DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
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DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
9d ago
Would you happen to be the Twitter Skeletor? That guy rocks and you rock.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
13d ago
J.J. Abrams' Star Trek Into Darkness is a wild ride and a special effects extravaganza, but its good points are overshadowed by the dumbest move ever: recasting Ricardo Montalbán's Khan Noonien Singh as English actor Benedict Cumberbatch. Whatever one might think of the practice of racewashing in film, this is a move that made nobody happy (except Cumberbatch's agent and banker). The casting was intended as a surprise reveal, and when people guessed correctly, Abrams lied to the fans. So dumb.
So I fixed it.
This scene takes place after "John Harrison" the augmented human defeated a cadre of Klingon soldiers and then surrendered to Chris Pine's Kirk and crew. It's largely Claude's prose, since I was more interested in reading it than writing it, but I've edited it with a weed-whacker.
The sound of Captain Kirk's bootsteps echoed against the brig's sterile walls as he approached the cell's transparent barrier. Beyond it, the man who called himself John Harrison sat with an unsettling stillness, watching him with eyes that seemed to calculate even in repose.
"Why is there a man in that torpedo?" Kirk demanded.
Harrison tilted his head slightly. "There are men and women in all those torpedoes, Captain. I put them there."
"Who the hell are you?"
Harrison rose smoothly, each movement economical and precise. "A remnant of a time long past. Genetically engineered to be superior so as to lead others to peace in a world at war. But we were condemned as criminals, forced into exile. For centuries we slept, hoping when we awoke things would be different." His voice carried the weight of disappointment, of expectations betrayed. "But as a result of the destruction of Vulcan, your Starfleet began to aggressively search distant quadrants of space. My ship was found adrift. I alone was revived."
Kirk crossed his arms. "I looked up John Harrison. Until a year ago, he didn't exist."
"John Harrison didn't exist," the augment agreed, "because János Horváth was planning the conquest of Europe when Khan Noonien Singh fell." He said the name with something between reverence and bitterness. "I was second in command of Britain's domestic intelligence apparatus when Khan surrendered. I never got to see if my strategies would have succeeded."
He moved closer to the barrier, and Kirk forced himself not to step back. "Marcus found it easier to give me a name with no history. A blank slate. But I am exactly who I claimed to be: one of Khan's officers. His left hand, if you will, while he was the mind that shaped an empire."
"If you're not Khan," Kirk said slowly, "then why should I believe anything you're saying?"
Harrison's smile was thin and sharp. "Captain, please. It would be so much easier for your pride to accept that you were beaten in hand-to-hand combat by the great Khan himself—tyrant, legend, the boogeyman of your history texts—than by one of his lieutenants." He spread his hands. "But I, like he, like everyone in those torpedoes, was designed to lead, Captain Kirk. Engineered. Every chromosome optimized, every genetic sequence refined to eliminate the accumulated errors of a million years of random mutation."
His voice took on an almost evangelical fervor. "You are the product of blind accidents. Your ancestors crawled out of the sea, stumbled through evolution's lottery, and called it progress. We were built. Purpose-made by men who followed the rules of reality to their ultimate conclusion: design, even by their limited minds, was far better than a roll of the dice. My reflexes are five times faster than yours. My strength, three times greater. My cognitive processing—" He paused, searching for smaller words. "You think with the tools that survival happened to give you. I think with an instrument precision-crafted for the task."
Spock, who had been listening in silence, finally spoke. "Yet you surrendered to that 'blind lottery' when you allowed Captain Kirk to capture you."
"I surrendered to save my crew," Harrison said quietly. "The only comrades I have left. Marcus used them as hostages, frozen in torpedoes like specimens. I built those weapons for him, yes—I helped him realize his vision of a militarised Starfleet. He sent you to fire my torpedoes on an enemy planet." His jaw tightened. "The Klingons would come searching, and you would have no chance of escape. Marcus would finally have his war."
"I watched you open fire on a room full of unarmed Starfleet officers," Kirk shot back. "You killed them in cold blood."
"Marcus took my crew from me!" Harrison's composure finally cracked, fury blazing through. "He used my friends—my family—to control me. I tried to smuggle them to safety by concealing them in the very weapons I designed, but I was discovered. I had no choice but to escape alone, with every reason to suspect that Marcus had killed every single person I hold most dear. So I responded in kind. And now because I made those choices, they live."
He leaned forward, and Kirk saw something raw beneath the calculated facade. "My crew is my family, Kirk. Is there anything you would not do for your family?"
A proximity alert shrieked through the ship before Kirk could answer.
"Proximity alert, sir," Sulu's voice crackled over the comm. "There's a ship at warp heading right for us."
"Klingons?" Kirk asked.
Harrison's expression shifted to something almost like satisfaction. "At warp? No, Kirk. We both know who it is."
"I don't think so, Captain," Sulu responded. "It's not coming from Qo'noS."
Kirk was already moving. "Lieutenant, move Harrison to med bay. Post six security officers on him." He paused at the door, looking back. "And Lieutenant? He's exactly as dangerous as he claims to be."
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
14d ago
For the average Joe, stocks are a white elephant gift. When and how does he sell them? Does he take them to his bank? Does he have to go find a broker? How does he track the taxes on it? It’s a world he’s never seen before, knowing only paychecks and bank accounts.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
15d ago
Eliminate pennies and nickels. Keep dimes and half-size half-dollars, and replace quarters with gold-colored quinters, $.2 pieces. Coins are the only arithmetic most people use, and it’s worth it to me to have them.
Alternately, return to pieces of eight: 1/8, 1/4, and 1/2 of a dollar. It’s what stocks incremented in for most of Wall Street’s existence, it’s good enough for me.
Add the $200 featuring Alan Greenspan, one of Rand’s disciples.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
21d ago
I use a Norelco battery-powered shaver I found lying in my driveway one day when I was getting fed up with my older Norelco corded shaver. The battery ran for two weeks, long enough for the new charger to arrive from Amazon.
God provides.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
Lower middle class. I have never made double the minimum wage for Albuquerque, though I make more now in raw dollars than my dad did by his retirement. I have had three cars since 2000, each lasting a decade.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
The standard vocabulary dogma is that between male and female is intersex, and between man and woman (or boy and girl) is nonbinary.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
Just found it on archive.org and holy cow I was not ready for that.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
Don’t forget DOGE claimed that USAID was helping LGBTQ+ people in all sorts of countries, with the expectation that they’d become a natural revolutionary militia if said countries ever made a conservative turn. It would be no surprise to me were it revealed that NGOs funded by American taxpayers were pumping the “trans genocide” line within America.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
And don’t get me started about Nazifurs and the 4chan creation Aryanne the white supremacist My Little Pony.
What people who know about these never seem to see is the vast distance between edgy performative jerkwads and conservative-liberal values.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
He also wrote one of the better paraphrases of the New Testament.
For a while now, I’ve had this idea of collecting different translations of the New Testament, and lumping them together by author. Phillips for the letters of Paul along with Acts and Luke, ESV for the letters and the gospel of John, HCSB for Hebrews and Matthew, and NLT for Mark and the letters of Peter. Go for anthology vibes.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
Fantastic response. Would fit in well with “Your God Is Too Small” by J.B. Phillips.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
Pointed but fair, even the heated rhetoric at the end. I’ll clarify that blue/red tribalism changes the perception of the cooperative value lost in each defection, inflating the out-group’s tats and deflating the in-group’s tits.
If the average red-tribe American (citizens since their grandfathers’ time at least) have the perception that they’re being prevented as a class from getting jobs by blue-tribe HR choosing naturalized immigrants, H1B workers, or unnaturalized migrants, tit-for-tat looks like mass deportations. The blue-triber sees this as a massive escalation of defection against their in-group or favored far-group.
If the average red-triber sees their wages stagnant vs inflation since 2008, yet the lowest rung of blue-tribe government worker can buy a suburban house and pay “our” taxes for their kids’ soccer practice, tit-for-tat looks like mass firings of government regulators. The blue-triber sees this as a massive escalation of defection against the people keeping them safe from capitalist overreach.
And so on, and so on. Sure it’ll make the Whigs (the blue-tribe and grey-tribe Republicans who disproportionately make up the GOP’s donor class and elected representatives) take pause, but the red tribe can finally smile at the perception of having shaken off, or at least told off, their oppressors.
This is also what it looks like when the red tribe no longer sees the blue tribe as a far group but its outgroup.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
What a lot of people never learn is how much the modern imperial states (Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, FDR’s USA, the Soviet Union and Communist China) resembled each other, differing mostly in how their philosophers describe them and how much (and how often) their governments are perceived to be allowed to violate their citizens’ and enemies’ human rights.
The opposite of libertarian isn’t communism, it’s totalitarianism.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
Reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four for the third time.
My first time was in high school in the 90’s, where mostly it was Newspeak that impacted me. I’d just finished Rush Limbaugh’s two current affairs books, and the trickery of politicians changing words to “politically correct” variants was my takeaway.
My second read was during the first Trump administration, where the shock of the totalitarian state of IngSoc/Airstrip One/Oceania and the geopolitics of Goldstein’s book made me look at current affairs in a new light, especially during the Biden/Covid years.
This third time through, the small details of Winston’s life are hitting me hard. He’s 44 or 45, a few years younger than me, and his constant mentions of physical problems punctuate the existential misery of his life in the lower rungs of the Party.
He’s married but separated, a fact I’d forgotten. I haven’t yet reached the parts detailing his love affair. I also hadn’t remembered his furtive writing of a diary where he introduced the idea that freedom is the ability to say that two plus two equals four, giving [spoiler] the perfect tool to break him in the end.
Contrasted with the other big dystopias I’ve read (The Hunger Games’ Panem, Brave New World’s ultracivilization, Atlas Shrugged’s crippled Communist America, and Harry Potter’s Voldemort’s Magical Britain), the world system in 1984 feels the most hopeless, the most capable of keeping heroes from arising, the most terrible to live under — and yet somehow, the most realistic and likely, with certain aspects already showing up in America’s coastal capitals.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
This book should not resonate with 15 year olds, not this much. Which means that these girls are still getting sexist signals from somewhere, and, follow the trail, those signals came from the 40 year old women who like the story, i.e. "feminists." This is what I mean when I say the system no longer needs men to maintain the status quo: it has feminists doing the job for it. - TLP
In this, Dave Sim was prescient when he authored and drew Cerebus the Aardvark. Initially a Conan the Barbarian satire, it became one of the greatest long-form anti-feminist screeds in Western literature. The political and religious totalitarian sect known as the Cirinists do their best to demolish the patriarchy, but in the end, become a monstrous variation unrestrained by chivalry.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
Whoops. Comment updated.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
The comment about Hell’s brimstone might be referring to his devious satire, The Screwtape Letters, in which Screwtape, a demon experienced at tempting, writes a series of letters to his nephew Wormwood advising him on the best ways to snatch the faith from one of their Enemy in Heaven’s mind and thus soul.
I would pay a pretty penny to have it read by John DeLancie, who specializes in this sort of character.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
· Edited 2mo ago
Interestingly, Lewis and Louis are derived from Levi, the tribe of priests. Little bit of nominative determinism, considering how highly many lay Christians regard C.S. Lewis.
EDIT: I was either taken in by folk etymology or misremembered a different common name with a mostly unknown Hebrew origin.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
The states and nigh-rural cities where Boy Scouts (and their Evangelical Christian analogues) actually earn those camping and forestry badges. The states where lighters and pocketknives are still daily carry.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
I liked it for the unique take on 3D, which only he could do. Unfortunately, Avatar 2 was a mix of 24fps and something much higher, switching at the least inopportune times.
I don’t want to watch a video game, I want cinema. Heck, I think I wouldn’t mint in on 20fps, or 12, as long as it’s consistent.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
"Trump fires Bureau of Labor Statistics chief without evidence for political reasons" says the news radio I wake up to, then continues to say he removed the Democrat appointee "without concrete evidence." Since COVID-19 caused lockdowns, the BLS numbers have been revised downward from initial reports regularly, sometimes ridiculously so, which Axios says has justifiable reasons.
So why are the initial numbers even reported if we know the algorithm they use will be wildly inaccurate?
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
(don't ask me why AC units became such pussies lately)
I have been assured by top conspiracist minds that the refrigerant chemical companies ensure their regulatorily captured lawmakers’ outlaw refrigerants as soon as they go out of patent, purely for environmental reasons of course.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
Who would have anything to gain by doing that?
Employers could hire people in the bottom fifth percentile for requiring sick days… and wanting vacations.
Political parties could put forward candidates with high empathy and cooperation scores, as determined by an AI, but with high loyalty to ensure they’d take care of their voters and not have a ton of affairs.
Every sport would become moneyball, even the Olympics.
Forget normal, the big money would go to edge cases. It would be meritocracy by caste.
Just finished reading this feel-good fanfic on AO3, and it has my erisology circuits buzzing. What if Foggy Nelson, law partner of Matt Murdock the Daredevil, started doing social work law? The Angel of Hell’s Kitchen has some CW themes but isn’t about the fighting, it’s about the morals.
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