JTarrou
4d ago
You're putting way too much thought into it. Social sciences are neither social nor sciences, they are sinecures for left-wing nutbags and anyone who funds it is funding their own opposition. It's politically ridiculous to spend tax money on hyper-partisan fake fields that died in the Replication Crisis, but no one has noticed.
Defund all this shit. You'd be shocked how little of the university system you need to train the very few jobs that might actually require a college degree. It's all a bloated jobs program for shitbird lefties who never want to leave the classroom, and a class barrier for the ruling elite. For the working class, it's debt slavery as the price of admission to the middle class.
JTarrou
15d ago
Clinton was so charming that he probably could have run on a bizarro world mirror image of the package he actually ran under (protectionist, openly pro-gay marriage, doveish on the international stage etc., unlike the real Clinton) and would still have won a first or even second term.
I think this is off base. Clinton was charming, but he won his first term with a plurality because Ross Perot won 19% of the vote. And immediately he had to govern far to teh right of how he campaigned. All that "Triangulation" stuff was Clinton being a shrewd political operator and figuring out that the country didn't want his ideas, they just wanted his face and interpretations on a Republican policy platform.
The Democrats got smashed in the '94 elections (where Joe Scarborough got his start as a firebreathing Republican). Clinton made political hay out of the defeat, and it won him re-election. Welfare reform, the '94 crime bill (notice that year?) etc.
But no, there is no way in hell the people who were in power and voting back in the '90s were in any mood for very liberal policies except perhaps a narrow range of gay rights and general fun-having. If you think liberal criminal justice policies were popular the year murder peaked in the US, you didn't observe it up close.
We'd just won the Cold War, had the Gulf War and no one wanted the stern Republican daddies in charge anymore, but they certainly didn't want the policies of the seventies back. And marginal Republicans weren't as worried about the existential nuclear threat and ideological superstruggle anymore, and were willing to vote on other issues. Hence, Perot picked up a lot of people from both sides who were looking for an option to the old ideologies. Clinton was the one who wound up seizing the moment to change the policies and interest groups of the left-wing coalition, which is what is being reacted to with the current re-alignment.
Only this time it is Trump who is doing the moving around, liberalizing the old Republican doctrines that no longer serve their new political base.
JTarrou
16d ago
The wages of success are that people with no physical wants often find life unfulfilling. Some subset of those people will externalize that inner psychic pain as various vague illnesses or socially-advantageous identities, some will choose eschatological fantasies to give their nihilism meaning.
Global Warming hysteria is just christian The End Is Nigh catastrophizing with extra steps. The bitter middle-class spinsters that would have become religious nuns five hundred years ago are now "transmasc". The Jain invocation that the most moral thing you could do is starve yourself to death without producing children or harming even a gnat is funneled into dietary restrictions, assisted suicide, and various anti-fun groups. It's all luxury beliefs, and it's why poorer countries are often much happier than richer ones. Struggle gives meaning, need creates community, which gives meaning. Only in rich countries are we comfortable enough to pretend a disability.
Underlying it all is a fundamentally pessimistic worldview that sees existence as not being worth the trouble. "That burden my father gave to me, but which I gave to no man". You see this on the internet with people talking about how they didn't ask to be born etc.
Camus said the fundamental philosophical question was whether or not to keep living. I tend to agree.
JTarrou
18d ago
Nonono, not even that.
You still aren't even close to in the vicinity of the ballpark where cynicism once played.
JTarrou
30d ago
Now that Twitter is 50/50 left and right, and the left isn't allowed free hand to censor, it's an "echo chamber".
Seems like there's something being missed.
JTarrou
1mo ago
Let me offer my own theory:
Trump made himself Hitler (in the minds of the left) to credibly signal to the people that he was on their side. He got the political equivalent of a face tattoo. Every hysterical denunciation, every spurious legal charge, every desperate ploy by the intelligence agencies only strengthen his position. The people want to know he won't abandon them like every other Republican. So he proves it to them, by becoming the most hated man in the country. Win or lose, Trump isn't going back.
That's what he does that DeSantis, and Cruz and Rubio and all the rest can't. Reject the Beltway, become a pariah among "polite" society. He is playing the political heel, and in so doing, cements his voting base. This is why all the attacks on him seem to make him stronger, because they do. It's all just more evidence that they fear Trump in a way that they do not fear anyone else. And that's what the party actually wants.
JTarrou
1mo ago
There's a strong element of "choose your destructor".
Trump should be the cautionary tale. Be careful who you think you want to tangle with politically. Obama probably thought that joke had no chance of backfiring. He mike dropped on national television, and then Trump made him eat it....twice.
JTarrou
1mo ago
Closest I've seen is Generation Kill, a miniseries, which was written by an embedded journalist, had a dozen of the guys from the unit on as instructors and producers, and one or two even played themselves (Rudy Reyes).
JTarrou
1mo ago
The dumb progressive fads aren't coming from the federal agencies, they're coming from the education schools.
JTarrou
1mo ago
For most of teh Roman Republic stage of the empire, they maintained the fiction that most of the territory controlled by Rome was technically sovereign and merely an "ally".
The US is a good bit less interventionist than we could be, and that's probably for the best, but we should not pretend that just because we haven't annexed Canada that they aren't US territory.
JTarrou
2mo ago
Let me put it this way, everyone sat in a circle in a room, and Scott moved his swivel chair out into the hallway and spun in a circle while he talked, so all you saw of him was his knees swing past the doorway every three seconds. Plus, that scintillating mind in print is entirely incomprehensible in conversation. It was interesting, but if I didn't already know from his writing that he was smart, I'd have thought he was seriously mentally ill, or perhaps autistically retarded.
Which it is my assertion that very high IQ basically is.
JTarrou
2mo ago
As an analogy, I think of IQ a bit like horsepower in a car. You can measure power a few different ways, they're all correlated but slightly different, and bigger numbers don't always translate to more actual speed on the road. A lamborghini has a lot of horsepower, but so does a digger.
Strictly speaking, IQ predicts educational capacity. It's correlated imperfectly with a bunch of other positive mental attributes, but bigger numbers don't always translate to more intelligence in the real world, and at the extremes the statistical selection effects are strong.
At the high and low ends, IQ is dysfunctional. Above a certain high threshold, more IQ has negative real-world effects, many of the "smartest" people in the world can't manage their own lives, stay employed or be understood by normies. Even our distant patron Scott looks and sounds either insane or stupid in person. Very bright guy, but a total weirdo IRL, and I'm pretty weird myself.
A society with an average IQ of 120 or 130 would have incredible human capital, a society with an average of 170 would collapse in about six minutes. To bring it back around to my analogy, most of us don't actually want a thousand-horsepower supercar to drive. Roads full of Bugattis would be a nightmare. A bit more speed than average is fine, but as you get faster, there's fewer and fewer places you can drive, and fewer and fewer uses until you get to something like a drag racer, which is fast as hell, and totally useless.
JTarrou
2mo ago
This whole thing, the NYT and your tongue bath of it, bespeaks nothing so much as two people who have never seen terminal ballistics talking ridiculous.
We should expect that, if these children are shot because they have caught stray bullets aimed elsewhere, that most of the children would be shot in places other than their head and chest.
Now why would that be? What percentage of surface area of the body is the head and torso, and how does the movement of the limbs affect their statistical chance of catching stray rounds? What's the effect of people poking their heads out to see what's happening? Is this calculation well established in the military literature? Because I've never heard of it.
And how exactly does one calculate that someone had been shot only once in the head? A rifle round through the skull will tend to pop the whole thing open like a smashed pumpkin. Could have been shot once, could have been shot fifty times. Could have not been a bullet at all, but a rock or chunk of shrapnel from an explosion. Good luck telling the difference.
This is the sort of thing that NYT journalists find impressive, the fact that you do as well speaks more to you than to anything going on in any war anywhere.
JTarrou
2mo ago
Well, that's your opinion, you can hardly expect people who do not belong to your socio-political tribe to agree just because you assert it.
Let me ask a question about election fraud, do you support the conviction of Trump on charges he tampered with the election by paying off a porn star?
JTarrou
2mo ago
People seemed to have defined "election rigging" as specifically electronically hacking election machines to change votes.
Rather than, say, changing all the election rules using emergency powers that didn't pass constitutional muster. Or charging your opponent with seventy-odd felonies, or keeping them off the ballots in some states etc. Or co-opting the intelligence agencies to wiretap your opponents and launder your oppo research.
Or just, you know, twiddling their thumbs while some idiot takes a shot at the candidate.
But by all means, let's mock the "vibes".
JTarrou
2mo ago
Parsimonious explanation, the first Joker was supposed to be a middle finger, but it was too balanced and hit at the right time and people liked it. So they went back to the drawing board and made a musical.
JTarrou
2mo ago
The very short version is online flirting lead to convention hookups lead to a short, abortive long distance relationship. I got the raid in the divorce, but the guild split over the drama and we had to form another.
JTarrou
2mo ago
Dwarf, vanilla and I let the DFTs go, because I built a TF. The rogues and furies could cry their fucking eyes out. :P
JTarrou
2mo ago
Kuwaiti knock-off of a Vietnamese energy drink, tastes like bargain Fanta and hairspray.
JTarrou
3mo ago
The loss of institutional prestige in the SS has some downstream effects. Most notably, every crackpot in the country now knows (whether true or not) that the service is not protecting Trump, or is wildly incompetent. I would expect political assassination attempts in general to rise for a while, as nobody is scared of the talent on display from that particular agency. The myth of the secret service terminators stopped more guns than the actual service ever did.
Now? The first marginally competent goon to rock up is gonna have a field day, but apparently today is not that day.
JTarrou
4mo ago
which I think will be solved in a decade or so
Yeah I said the same thing in 1995.
JTarrou
4mo ago
Per Machiavelli, you should do your evil all at once, then blame the subordinate you had do it, execute him and after that be conciliatory.
Let's test the theory by taking away the sinecures.
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