JTarrou
9d 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
10d 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
11d 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
15d 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
19d 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
20d 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
25d 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo ago
Kuwaiti knock-off of a Vietnamese energy drink, tastes like bargain Fanta and hairspray.
JTarrou
1mo 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
2mo ago
which I think will be solved in a decade or so
Yeah I said the same thing in 1995.
JTarrou
3mo 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.
JTarrou
3mo ago
after total victory.
That's the part you're eliding. After, it is possible. Before, it is not.
JTarrou
3mo ago
"If you do to us what we did to you, that would hurt Democracy, so be responsible and let us continue discriminating against you, because we're morally superior"
Yeah, that's a tough sell, bro.
JTarrou
3mo ago
A felony is a kind of serious crime.
Indeed, and yet I find the "crime" that Trump has been convicted of is not serious. It's not a felony. I don't think it's even a crime, except when combined with the horror of having won a national election as a non-Democrat.
Would you please explain which felony law Trump is supposed to have broken? And when exactly was he convicted of it?
JTarrou
3mo ago
The judge needed the public cover that the debate and the shooter provided, perhaps.
JTarrou
3mo ago
Assassination seems sort of anti-democratic too though. Maybe even moreso than peacefully relinquishing power on losing an election even if you think it wasn't fair.
JTarrou
3mo ago
It's disappointing and hypocritical, but it's a good thing that cancellation is no longer a leftist superweapon.
All is proceeding according to the prophecy.
JTarrou
3mo ago
Shooting from an elevation into a crowd, head hits are more likely.
Snipers aim for whatever's showing.
JTarrou
3mo ago
My dearest wife
I opened my eyes on the last day.
It was the only thing that came to mind.
You were awake before me, as usual.
Rolled to my left and saw the same thing
I've seen for a third of my life.
The back of your head, back-lit by your phone.
I shifted closer, draped my arm over yours,
and kissed your shoulder.
You grumbled something and shrugged the arm off.
So I lay there, three inches away,
and tried not to shake while I cried.
In a few minutes, our lives are going to change.
I'm never going to walk down this hallway again,
use this bathroom, or type on this computer.
You went down to make tea and I'm writing.
When the drinks are done, we need to talk.
The papers are filed, the process server will be along.
This is not my home any more.
JTarrou
3mo ago
neoreactionaries like hanson
lolwut.
Your evidence is a breitbart article that lumps a bunch of people into a vague category that didn't mean much back in 2016, and that category is not "neoreaction".
Says a lot more about you than it does Hanson, who isn't nearly interesting enough to aspire to neoreaction.
The dumb progressive fads aren't coming from the federal agencies, they're coming from the education schools.
More options
Context Copy link