HalloweenSnarry
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User ID: 795
HalloweenSnarry
9hr ago
Also, it looks like Ben Franklin is the male leader option for America alongside Tubman.
HalloweenSnarry
9hr ago
I suspect it's the human tendency towards imagination that lets us place so much mythological importance on the unverifiable. Everyone wants to believe the heroic legend, that people existed who were larger than life itself and who did incredible things. The air of mystery may in fact be more tantalizing than the surety of reality, for some.
HalloweenSnarry
3d ago
To a first-order level, it's good to respect treaties insofar as they function as a Schelling point, ethical value aside(?).
That being said, the Assads have ruled Syria for about as long as said treaty has existed, though, no?
I suppose it depends upon whether treaties are generally made between governments, or between countries. Does the presence of the country override continuity of government, or can they functionally be tied to specific regimes or governments?
HalloweenSnarry
4d ago
Scattered thoughts that I might as well dump here where few may see it:
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I think there's an unconscious secondary purpose to too-large houses like McMansions as discussed in the standalone thread: having multiple bedrooms makes it piss-easy to host your extended family for a holiday occasion.
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Re: Kinkade: I think there needs to be a happy medium, where art can be something more than overwrought, mass-produced kitsch like Kinkade's Christmas scenes, but also not be products of an uncontrolled spiral of elitist bullshit that's better at making money than making memorable impressions. Thankfully, there's legions of online artists on places like Pixiv and Twitter that make things like well-rendered fanart of anime and video games, or original pieces that truly stand out on aesthetics and subject matter in a way that modern high art doesn't.
HalloweenSnarry
8d ago
Did you mean to say "the former" instead of "the latter"?
HalloweenSnarry
9d ago
Eh, I think the electronics skill example is a wash: yes, the vast majority of people today will have to get to grips with how to work their smartphones and smart watches and smart TVs and Fitbits and so on and so forth, but the actual knowledge of how computers, operating systems, and actual physical electronics in general work has arguably declined. This is because companies like Apple have put in Herculean amounts of effort into dumbing down tech and sanding off as many rough edges as possible, while hiding as much of the working bits as they can. User-servicability declined once consumers didn't really need it as much.
HalloweenSnarry
9d ago
I dunno, the 21st Century so far has me suspecting that the Cold War ending how it did may have just been a lucky fluke we didn't appreciate. The 80's was filled with economic hardships paired with plenty of fears of the end of the world vis-a-vis WWIII. Imagine if the Soviet Union didn't collapse when it did.
HalloweenSnarry
10d ago
Would these handguns be different, but identical examples of the same model (e.g. 10 Glock 19s), or completely different models altogether, united only by chambering? Or both?
HalloweenSnarry
10d ago
Presumably, if the judge reneges on his side of the deal, he will torpedo his chances at getting future bribes.
HalloweenSnarry
10d ago
I was gonna say, I think it's literally all because of the very OP of this TLC. Vanillasky posts a lot about India.
HalloweenSnarry
11d ago
You have to balance this against assassination targets like Lincoln and JFK, though, who I think definitely got cast in a sympathetic light post-assassination.
I remember seeing it in an issue of Wired from like 20 years ago.
HalloweenSnarry
15d ago
But one of the foundations of the Dissident Right is Nick Land's Meltdown, which, IIRC, posits that Capitalism doesn't even need humanity anymore.
HalloweenSnarry
15d ago
Yes, but I suspect the point of view of China's current rulers is that these choices in its history were mistakes that they will consciously not make, which potentially means "take the opposite actions"--again, see the Century of Humiliation. Modern China will not do something as hindsightedly retarded as "ban oceanworthy ships."
This doesn't preclude China constraining itself in ways that are objectively counterproductive (overjuiced real estate, zero-COVID policy), but they seek to be the next hegemon, to embrace the Imperial history instead of trying to make it disappear, and thus we must assume they will not abstain from things that states try to do when they feel they have no limits.
HalloweenSnarry
15d ago
But as Corvos raises, to go from a two-tier society to a one-tier society does not necessarily mean that Populares becomes Optimates. Rather, Optimates must become Populares. This is why people have railed against communism and similar ideologies in the past, because all they really accomplished was leveling everyone in certain societies down to a level that was objectively sub-par.
I think class is something that might be impossible to eradicate. Even the Soviet Union stratified into proletarians and intellectuals. Classes must always exist in any human civilization. The best you can do is to keep resentment from building up in the first place.
HalloweenSnarry
15d ago
Something like "Health insurance companies spend too much money on goodies making your healthcare expensive. Healthcare Janitor comes in to eliminate wasteage and make insurance cheaper." Really it's like any capital efficiency, accounting, analytics job. Hire STEM grads to keep the activists out. Markets are happy cause it saves company money, people are happy because Insurance seems to have a watchdog, employees are happy because they are supposedly reigning in the greedy insurers.
How do we prevent this from succumbing to the same thing that caused insurers to become the hated avatars of bloat and inefficiency?
Fix the West, first, on a cultural level, then worry about whatever the fuck is going to happen with Taiwan (I don’t care).
To join some of the other replies here, I would contend that allowing random revanchist tendencies to go unchecked would actually make it much harder to fix the West when economies go into the crapper, because wars of annexation tend to be pretty bad on a world of global trade (military border control being a damper on international movement of goods and money). Now, it is possible to head towards law-and-order without the backdrop of a strong economy, but the West has generally been about not resembling the countries that do so for quite a while now.
HalloweenSnarry
15d ago
The rabidness of the Russian Bear should not cause us to discount the hunger of the Chinese Bear. Xi Jinping has made it clear that he wants China to have prestige and respect, and for all the power it has built up and all the subterfuge it has done, China does not yet have the same level of world-historical importance as the US. Anything and everything to reverse the Century of Humiliation should be considered as on the table for such a goal.
HalloweenSnarry
16d ago
I'm not even sure Shoe ever "drifted" left, she was a Bernie supporter and complained about the "Liberal Voltron" formed to block him in 2020.
HalloweenSnarry
17d ago
He should have never run for a second term, and he should have announced that earlier.
I thought he actually did at one point.
HalloweenSnarry
17d ago
Isn't Toyota still family-run?
I actually first encountered this disease when exploring the twitter of a porn model (so sue me) at least a dozen or more years ago.
Was it Larkin Love?
ETA: FWIW, I did know someone online about as long ago, who did have EDS, and she was wheelchair-bound, and she could do that eyebrow-raising hyperextension it apparently causes.
HalloweenSnarry
18d ago
To add onto ToaKraka's reply, crypto is literally designed to be transferred in increments that total up to sub-cents. Micropayments were one theorized method of paying for the Internet, but were deemed to be impractical. Brave's BAT was created as a sort of alternative to the modern ad-driven internet we have.
HalloweenSnarry
18d ago
I don't have the link to it, but I did once read an article detailing just how extensively prison labor is used. I think ConAgra Foods was one of the users of prison labor mentioned in the article.
Didn't Scott write a post on ACX about how AI has actually blown past a lot of old goalposts for "true intelligence" and our collective response was to come up with new goalposts?
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