Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[dagothcares]

I actually like this new trend of holding the president accountable for his actions. I hope this new trend continues after the unpopular president leaves.

[mitigatedchaos]

haha, good one m8

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[slatestarscratchpad]

I follow dozens of people online ranging from centrists to communists to alt-right to libertarians, and I haven’t seen a single person who supports the latest strikes on Syria. But all of them have been posting articles about how worrying it is that “the mainstream” supports the strikes.

I’m really curious what I’m unintentionally selecting for here.

[bambamramfan]

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[valwinz]

WTF AM IM READING ?

Thats not how it works those missiles are part of the defense budget  is not money that you can use on other things even if you wanted.

they were not created for the strike and pay for in the same day.

also can we stop with the whole Refuges are entitle to come here  because they are not.

People always find something to bitch about. Assad Gases his own people , people that could become refugess the US does something about it and is also bad.

There is no wining here

[ranma-official]

Concept: cannibalize the defence budget, spend money on things that help people

[mitigatedchaos]

Eschew both refugee resettlement (and thus truck attacks against natives) and unnecessary missile launches, let people with other ideologies sort out their own problems in their own countries rather than bringing them to our countries, spend some of the difference on sending rations and medical supplies and tents instead.

Alternatively, quit pretending all ideologies/religions are equal and selectively resettle refugees that won’t self-radicalize on the second generation for ideological/religious reasons.  Take some group that has a natural reason to align with the host country, such as one heavily oppressed in the original state.  (LGBT a good option for this.)

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

src bs6

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[slatestarscratchpad]

I follow dozens of people online ranging from centrists to communists to alt-right to libertarians, and I haven’t seen a single person who supports the latest strikes on Syria. But all of them have been posting articles about how worrying it is that “the mainstream” supports the strikes.

Who is this mainstream and what are they doing?

[mitigatedchaos]

Brian Williams waxing poetic about American destroyers launching missiles into Syria on national television. Hillary Clinton supporting airstrikes on Syrian airbases before they happened.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[earlgraytay]

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. 

[nuclearspaceheater]

@ me next time.

I have no problem with people who can’t do math. But I don’t feel bad about holding people to unreasonable standards of well-roundedness when they assert that their favorite corner of human experience is equivalent to humanity itself. I suppose a true polymath may indeed call me out on this, but I strongly doubt that any true polymath would be running around asserting the superior human-ness of a single specific field in the first place.

In any case, the original article isn’t even about “art”, in the sense of what most people would consider to be missing from a stone cube, and which does include, as pointed out, such diverse works as fashion, music, movies, video games, furniture design, international technical symbols, the patterns on shampoo bottles, cooking, typography, and hentai doujins. (And not just because many of the actual stone cubes we have today are entirely the fault of artists, and the governments and large institutions that backed brutalist architecture.) It’s about “the arts” and cutting the funding they get from the United States government.

While it should be obvious that there’s a pretty hard limit on just how subversive anything that gets funding from the United States government can actually be, the author doesn’t want to admit that it’s in service of a power-that-is that they happen to side with, and so equivocates the defunding of a government arts program with the active suppression of art (by, for example, mass executions) that people would otherwise create on their own, state funding or not.

And indeed, people do create a lot of art on their own, without state funding. Every form of art you mention to emphasis the importance of art only argues against the National Endowment for the Arts, because if people can create all of that without government funding, then how important can the NEA possibly be? Not important at all, unless you want to protect art from influence of the regime, in which case, getting government money out of the arts should be something you’re entirely on board with.

[mitigatedchaos]

Much of the “subversive” art is highly overrated, buying into existing boring narratives already approved by factions that have existed for a long time, and I’m beginning to wonder about an Alt Righter’s claim that modern art is actually some kind of tax avoidance scheme.

If the government is going to fund art, it should be art that people actually LIKE and as such benefit the nation, not deliberately insulting and confusing pretentiousness. The other suitable role is to preserve elements of our cultural heritage, such as historic buildings. This isn’t like materials science where pushing the cutting edge improves our standard of living.

In other words, government-funded art should be unironically pleasant.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

“We seek the establishment of an armed revolutionary movement,” she said, “based on the principles of moe!”

I looked on, wondering what I had done to deserve such punishment.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

I can't believe we're still having this debate. Did Yudkowsky die for nothing??

argumate answered:

If you meet Yudkowsky on the road, cuck him.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

mrpku asked:

Why are you so sure airstrikes in Syria are bad? I personally don't like them either, but I can see the logic - that threatening to hit anyone who crosses a line may make Assad/ISIS wary of crossing that line - and while I don't *think* that works that well (e.g. Libya), I also think Hillary Clinton knows more than me about geopolitics and wouldn't be very confident about disagreeing with her.

theunitofcaring answered:

See, that’s the whole thing: every single time we’re contemplating an entanglement in the Middle East, it looks like there’s a humanitarian justification and a really good reason. I supported involvement in Libya, because it looked like a clear-cut case where a little involvement could do a lot of good. And instead what happened is that Libya is in an unstable state of ongoing conflict and much worse off than before. This happens every time. I no longer trust ‘I can see the logic”. Even when I can see the logic, this happens. Even when I find the logic really convincing, this happens. 

Every time we bomb places in the Middle East without a long term plan, it ends up worse than if we had just not done that. Every time. When do we just internalize the lesson ‘don’t bomb places hoping it’ll make things better, even when you have a good reason?’ Because that’s the lesson it’ll take to end the foreign interventions.

I think Clinton values the lives of people in poor countries less than me; she might be rational given her goals. Though she was an architect of the Libya mess, so maybe she’s not even that.