of “equal rights,” but because abstract concepts don’t always hold a lot of weight - for higher ground.
“Huh, actually, that’s not actually a bad policy idea. Where did you first hear it?”
“Oh, some Singaporean time travel blog on Tumblr.”
“Singaporean time travel blog?”
“Well it mentions Lee Kwan Yew a bit and the author seems interested in authoritarianism in Asia, so either that or the United States given that it keeps talking about a North American Union.”
“…what?”
“If I might remind you, sir, you ordered that we answer all your questions as honestly as possible.”
Sometimes the mask becomes the reality, bbbb, and sometimes with no mask there is no reality. We are social creatures, not solitary ones. Sometimes we need context to be provided for us to be at our best.
Some of the existing problems in society are due to the breakdown in scripts. Not everyone is a social adept that can figure it all out on the fly. The framework provides something to fall back on.
Who wants to live an unexamined life? Golden handcuffs are still handcuffs
That doesn’t mean you don’t examine things. I don’t know why you immediately jump to “handcuffs” as if the presence of structure makes motion or mobility impossible.
One of the weirdest policy proposals is where you put an expiration date on cash, to encourage spending.
ooh I’ve played with that one, it also fits well with some basic income proposals
inflation
All the kool kids nowadays are talking about negative interest rates.
They’re not yet talking about forming quasi-autonomous state agencies that compete for assignment of implementing government programs, with contracts that can be renewed, but
Shhhh, they aren’t supposed to know about it yet. I only know because I’m from the future.
Politics is just a mask for a lot of complex personal problems, huh
how dare you drag my mother into this discussion of tax policy
…consider: politics is complex personal problems.
a nation is just a very large group of people. democratic politics is the fine art of getting them to come to some kind of consensus about how they want to live. interpersonal mediation on the grand scale. with guns.
That’s all well and good, but most of these people should probably work on their own lives before they turn to Utopian visions of how the world around them should be different. Especially teenagers on Tumblr.
I’m not sure how much this is about me (considering that my typical post is something along the lines of “Actually, having governments and borders and taxes is Good, and polygamy/cousin marriage is Bad”), and certainly I do have my own matters to work on, buuuut…
Much of the Rationalist Sphere on Tumblr and those around it are neurodivergent in some way, and thus have different natural intuitions sometimes, leading to Weird Politics.
Though I guess also there are teenagers. I do try and put on a reasonable face for teenagers when I know they’re watching. It’s important that people that are looked up to model good behavior. (Conservatives kind-of know this but also have too much threat pattern-matching as if to balance out leftists not having enough.)
Sometimes the mask becomes the reality, bbbb, and sometimes with no mask there is no reality. We are social creatures, not solitary ones. Sometimes we need context to be provided for us to be at our best.
Some of the existing problems in society are due to the breakdown in scripts. Not everyone is a social adept that can figure it all out on the fly. The framework provides something to fall back on.
@obiternihili
And I lean towards that, and am asking for examples indirectly
The new masculinities are out there being formed right now in the vast chasms of the net, but many are too liquid now and not yet crystalized.
Some are pulling from the future, where gender is more dissolved than it is now, and mixing outwards transgressions with confidence.
Others pull elements from the past without taking the whole thing. Some degree of sexual promiscuity has always been present in human society, but not always with the same rules, social punishments, and social status.
I don’t think new stable equilibria will be fully identifiable for a while.
dudebro is just a terrible word for any kind of progressive purpose given that it entirely concedes masculinity to the opposition.
I think we’re more than prepared to concede masculinity to the opposition. What redeeming qualities does it have? Everything I’ve seen masculinity be is aggression, envy, or pride, all of which are, uh, mortal sins.
…are you joking?
Or have you just already defined masculinity as everything you hate?
If it turns out that a significant number of straight women actually like masculine men and haven’t been brainwashed into it, what is your plan?
How can a male build a healthy self-identity if to be male is nothing more than to be a flawed woman?
In that last line, being male and being a Man™ are different things. You can be male or female and you can be you by having your own goddamn identity and thinking for yourself instead of bullying the sick weak nerdy kid into it for not conforming to some arbitrary set of interests
like I might disagree with bbb on this because being a real man to me is just being an adult. But being a Man™ or even the subset of Men™, the dudebro - is giving up defining my own identity and giving up making maturity, not interests or the way I express myself, the performative element.
dudebro was pretty much always meant to refer the kinds of people we think of as stereotypical frat boys anyways. Dumbasses who don’t give a shit about consent or abuse or anything like that except fucking people ±over. That’s not being a man. That’s being garbage.
And if a lot of women are attracted to abuse, why? And are we sure? Are we sure underlying factors aren’t distorting the really important values?
And like if definitions differ definitions differ. Get over it. The line beginning with “Or” is not actually a point however smugly it’s phrased.
Have you considered that maybe it’s your conception of masculinity which is very narrow and culturally limited, here?
There is more than one way to be masculine and exploring and normalizing new masculinities could be very helpful (and still attractive to cishet women and thus not self-erasing on the long-term). Conceding masculinity to the opposition is a terrible idea.
I fail to see something better that convinces me to change it.
But it sounds like you’re widening the definition past the point of coherence, in which case we’re in the same camp but different labels.
I’m not widening it past coherence.
There are multiple paths which are congruent with the male gendered trait cluster and are compatible with cishet sexuality. Dudebroism in its original meaning and not a generic misandrist or outgroup insult is only one of them. We can take the same colors and paint a different image.
It only appears incoherent if you already pre-define masculinity as only the “dudebro” version, which is a terrible idea if your goal is better men that are willing to work with your movement.
Of course, men themselves will have to build these new identities mostly. Feminism cannot do so for them. But you don’t want them to think Feminism is incompatible with them being masculine. Remember the post I was responding to said masculinity was seen to be only of sins and just fine to let the opposition monopolize.
