BahRamYou
1mo ago
you really can't "play hardball" with a presidential candidate, because everyone they're the belle of the ball right now. everyone wants to interview them, so they can pick and choose their venues. There's zero incentive for them to go on a hostile interview, or even a less-than-friendly interview. Especially for Democrats, since so much of the mainstream media is sympathetic to them.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Phrases like "desublimated higher culture", "the pleasure principle," "the institution of the reality principle," or "demonstration against the herd instinct" are not part of my normal vocabulary. Maybe they're common in marxist/freudian writings, and maybe people who have spent enough time reading that stuff know exactly what he means. But for me, I have to guess, and I'm never quite sure if I really know what he's talking about.
But yeah, fell you 100% about going to a modern day big-budget "punk" concert. It's still fun but it's weird. I assume the band is in on the joke though and it's all kayfabe.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
thats why i specified live. very different to perform in front of your local peer group, with a whole party atmosphere, vs uploading a video for random strangers. most kids just passively watch videos that already have millions of views.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I feel like more and more malls/stores have removed those benches/couches. I guess to deter loiterers? But it sucks, there's just no chance to rest. Makes me want to leave instantly.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Well, I'm happy that at long last she's finally being forced to answer some substantive questions, even if they're being lobbed to her from the most friendly possible journalist. her answers... are about what I expected, given what I remember of her from the 2020 primary. She just has no understanding, at all, of policy issues. Her word salad is her realizing she doesn't know what to say and frantically trying to dodge the question and move on.
To be fair those are pretty difficult issues. No matter what she said, she'd be guaranteed to piss off a lot of people. So I understand why a pro politician would want to avoid talking about them as much as possible. Trump has also been highly evasive on the issues of Ukraine and Israel, other than his usual "I'll make a deal" vague nonsense.
There seems to be this huge blindspot in American politics, where no one can admit or even notice that, despite all the US aid and influence, it's currently failing to achieve its goals. Ukraine is getting steadily pushed back, the violence around Israel rages on, and the US can do nothing but give away money to corrupt military-industrial contractors. I give Biden a lot of credit for being the one to finally admit that the situation in Afghanistan was bad and taking the political hit to withdraw. I wish he'd do the same and take the fall for those other bad situations.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I think it's suffered from the same sort of Baumol's cost disease and general bureaucratic incompetance that have plagued all large infrastructure projects. So while it's tempting to say "we made a bunch of nuclear plants back in the 70s, we should be able to keep making them now" that might actually not be true. For the same reason that it's now impossible to build bullet trains, subways, or skyscrapers in western countries, at least not without spending absolutely absurd amounts of money. Even then, that might not be enough- California has spent $33 billion so far and not laid a single piece of rail. I imagine them trying to build a new nuclear plant these days would go similarly. Hell, even large solar installations get protested to death and cost overruns.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Mercuse is such a fascinating figure to me. I can never tell whether he's so brilliant that I can't understand him, or deliberately obfuscating with his crazy word choices and meandering sentences. It's like every sentence from him is some sort of motte and bailey.
Still, even though he frustrates me, I do often get a feeling from his words that I find myself agreeing with. In this case I think he's onto something. It's sort of like going to a "punk rock" concert, where the band is all middle-aged millionaires, performing in a stadium with corporate sponsors, and the audience is also middle-aged begging to hear the same songs they've heard their entire lives. Or a "school of rock" where adults teach teenagers exactly how to pose, dress, and perform. Technically there's nothing with these things, and people seem to enjoy them, but still you get the sense that something ineffable has been lost. The traditional music scenes where young people made up stuff themselves and performed live in front of other youth with no rules seems to be disappearing.
Maybe an analogy would be a "soft" martial art, like Judo. As I understand it, Judo works by trying to redirect the opponents force, instead of directly opposing it. So while an old-school oppressive society would say "don't have sex outside of marriage! sex is bad and evil and illegal!" and that leads to young people directly opposing it, with crazy chaotic energy. A modern liberal society says "yes, have sex, it's perfectly fine, we won't stop you. But here are the recommended, socially-approved ways to do it." it channels you into just a few specific venues and styles, which have long sense been mined out of any sort of new ideas. "Go on tinder, then go to get coffee, then go for a walk in a public park, then get affirmative consent, then engage in at least 1 hour of female-centric foreplay, then wash and use a condom, then discuss what happened." It turns sex into some sort of bizarre job-hunting process, and manages to make sex unsexy.
Meanwhile internet porn just gets wilder and wilder, because it's one of the few places left that's explicitly outside the control of mainstream American media, and young people feel free to do and ask for whatever they want. I wonder how much longer that will last.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
i've never seen it, but it doesn't sound that good. It sounds like a bog-standard shonen battle-anime, power fantasy. An orphan boy gains superpowers to defeat the evil monsters and save the world. Along the way there are many fight scenes, against a progression of increasingly strong yet easily-defeated opponents. woo. Never saw that one before... What about that is "well-rounded"?
BahRamYou
1mo ago
They’re not particularly good ones; still, I see freshmen in the corner of the events, drinking until they pass out. Despite the safety rhetoric, the new atomized campus culture isn’t even safer.
That makes perfect sense to me. My memory of freshman year at a school that had a big Greek system, but I wasn't in it, was a lot of really crappy "parties" like that. The students wanted to socialize, meet people, and have fun, but no one really knew how to do it. Partly because they were all 18 and didn't have money or a proper space for it, but also because they just literally didn't know how to throw a good party. So you ended up with these shitty "parties" that were just kids sitting around drinking, hoping that if they got drunk enough it would magically start becoming fun. Also way too crowded and hot, so the drinking was a way to handle social anxiety.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
For what it's worth, I appreciate the long effort post response and all the links. Though I do feel a bit um.. Gish-galloped/Eulered. I don't really know what to say in response to all this. I feel like I would have to do a very long deep dive into 1970s psi research to really respond properly, and I'm not prepared to do all that right now. But still, thanks.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
To be clear, I wasn't talking about someone where "money was no object." I was trying to focus specifically on the upper middle class. My understanding is that, at that time, it was pretty normal for anyone in the middle class to have a servant, or at least a part-time housekeeper. It wasn't really an upper-class thing, it was just a not-being-poor thing.
And yeah, no super fast travel, but the travel they did have was more comfortable than today. I don't think doctors in 1910 were all that bad, they did at least know about washing their hands and keeping things clean.
West End shows are a lot cheaper. Nosebleed seats start at £25 and top price tickets are generally around £100.
Ah really? That's awesome. But I was thinking of me, as a regular American, where I would first have to book a flight to New York to see a show. Or wait several years for the off-broadway production to come around, and I get one chance to see it or miss it forever. There's just not a lot of live theater here in most places.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Didn't the Edwardians also have a lot of weird crimes that wouldn't be considered crimes today? Most infamously "sodomy" was illegal. But I'm really not an expert on Edwardian crimes.
I do agree that crime was way worse around 1990 than it is now. That said, there's a lot of minor property crime now that probably never gets reported.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Then I guess I don't understand you. if you really want to start a large family, you need to get married quickly and plant roots somewhere, probably in your home country, even if you don't like it. Travelling to SEA to party is... not going to lead to a good wife and kids back home :/
America is... I don't know man. The best country in the world for making money. The worst for meeting women.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I have to think it's kinda different there. A small village in Alaska, with a high native population of people who are genitically weak against alcohol, is pretty different from New York City with a large mafia and a population where alcohol is part of the traditional culture.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I think it mostly just shows that they're willing to take a flyer on extremely low-odds, high-payoff ideas sometimes. It doesn't sound like they put a lot of effort into it, just gave a bit of money to one crackpot to work on "antigravity" for a while. Similarly there was the time they did some research on psychics and remote viewing which... didn't work out.
Anyway, notable that all of those top secret programs did eventually come to light. They're not good at keeping secrets!
BahRamYou
1mo ago
we know that some of these projects do involve work to make super-advanced aircraft that seem to defy physics
Like what? Making an aircraft (briefly) hover in mid-air doesn't defy physics, it's just really difficult and expensive. Same with electromagnetic warfare. Defying physics would be something like instantaneous acceleration or faster-than-light travel.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
It's funny to me how this is like a mirror universe version of the entire college application process. You apply to a certain number of places, and they decide whether to accept you or not. You've got one chance to get in, and that's that. Some places are higher ranked than others, although the exact ranking is kind of vague and nebulous. There are certain rules for getting in, which are also vague and ever-shifting, with the exact rules known only to insiders. Except that it's pretty obvious they care a lot about your appearance, and don't much care about your GPA or test scores, so in that case it's a bit different.
In both cases it's the same root cause I think- artificial scarcity. The whole point is to appear more desirable by excluding most people, and thus create an "inner circle" with higher social cache. If too many people start to figure out the rules and work the admissions game, then the rules will be reworked to raise the bar even higher. Arguably the greek houses at least have a better reason for this- it's a house after all, there's only so much living space to go around, whereas the school itself could just build more dorms and hire more teachers. But really they just want to be exclusive by exluding people, same as a fancy night club.
Ironically I really could have used something like this when I was a freshman. I was horribly lacking in knowledge about social skills and how to navigate university party life. But of course that same lack of skill would have exluded me from the greek system where they'd teach those skills and get you in to parties.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
So, do you believe in them? or, to put it another way, what would you guess is the probability that aliens exist? Bearing in mind your bias that you want them to exist.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
why don't you just stay there? or somewhere in SE Asia. Seems way better for you there than being back in pussy prison america.
As many people have noted, the decline of religion in mainstream society has left a lot of people with a yearning for something like religion. Some people channel that into politics, some into sports, and some into esoteric new-age beliefs like the idea that UFOs are faeries. Or, sure, maybe the relics of some ancient civilization that developed AI and then went extinct, leaving their robot-ufos to forever roam the Earth without a purpose.
I'm not a believer but I'm open-minded. I've never been fully convinced by any of the arguments against UFOs-as-aliens. I certainly don't buy the idea that the government has some sort of decades-long project that makes super-advanced aircraft which seem to defy physics, and has also kept it hidden all these years. They're just not that competent. We know about all their high-tech research projects, because those projects involve a huge amount of money and people working on them.
One theory I do like is that it's the opposite- it's a conspiracy by the air force to cover up their own lack of knowledge. They see all these bizarre events, they've tried to research it, and just never come to a satisfying conclusion. It looks really bad for the air force to admit "weird shit is happening in our skies, and we have no idea what it is or how to stop it." Of course the "weird shit" might just be odd aerial phenomenon like ball lightning. Or it might not be. it could also be that all the pilots are just going crazy from too much time staring at clouds, and starting to hallucinate things that aren't there, but that looks even worse for the air force to admit.
Anyway, it's clear that a large number of people really want to believe in aliens, thanks to science fiction and a lack of religious meaning in their life. But there's also a large number that really want to not believe, because it makes them feel comfortable and secure in their worldview of scientific certainty. It's hard to find people that can actually investigate this in a rigorous, open-minded yet skeptical way.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Pretty much agreed with you on everything. Like you said, I like them both a lot better than the actual presidential candidates. But I guess being VP gives a little more space to breathe and avoid the media frenzy. Vance is obviously smarter, but Walz is more likeable and relatable to average voters. The moderators were obnoxious with the interrupting "fact checks" and loaded questions ("you have one minute to explain how to fix the economy"). But I suppose that's normal for a presidential debate in the current year. At least we got to see a little bit of actual policy debate.
One moment that stuck out to me was when the moderators asked a doom-and-gloom question about climate change, and both candidates were like "yeah I don't really care about that, we're going to focus on increasing oil and gas and manufacturing." Really showed the disconnect between the media and a politician who understands what average voters care about.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
did you watch the VP debate? I thought it was relatively calm and respectful, at least as far as anything in American presidential politics can be respectful these days. It's probably the sort of thing you're looking for, or at least a step in that direction. of course there was still a lot of "your running mate is hitler!!!!" but they were at least able to discuss the issues a bit and find some common ground.
yeah, it's a whole different ball game between local and national office, and then president is a whole other level. With the lower levels, a lot of the race is just name recognition, getting voters to know and care about who you are. Journalists there have a lot of power, since they gatekeep the shows that can make the politicians famous. But Harris and Trump are already the most famous people on earth, there's really nothing that a journalist has to offer them except bootlicking.
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