BANNED USER: /comment/193024
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
Failed repeatedly in his attempts to die a hero and has now lived long enough to become the villain.
User ID: 659
Banned by: @cjet79
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
No i don't think you're not the one out of touch.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
Are you saying that we are not discussing "competence" per se so much as "conforming to liberal preferences"?
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
(This, incidentally, is a major reason why conservative protests are usually incompetent).
Define "incompetent" because in my experience conservative protests/rallies (especially the pro-life and pro-gun ones) are typically larger in terms of attendance, and better organized in terms of transportation, porta-poties, trash pick-up etc... than progressive protests. They just don't enjoy the friendly relationship with the media that the progressives do.
Proving what point?
Apologies, you're catching a bit of the backwash from a loooong-running argument between myself and some of the other mods.
Short version being that the moderating philosophy of /r/themotte and now theMotte.org not only enables but encourages certain pathologies (see the "geek social fallacies"). And a big part of that is the negative feedback loop. I know I am in the minority, but I still think @ZorbaTHut made a mistake when he ported upvotes and downvotes over to the new site. Votes are engagement. Comments are engagement. And negative engagement will always be easier and more engaging than positive. Hate makes the blood flow, and blood makes the grass grow.
ETA: Someone who writes a thoughtful well-written response often gets few replies and few votes because who's going to get worked up about a thoughtful well-written response. At the same time "good job" is often exactly what those people need to hear if you want them to keep making thoughtful well-written responses. Eating a ban for encouraging good posts strikes me as a small price to pay for encouraging good posts.
Steve Sailer isn't a racist. He's just correct about the wrong things. Calling him a racist is just an appeal to the mercy of the 'good' side.
Sailer is only correct insofar as one presumes that the "Social Sciences" are rigorous and scientific. A dubious presumption at best if you ask me. I see Sailer in much the same way I view Scott, Proffessional-class academic-types of west coast Jewish descent who hasn't quite wrapped their head around the true implications and scope of what they've stumbled upon.
They still think that "studies show"...
The truth is that it is all lies, all of it.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
It feels like vintage Scott to me. He is loudly and explicitly calling bullshit on a clearly false proposition.
Is it "clearly false" though?
I'm reminded of a speech our Company VP made at our year-end/new-years all hands to the effect of "science" is 90% bullshit because scientists can just make shit up and no one but another scientist (who's probably their friend, colleague, and/or engaged in the same sort of chicanery) will ever be in a position to call them on it. Engineering is where the real challenge and intellectual rigor lies because any lay-man can tell look and tell you if the bridge stands, or the airplane flies.
If Claudine Gay was targeted, what does that change? If Scott genuinely feels that tribal Affiliation and political expediency should trump intellectual rigor, let us see him make that argument.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
I suspect that he's always been like this he just kept it on the DL. See some of the contemporary commentary surrounding "the categories were made for man" and the implications for the Trans community. "Bounded Distrust" where he defended Fauci's choice to lie to the public and to the congress was his coming out party and now this is simply who he is.
It may sound flippant, but I kind of blame the autism, in that I don't think he ever truly grokked that "the other-side can read your book" until the whole NYT fiasco, and by then he'd already said too much.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
Israel spies on America and sells its secrets. It also lobbies the US to fight its wars and give it money.
And so does everybody else, just as the US spies on, and sells the secrets of, others.
Once upon a time it was understood by everyone down to lowliest serf that such was the minimum buy-in to play "the great game".
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
...and what exactly do you mean by 'intelligent' here?
I mean ability to process new information and adapt to changing circumstances/scenarios.
What I'm saying is essentially the flip-side of "don't do the crime if wont do the time". I understand that you want to discourage users from posting "good job" or "excellent point" and i am ok with that. But that isn't going to stop me doing so, because I genuinely believe that encouragement/positive renforcement is worth the marginal loss of my getting banned.
Edit: To be explicit, if you want to ban me for giving @Walterodim an "attaboy" that is your prerogative, but I also cant help but feel like doing so is kind of proving my point.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
It's not a lack of self-confidence so much as an overabundance of confidence. Our "elites" are not intelligent people. They're idiots, and that there is the problem.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
Im wondering where they got their numbers or if they are trying to pull some statistical tom fuckery as US aid to Gaza in 2020 alone was something like 2.5 billion. Heck we've sent them 0.2 billion in the last month and our contributions tend to run "light" compared to those of the EU, UN, Saudis, and Qatar.
As for the Arabs, their beef with us, IE Anglos/The West, goes way back. Way farther than 1948, The notion that Arab animosity towards us and middle eastern instability is somehow to blame on Israel is mostly "a cope" invented by woke liberal MBA students who've never been outside the country and who couldn't tell a Sunni form a Shia if their life depended on it because a simple narrative of "Joos Bad" is far more palatable to modern liberal tastes than an honest accounting of the history.
Do you really not listen to the rhetoric from US politicians?
Not really, no.
Do you seriously believe that a politician's rhetoric is a reasonable proxy for truth? If so, I have a bridge to sell you.
A man is what he does, not what he says.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
If you're completely unwilling to face what you're doing, you shouldn't do it.
Excellent point.
An interesting thought that genuinely hadn't occurred to me until you pointed it out. While the ability to voluntarily hold one's breath is typically limited to 2 -3 minutes a reasonably healthy Human body is capable of functioning on limited or no oxygen for a significant amount of time (closer 10 to 15 minutes). Hypoxia is pernicious in that it sneaks up on you, without explicit warnings/training most people will not recognize that they are in trouble until they've already burned 90% of their available time assuming they recognize that they are in trouble at all because by that point cognitive ability has already started to decline.
Accordingly, I'm now wondering if they ought to have sedated the guy or gotten him blackout drunk first. Throw a big party on death row, get everyone plastered and then pump in the nitrogen.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
A considerable amount of research has taken place;
That a considerable amount of research has taken place doesn't actually tell anyone anything. Whether or not "thousands of lines of code have been written" is wholly independent of whether "the software performs to specification".
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
Is this true?
Anecdotally, as in go to a middle-class sportsbar in Atlanta or Gulfport during football season and compare the demographics of the patrons to a similarly middle-class sportsbar in Boston, Denver, or Sacramento, absolutely. It is not even close, and I would be deeply skeptical of any source claiming otherwise. As the old saw goes, there are three sorts of lie, lies, damned lies, and statistics.
We aren't "Bootlicking Israel" though. We are offering them a relatively small portion of our Military Industrial Complex's total output in exchange for Raytheon, LockMart, NGC, BAE, Et Al using their backyard as a live-fire R&D lab and getting first crack at any patents their engineers might file.
The ways you can tell that the OP and others' claims about Israel being dependent on the US are being made from a place of either bad faith or extreme ignorance, is that it's readily apparent for all to see that even without the 10 - 20 billion dollars a year Israel receives from the US they would still be a nuclear power with a robust domestic manufacturing capability and a broadly "first world" standard of living.
Meanwhile Gaza without the 10 billion or so in combined US and EU aid it receives each year would be living in the 17th century. No Electricity, no motorized Transportation, and looking down the barrel of some extreme food and water shortages.
What comparisons are there are don't compare at all.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
and will be well underway again in 18 months or so.
...Assuming Trump (or DeSantis) wins the election. So long as Obama/Biden keep funneling resources to Iran, Iran is gonna keep funding the Houthis Hamas, Et Al and that's going to put a krimp on things.
Though on the flip side I could see a Saudi Israel alliance against Iran developing should the Houthis overplay their hand, or Iran drop the pretense and start acting directly.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
It becomes less baffling when you realize that there are a lot of continental philosophers and left-leaning technocrats (IE the sort of people who would have voted for Woodrow Wilson back in the day) who will never forgive the Jews for how WWII ended.
Much like claiming Seinfeld is unfunny, or that Star Wars (1977) is overrated, characterizing the Beatles as "basic pop-rock" is doing them a disservice and missing the point. To the degree that they seem boring/cliche today (debatable IMO) it is only because we've all grown up listening to entire generations worth of other artists trying to emulate them.
As for the rest, I remain convinced that only real measure of "quality" when it comes to art is whether it remains relevant 50, 100, or 1,000 years after the fact. The Beatles seem to have ticked that checkbox, we'll see about Peter Watts.
The "or is at least perceived to be" is the critical part. That "center-right is dead" is the narrative that both the woke left and dissident right want to push because what power and credibility they have absolutely depends on convincing enough people that this is the case.
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