the idea that Trump/Brexit are purely a racism thing disregards the angst about globalisation that is taking place across the globe, not just in Anglo nations.
sure, people are racist, that’s unsurprising, but people are also exposed to economic dislocations without any sugar coating justification or vision of a hopeful future to come, it’s no surprise that they react with fear and anger.
@slartibartfastibast:
Also all that rape. But pointing it out gets you sent to racial sensitivity training. So it must be racist.
@argumate:
jesus like I said you can kick out all the brown folk and the problem will still be there, give it a rest
@slartibartfastibast:
You’re out of your mind. There are potentially a million kids getting trafficked in the UK, specifically by familial Pakistani grooming gangs. Rotherham has a tiny immigrant community that does half the child rape. What the fuck has to happen to make you acknowledge reality?
Argumate man, he’s not going to give it a rest until they actually do something about it. And it isn’t “brown people,” generic. This is a cultural thing tied to a specific ethnic group.
And part of the reason he’s not going to give it a rest until they do something about it is that ignoring the problem in an attempt to preserve the dominant Liberal Globalist ideology is driving the adoption of right-wing philosophies in America and across Europe.
There’s still time to separate it out from race, but to do that, we have to attach it to culture, and give up on the idea that all cultures are equally valuable.
@andhishorse:
Would the same people be the same amount of distressed if all the jobs were going to Western Europe, instead of various parts of Asia? If so, would the dissatisfaction with globalism be so easy to invoke, and its beneficiaries so easy to villainize?
China is a continent-spanning superstate only a few hundred thousand kilometers short of the size of America, and both of them are over nine million kilometers in size. It has three times as many people, and an authoritarian government that arose from a Communist revolution, known to engage in cyberespionage, which has more-or-less deliberately poked its straw into international finance and global capitalism in order to revitalize itself while not even fully liberalizing its economy, much less its government.
China’s government is a major rival to American global political dominance and liberal democracy on Earth.
Making Europe comparable would take a far more serious alternate history exercise than merely turning it into a fast-growing economic powerhouse.
The problem of “militant tactics just turn public opinion against you and galvanize the state” is really just a PR problem as far as I’m concerned. The problem isn’t the militant tactics themselves but the failure of propagandists to adequately explain and justify those tactics to the audience.
Hah, then you have decades of work to do before you fire a single bullet, m8.
Bad tactics aren’t always guaranteed to result in bad results long-term, it’s true, but…
People were warned, for years, that bad tactics would eventually cause bad results. Now we have the Orange Presidency, the antibiotic resistant bacteria that was foretold by those shouted down as themselves racist for advising some restraint. That was part of what made those tactics bad in the first place.
I’ve been feeling schadenfreude since November 9, 2016.
itt: poor people / mentally ill / badly assimilated non-natives wreck communities and this is Problem and pretending it isn't just because ~~Outgroup~~ thinks this too doesn't make the problem go away
not really. like, most of the point of talking about how communities are wrecked is that there should be mechanisms other than price for getting communities that aren’t. rich people can already get functional communities.
My car’s brakes were acting a bit funny, so I took my car to the mechanic. When I came back later, I asked him what the problem was. He said that the brakes were getting old, so he removed them entirely. I asked him “What the fuck? I need those brakes to stop the car!“ He replied “Oh you poor ignorant fool. Don’t you know cars stop on their own? Haven’t you ever heard of friction?“
At that point I had a hunch what was going on. I asked him “You voted for Gary Johnson in the election didn’t you?“ “Darn right“ he said. Shoulda known.
the idea that Trump/Brexit are purely a racism thing disregards the angst about globalisation that is taking place across the globe, not just in Anglo nations.
sure, people are racist, that’s unsurprising, but people are also exposed to economic dislocations without any sugar coating justification or vision of a hopeful future to come, it’s no surprise that they react with fear and anger.
“Munoz repeatedly makes reference to established procedures: “Our employees followed established procedures for dealing with situations like this.” Here we have what seems to be a nice use of the active voice: We have actors (“our employees”) and they are doing something specific. But the figures responsible for establishing procedure are nowhere to be found. Whenever possible, bureaucratic style will shift responsibility to immutable rules and directives that appear spontaneously from the ether.”
it’s funny because if employees did violate established procedures then they could take the blame, but if established procedures are responsible then really you want to chase responsibility up the chain of command until it reaches the CEO if necessary: who established the procedure, who reviewed it, who approved it, who is responsible for reviewing it, who set the overall corporate direction that led to it, etc.
What if that guy is dead?
Then they are not the officer currently in charge, unless it was the incident under review that killed them.
What if they’ve died and become a godhead that communicates through prophetic hallucination?
My office has methods for dealing with that. You don’t hear about it much because this sort of situation has only come up twice in corporate malpractice.
How can Labour supporters take a word out of Tony Blair’s mouth seriously?
Every time he appears the only question I have is “why the fuck aren’t you in front of The Hague or better yet a firing squad?”
a distributed divestment system that could be used to punish everyone who associates with warmongers would be neat.
That’s a pretty nauseatingly rationalist-ancap solution to imperialist war criminals. Just fucking shoot the bastards. What is the moral quandary there? Sic semper tyrannis.
Lots of people voted for, say, Bush. If you go out killing Bush and the others, it won’t be taken as “killing war criminals” because they don’t think Bush and the others are a war criminals. This will then be used to justify political violence by their side that they will consider retaliatory.
Or else they may start applying that calculus to other issues you don’t want them to. Some of us have seen the image of the aftermath of that truck attack in Sweden. They could start going after open borders advocates, more prominent Muslims, NGOs, and so on. Not that low-level individual violence doesn’t already occur, but it would increase.
Our time is already more fetishistic than the past. It wouldn’t be surprising for the future to be more fetishistic than the present, especially given a reduction in morphological restraints under either Transhumanism or heavy Virtual Reality.
Future-shocking readers that way, however, will actually shock them now, even though androids, ray guns, and starships operating on impossible physics don’t shock them at all.
HoneyBites, the subject of the OP is literally denying people the right to vote based on their race and sex. If you don’t think that would increase resentment, and that resentment increase racism, for whites, but you think doing the same to blacks would increase resentment by blacks, then you don’t think whites are human.
You heard it here first, everyone. Be nice to the racists, and they won’t be racist anymore. Oh wait. This is the trillionth time this tired and wrong argument has been made. ¡Felicitaciones!
Actually, a black man did manage to demobilize like 30 members of the KKK by doing exactly that. But I’ll set that aside because while admirable that is a lot of fucking work and one doesn’t actually have to go that far.
What you have to realize is that racism isn’t uniform. There are some racists that will never quit being racist. This is implied by my “background level of racism” comment, and you should be smart enough to have realized that. There will always be a background level of racism because the background level is caused by old memes and misfiring human pattern-scanning. And Richard Spencer isn’t likely to just quit being racist even if he was argued with for a decade about it.
However, your comment implies that racism is a binary, that you’re either racist or you’re not, but instead it’s more of a continuum one can move along. There are people that can be shifted, marginal racists, the swing voters of racism.
They aren’t Spencer, they lack a dogmatic commitment to racism, it isn’t part of their identity. Now the best thing would be to shift them less racist and actively drain the WN movement to its minimum possible size sustainable by background racism levels. The next best thing is to avoid shifting them further into racism, with the WN at least not growing. The second worst plan is to propose highly racist or racialist policies like “disenfranchise all white men” which will make people very, very aware of their whiteness and maleness and brand everyone else as their outgroup. The worst plan, which would result in the formation of a white ethnostate, would be to actually attempt this.
Richard Spencer needs to sell his plan to the swing racists. That’s harder to do the less true claims of white disenfranchisement and similar things are. It’s easier to do the more true such claims are.
So take this not so much as “be nice to racists”, but “be nice to people who are vulnerable to being swayed towards racism”. Had this advice been taken and something been done about US rurals as the rural white death rate climbed, Trump might have been avoided, since the white death rate by county forms a line correlating with % Trump vote. It wouldn’t have even been ideologically inconsistent to do something since many of them are working class.
If white men no longer had the vote, the progressive cause would be strengthened. It would not be necessary to deny white men indefinitely – the denial of the vote to white men for 20 years (just less than a generation) would go some way to seeing a decline in the influence of reactionary and neo-liberal ideology in the world. The influence of reckless white males were one of the primary reasons that led to the Great Recession which began in 2008. This would also strike a blow against toxic white masculinity, one that is long needed.
At the same time, a denial of the franchise to white men, could see a redistribution of global assets to their rightful owners. After all, white men have used the imposition of Western legal systems around the world to reinforce modern capitalism. A period of twenty years without white men in the world’s parliaments and voting booths will allow legislation to be passed which could see the world’s wealth far more equitably shared. The violence of white male wealth and income inequality will be a thing of the past.
Inverse the races in this and you’ll be on stormfront.
The sooner the legacy media starts proudly and openly showing their anti-white convictions, the quicker and harder the backlash will be.
“#Anti-white racism”
😂
*People of color and women are denied the right to vote for literally hundreds of years in the United States alone.*
White supremacists: *celebrate* *actively try to return to this today* *pass voter ID laws that marginalize people of color* *close offices in majority Black areas where voter ID can be obtained* *have fewer voting booths in majority POC neighborhoods* *throw people off the voter rolls if they have a name that doesn’t sound white* *strip the Voting Rights Act*
Someone: The denial of the vote to white men for 20 years would go some way to seeing a decline in the influence of reactionary and neo-liberal ideology around the world.
White supremacists: That’s racist! Can you imagine for a moment if this were the other way around?! What outrage there would be in this totally hypothetical situation that has never happened in real life! Hashtag anti-white racism!
Is this REALLY the hill you want to die on?
Yes. I’m making my way up Mount Calling Out the Hypocrisy of Racist Ideology right now. I will set up base camp here and continue in the morn’.
Stop and think about this for a moment. Right now White Supremacists are still only a small part of the population. They’re growing because throwing your borders open has consequences that can’t be ignored, but they are still small and are likely to stay relatively small for the forseeable future.
…unless, of course, you do something like this. There is a background level of racism much like there is a background level of radiation. Insomuch as it is true that the Left isn’t racist, this truth can be used to keep the racism level closer to the background level.
Insomuch as it is true that the Left is racist, that it is willing to engage in ethnonationalism or disenfranchisement, while actively seeking to replace demographics, while covering it with excuses about how this is “antiracist”, the Richard Spencers of the world will be able to point at this and up their recruitment, then fill them with false information because they no longer trust the intolerant tolerants.
I cannot imagine a faster path towards an outright race war and the formation of white ethnostates than the mass disenfranchisement of all white men, one of the more heavily-armed demographics in the world.
Right now the Left is “joking” about white disenfranchisement to “make a point”. This contributes to radicalization in an environment already prone to it since the WNs can sell their narrative of “they hate you, so you can’t trust them”. And the kinds of people engaging in this “ironic racism” are like those engaging in “ironic misandry” - they just don’t have the credibility to seem as if their “joke” isn’t meant, and they would not accept “ironic misogyny” in turn.
Right now most whites don’t actually think they’re doing ethnonationalism. They’re reacting to Rotherham, they’re reacting to truck attacks, and so on. If they openly regain racial consciousness the results could be a disaster. So campaign to punish police for racist behavior because that’s correlated with truth, but for the love of America do not publish articles like this.
Edit: And as to “yeah but what about” - as a Nationalist I think slavery was the single greatest mistake the country ever made, Jim Crow laws were terrible, etc. I was faceplaming at that redistricting in NC that was so racist it went to court - and lost. I supported cop cams too, for a reason. But none of that makes this even a remotely good idea.
The problem with intolerance of intolerance in the case of Richard Spencer is that he’s just a symptom. Most of this increase in white nationalism is a symptom. The virus has been integrated with the host DNA, but the immune system would keep it almost unnoticeable under normal conditions. But the immune system has been compromised and so has the health of the host.
You can’t praise ethnonationalism for some groups without removing the antibodies against it for all groups - people will notice your hypocrisy. You can’t treat all religions and cultures as the same.
This causes unignorable Rotherhams which will slip past your media net.
And deciding assimilation is evil precommits you to defending the worst cultures that can make it to your shores.
Do you think we're headed toward an inevitable increase in authoritarianism with the advent of the panopticon + better data processing + better weapons for urban warfare and tracking and following individual people wherever they go?
Yes.
The world is becoming ever more tractable to power and it’s hard to see that trend reversing. It’s possible that some unanticipated technological development – unbreakable encryption or something – will turn everything on its head, but I don’t think we have a shot at reversing current trends short of getting lucky like that.
I have no idea how much worse the world will actually be in this future though. Probably our current world isn’t as good as we might like to think, relative to some ideal, and probably our future won’t be as dire as some fear.
I’m still puzzled by those on the Left who don’t understand the rise in White Nationalism.
What exactly did they expect when they were cheering on “demographic destiny”? When their ideology required them to excuse terror attacks and look away from mass sex crimes? When the rurals were thrown under the bus in favor of corporations and globalization? When governing in the national interests went from an unspoken assumption to ‘chauvinism’? When the woman accompanying Charles Murray went to the hospital after the no-platforming to check on her injuries? When a foreign ideology hostile to LGBTs was excused from all criticism because of the race of who practiced it?
Will it be any mystery if Asians leave the coalition over getting smacked by Affirmative Action? Will it be any mystery if Blacks leave the coalition because tighter immigration restrictions make it easier for them to get jobs, and school vouchers make it possible to send their children to schools with problem students filtered out? Will it be any mystery if those who immigrated legally leave the coalition because it undermines what they managed to do? If centrists leave because of the support for open borders?
There is one movement that will never make white men its enemy and will never attempt to replace them. And they’re flowing towards it and its potential for ultraviolence, while it’s being cheered on by people who should know better.
The potential for damage, including to people who had no part in this, is catastrophic. How can they be demobilized by people that have nothing to offer them? Who are themselves hypocritical sexists and racists? Who excuse the same actions they condemn them for?
I liked pretending the cracks in Liberalism didn’t exist, but, collectively, that might have allowed the situation to get this far.
the government has not given each person the regulations to look at and sign
That’s not an argument about the complexity of the regulations, just their imposition by force.
Which, you know, some things the state makes us do and support are genuinely cruel and stupid. But other things are like… don’t murder. No I never willingly signed away my right to murder, other people chose that for me. I don’t really blame them.
Plus, you know, good luck getting internet, traveling via plane or a car you bought, or getting healthcare without signing ridiculously complex contracts and EULA’s. So you can’t travel, can’t connect to the mass of humanity, and will get sick and die, unless you accede to things that you haven’t are difficult to read. This isn’t that different from “choosing” to be in jail.
You should have a position on the question of “are byzantine technical details understandable by the average citizen, and should we expect the citizens to know them?” That position should be consistent whether they are byzantine details brought by the government or by companies you do business with. Otherwise you’re just making up any clever argument you can for the side you favor, which yes is very possible to do you are very smart, but is pointless and you’ll never learn anything or convince anyone.
autumn is deepening with a familiar chill settling over Melbourne and driving people back into their monochromatic shells of jeans and hoodies and puffy jackets they bought last year back when uniqlo was new and exciting.
except for the girls in pink tennis skirts of course, who come from another dimension and have +2 resistance to frost damage, as we explained earlier.
nuclearspaceheater said: Resistance to “Frost damage” protects against extremely rapid cooling sufficient to cause trauma or frostbite, not low ambient temperatures. You’re thinking of Temperature Tolerance or system equivalent.
resistance to nerd damage
Nah in D&D 3.5 at least the damage resistances do actually shift the range of feasible temperatures, not just the damage.
I mean, I wasn’t planning on cuckolding every white American man, but they just keep going on about it; I can see some logistical difficulties, but I think I can pull it off if I just manage to stay hydrated.
Quis cucket ipsos cuckers
In which quasi-normalcy discovers they were an American White Man in a mask all along, making this goal logically impossible. Entering into a severe depression, quasi-normalcy takes on a trap tradwife and joins the Alt Right.
I know people who seriously believe all at once that that
genetics as not a real thing that applies to humans
eating GMO food is bad for your health, even if it was grown on an otherwise “organic” farm
sequencing the genome of species or DNA testing of meat and fruit samples is inherently immoral
Can you explain #1? Do they think DNA isn’t a thing for humans?
I guess DNA is a thing, genes are inherited, but traits are not heritable? There is no real consistency there. They just don’t want to think about the stuff too much.
In their own moon logic sense, they only consistently believe that “genes are bad for you“.
“If genes applied to humans, that would be unfair and racist.” - the actual reasoning
Reading some of these recent posts reminds me that when I've seen some of these SJ concepts, my intuitive reaction was often "...wait a minute, that's a trap!" the same way I feel about elements of various religions.
Yes indeed! I think that probably /a lot/ of people felt that way initially…
can’t do it because im bored and nothing is interesting
can’t do it because im overwhelmed and im one slightly dissapointed glance away from crying for the next week
can’t do it because this one thing has had my full entire attention for the past three days and i think ive gotten two hours of sleep in that time and my blood has been replaced with coffee
sometimes it’s all 3
the grand slam
forbidden fourth adhd mood: -can’t do it because AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
the fifth adhd mood, only accessible through a glitch
+ can’t do it because you told me to and now i’ll be so busy beating myself up for being so stupid you had to tell me to do it that i won’t be able to actually do the thing
One thing that pisses me off about the Chechnya camps is that people are so fucking self centered that the first thing they did when they saw what was happening they went "SEE!!! THIS IS WHAT TRUMP IS GONNA DO!!! I HAVE NO CONCERN WHATSOEVER FOR THE MEN BEING ROUNDED UP BUT I GOTTA SHOW THAT PERFORMATIVE OUTRAGE SOMEHOW GAIZ!!1!1!! #FUCKTRUMP" and it's just really bugging me ya feel? Like I'm no fan of Trump either but maybe people could pull their heads out of their americentric asses for once?
Please someone tell me that this anon here isn’t right. Please say that there aren’t people that are so selfish that they’ve used this to attack Trump with, when it has zero to do with him.
I have to believe that you’re making this up. Please.
bpd-anon said: “Slavery is that thing where I have to do things I don’t want to, right?”
slavery is that thing where I’ve made choices but then grumble about them
slavery is that thing where unavoidable compromises result in arrangements that aren’t 100% ethically pure
slavery is that thing where we have to make decisions with limited information and bounded reasoning power
Slavery is that thing where people uses threats of violence (backed by actual violence in case of non-compliance) to make me do work I don’t want to do.
That’s not taxes. Taxes aren’t work. Taxes are theft.
Taxes are rent.
Force is the fundamental nature of property. The State is the real owner.
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?
