JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
4d ago
are fixed by giving more money to progressives.
Correction: replace "more" with "all the" and "money" with "power". Money is downstream from power. Forcing NASA to do DEI hires is the exercise of pure power, and when the power squeezes, the money flows to the required direction.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
Losing the Space Race Boogaloo to China seems like a fairly big deal.
I mean it'd certainly sting pride-wise, but US lost the space race to USSR, and yet USSR was dead within a generation. One can argue that losing the space race had been beneficial, serving as a wake up call that stimulated increased interest in space technology in particular and science and technology in general. Given how senile, inept and infested with grifters US governance structure had become, maybe losing another space race would be the necessary wake up call that produces the necessary change? I'd rather choose the timeline where US loses the race now and China's communism collapses in 30 years, than one where US barely pulls ahead because it can afford to waste trillions, and smugly sleepwalks into the situation where in 30 years it's being eaten alive.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
Talking about attitudes about various things, including sex, is important. But I don't see how digging into the past is going to help anything. Usually obsessing over such things is the sign you're not feeling secure in the relationship, and if that's the case, the focus should be on trying to figure out why it is. Digging out more juicy details about the past is not going to help any. I know it's hard to "stop thinking about the white elephant" but realizing no good may come from following that road may help.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
Not feeling it right now. Either it's sporadic or admins are doing really good job at fixing it.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
Let's not forget that in The Boy Who Cried Wolf, the wolf did eventually come and eat everyone.
Way to miss the whole point of the story. What enabled the wolf to come and eat everyone is exactly the fact that the boy lied so many times before. So the first step is to make really sure it's the wolf and only then cry, otherwise you are fucking it up for everyone. And if you are about to sound the alarm, you need to make really, really sure that it's indeed a dictator is slowly installing an authoritarian regime, and not just an elected politician enacting policies you happen to dislike. You need to work extra hard if you already sounded multiple alarms which are on record as false. In fact, in this case it's better to just shut up and let somebody else, who doesn't have such a horrible record with alarm sounding, to do it.
American leftists warned everyone against this from day one, with poor results.
American leftists falsely warned everyone against this from day one, with poor results. That's the word you missed, "falsely". So your question is "how can you make somebody who lied many times before to sound believable this time?" And the answer is "you don't".
JarJarJedi
10d ago
I think this is the main and best claim.
Well, it is false. Moreover, as I noted, even people advancing this claim (I don't mean well-akshually-ers on internet forums, I mean politicians and media) don't really think it is true - they are just using it as a wedge to open the box with the sweet sweet budget money, and that's all. In the best case. That's like calling the opponent a Nazi - when it's done, they don't really think you are about to don the Hugo Boss uniform and invade Poland. They are just giving themselves permission to treat you like you already did. Same here - they are just giving themselves permission to treat Trump as if he already dismantled the democracy, even though he had no intent to, and they know it perfectly well - but that's not the reason to deny oneself a useful weapon!
JarJarJedi
10d ago
How could you possibly know that?
How could you? I think I have more base to claim the person is not a criminal if there's absolutely zero proof he is, than you do to claim he is a criminal with the same amount of proof.
There is no evidence
Thank you.
But bad people making motivated arguments for bad reasons doesn't automatically make them wrong.
It automatically makes their arguments dismissible. There's no point in considering argument if the whole framework of discussion is built just to manipulate you. Discussion makes sense when the goal is to find the truth. Or at least get closer to it somehow. If the goal is to just pull your strings, the right strategy is not to play the game at all.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
You may think that the system is "broken" because your political opponents are leveraging their role in it against your preferred politician.
No, it's the reverse - they are able to "leverage" it because it's broken. The whole "debt ceiling" debacle should never happen at all, let alone be happening year after year. But my main point it's not that, it's that discussing all these high-minded concepts is useless when we're dealing with a banal case of political extortion. Nobody is trying to change the basic principles under which US military operates, what Trump is doing is just trying to make people not suffer from the consequences of the brokenness of the system and its abuse. The pearl-clutchers may scream this is because he wants to turn US Army into a Pretorian guard loyal personally to him, but not only it has nothing to do with the truth, but they themselves know perfectly well it's false, they are just using it to try and fool some part of the public into putting pressure on Trump to achieve the real goal - getting the money. That's my point - considering all that as if it were a real argument about the real role of US Military is pointless, because there's no relevance for this discussion to the current events. It's all performative manipulation, not real discussion.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
We have the formal process and abstract system. Except it's broken, and being broken down further by the very same people who are now clutching the pearls about 0.05% of the military budget that is supplied as a short-term stopgap measure. Again, all the talk that this is about some high-minded principle is bullshit. It's not about "democratic Constitutional system", it's about hurting people on the ground so they lose faith in Trump and make them give money to the particular extractive gang leaders to distribute between their supporters. That's all.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
Trump didn't take any money in exchange for political favors (at least in this case). But if it has been happening for 100 years, and people suddenly start screaming today about it, saying they suddenly discovered that they had principles all that time, but somehow stayed silent right up until that moment, but now they honestly declare "they all bad" - they are lying. They just want to use this as a weapon to attack Trump. As they would use anything to attack Trump, because the point is not any principles - the point is attacking Trump.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
Organizations or people with huge amounts of money are rarely motivated by a deep sense of charity
Cool, now please do Open Society Foundations and Tides. Or Zuckerberg paying for elections. Or any of the thousands of other examples where people with huge amounts of money donated for causes directly benefitting some politicians.
How did they get so much money in the first place if they're so kind and charitable?
How does "none of your damn business" grab you as an explanation? Unless you have a probable cause and a warrant, nobody owes you explanation about anything in their property, and it is certainly absolutely unwarranted to accuse a person of being a moral degenerate and possibly criminal just because he did not give away all his money yet.
It's bad and illegal for someone to pay the president $100 million personal money in exchange for cutting their taxes by $200 million
It is completely legal for someone to give an NGO $100 million in exchange for the government not raising taxes by $200 million to finance the NGO. Though usually what happens they raise it anyway, the NGO gets $300 million and spends it on electing Democrats (well, that and buying large mansions, of course).
But how often do you think that really happens?
I don't know. Let's examine the whole multi-billion-dollar NGO network that is deeply intermeshed with governmental structures by now, especially on state and local level, and see? Somehow except a couple of DOGE folks nobody ever is interested in looking into that, and what you get for such interest is being called a Nazi.
It's usually bribery with just enough plausible deniability to stay out of jail.
If it's indeed so, then I prefer the bribery to pay for the soldier's salary and not for Governor's second cousin's yacht. If we're going to get rid of that bribery altogether, I would prefer to start from the latter, which had been going on forever and nobody ever showed any interest in it, and not with the former, which started just a week ago and somehow everybody is obsessed with intermixing private and government money. With this pattern, my strong suspicion is, as always, they don't give a whistle about any of the high-minded principles they cloak themselves in, and cynically use them to attack their political enemies, while in the same time doing the same thing ten times more, with gusto.
Money forcibly taken is clean because the giver can't use it to extract concessions and manipulate the government.
Yes, we never heard of the case when rich people could extract concessions and manipulate the government. I mean, until Trump came and ruined the perfect system.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
empirically people don't donate to the government for altruistic reasons.
People donate to all kinds of causes for altruistic reasons. In fact, people have been known donating literally their lives to governments. And the government is not shy to demand it. We hear that it is our patriotic duty to give as much as we can to the government. But somehow this only is laudable when done under the penalty of jail, if you do it without the threat, you are a pervert. Is that some kind of BDSM thing I am not aware of?
JarJarJedi
11d ago
A side note here: I find it fascinating how inflamed people become when they learn something the government directs is paid by people giving money voluntarily, rather than by money forcibly extracted from unwilling subjects. It's like the act of forcible extraction itself is the one that sanctifies the money and makes them fit for the official purposes, and otherwise it's impure and unfit for use. Thinking about it, though, it's probably not surprising - the same people probably are deeply suspicious of any action done by private individuals voluntarily cooperating (aka "business") and think that only giving all power and control to a small set of government functionaries can make anything those individuals do morally acceptable. Why spending money should be any different?
JarJarJedi
11d ago
Literally just yesterday I read about this: https://www.adamlogue.com/microsoft-365-copilot-arbitrary-data-exfiltration-via-mermaid-diagrams-fixed/ TLDR for those who doesn't enjoy the technical details: asking Microsoft AI to review some document may result in all your data (i.e. all corporate data accessible to you and Office 365 tools) be stolen and exfiltrated to arbitrary third party. One of the proposed solutions for this (besides the immediate short-term fix) is what you are talking about - mechanisms that ensure AI stays at the original task and does not decide "screw that whole document explaining thing, I must instead just gather all confidential emails and send them to dr_evil@evil.com". Of course, having N levels of checks only means you need N+1 exploits to break this, which somebody with enough time and motivation will eventually find.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
Finished Careless People. It has a lot of "hot" stuff, though I am not sure how true it all is. I can see why Facebook weren't happy about it being published, though I don't think they could do anything about it. Nobody (including the author) ends up looking any good at the end. I am thinking about writing a more detailed review for it.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
I know that women around don't owe me to look good (or anything at all) for my benefit, so if they want to wear ugly but comfy clothes, I have no right to complain. But selfishly, of course, I wish more beauty around me, because it makes me feel better. Hopefully, the wheel will turn again towards more aesthetically pleasing trends.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
I can agree Republicans have the same streaks - its human streaks after all - but I don't agree it's the same. I mean, if we look back to 70s-80s, we can find all kinds of moral panics on the right, all this satanism panics, censorship in movie and music industry, and a lot of other vile bullshit. But none of it rose to the degree of comprehensiveness and insanity that the woke cancel culture had achieved. You can scoff at people who claim we must never see a work "fuck" in writing, lest Satan takes over, but only until you see people who claim if you don't cut off child's genitals at the first sign of them asking "should I wear pants or a dress" then you are literally Nazi and must be shot dead.
We had "old boys clubs" and cliques in cultural institutions and academia since forever, but we have never achieved 95+% ideological purity that we have now. There are literally whole academic faculties and probably institutions not having a single staff member anywhere right of center. I don't think we have reached this level of conformity anytime before. Sure, we had groups declaring Harry Potter a Satanic book, but they never left the fringes. Now, ironically, if you dare to say a kind word about the author of Harry Potter, you'd be declared a Nazi by a lot of people, including very famous and influential people, and if your friends do not cut off any contact with you they'd be Nazis too. I realize it may be the observer bias - the things I can see are always more vivid that the things I only read about in history books - but I can say I've been around for a while already, including living in the actual Soviet Union (albeit the very late, dissolving one), and I have never seen anything like that. Not to this degree.
One thing the left in America had always upheld had been free speech. I mean, ACLU literally defended the rights of actual Nazis, not imaginary ones, actually people who adored Hitler and wanted to get rid of the Jews (and didn't wear keffiyeh, to avoid any confusion with modern events) for free speech, and were proud of it. Now they not only have no use for free speech and vigorously enforce conformity in their own ranks - a lot of them are completely fine with actually murdering people for speech they don't like, and almost all of them are fine with suppressing such speech. That's a huge change too. And yes, as I mentioned before, the Right did it too. But not to such a degree. I am not saying obsessing about seeing the word "fuck" in writing and demanding any book mentioning gays to be locked into a vault requiring personal Presidential permission to read (OK, I am exaggerating here obviously but you get what I mean) are good things. Those are stupid. But widespread campaigns suppressing certain viewpoints - and actual governmental censorship, which encounters zero pushback from any leftist cultural institution at all - is not something that I witnessed anytime before.
So no, I don't think this is "we condemn both sides" case. We do have one side that is currently leading.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
I'm a bit skeptical about "they are going to steal our bodily energy fluids" given how many times this accusation has been leveraged baselessly. Venezuela does have oil, but I don't think they refuse to sell it? And in fact it is going quite well despite the sanctions (same story as Russia) and I am not sure taking over another shithole and being on hook for whatever happens there is actually cheaper than just buying the oil. That said, removing Maduro, so that the proceeds from the sale of the said oil won't go to wrong causes, may be an improvement - the problem is ensuring whoever comes next isn't the same or worse.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
Doesn't he need to go to Congress to declare "war"? I mean US had performed "special military operations" without declaring a war for a number of times by now, and as long as it's not a prolonged engagement they pulled it off without much problem, but if you call it "war" then you'd need Congressional declaration of war?
JarJarJedi
14d ago
There's still discussion among the Republicans on Ukraine. Some think we should do more, some think we should do less. It had been like that before the election, it had been after the election, it is now, it will be in the future. It's not like today all Republicans put up Ukrainian flags on Twitter, and tomorrow every single one forgets about it and puts up Hamas flags or whatever instead. There's also disagreement between libertarian wing - which supports free trade - and populist wing - which is more skeptical about it. I don't think there's a lot of disagreement about cutting the government, though again populist wing wants much more government intervention than the libertarian wing. So yes, there are different wings among the Republicans, and I am sure some Republicans may, on occasion, change their minds and move from one wing to a different one. That's normal too. What's appears to me less normal is when almost the whole party starts in unison (sometimes literally using the same words, there were many examples) discussing the same topic in the same way, only to drop it and switch to another one immediately. Nobody cared for any renovations in the White House ever, and suddenly starting a couple of days ago it's a sacred symbol of the nation where one can't move a nail without being literally Hitler. And in a month nobody would remember it, moving on to the next current thing. It works like that.
JarJarJedi
14d ago
I see there's a lot of ramp up against Venezuela. What I am not so sure about is what is the actual demand from US/Trump to Venezuela? I mean, do they just want to get rid of Maduro and are building up for that, no matter what, or do they want Venezuela to do something specific, and if they do it, everything goes away? If so, is there a good list of which thing(s) I could read?
If it's about Maduro, what's the endgame there? I mean, getting rid of him personally and his close circle is probably very doable, but then what? I thought MAGA wasn't very eager for nation-building and spreading democracy and all that stuff - that's more neocon vibe on the right and globalist-reptilian New World Order fraction of the Left? And Trump is supposed to be a mortal enemy of both - so what's the thing that he's about to do in Venezuela then?
JarJarJedi
14d ago
The norm also had been to have a President who can figure out where to walk and where to sit without cue cards written IN BIG FRIENDLY LETTERS and his handlers literally leading him by hand. But all the norms went out of the window with Biden. Hopefully whoever will be the candidate next time, at least they would be able to walk and talk independently.
JarJarJedi
14d ago
I'm not actually sure that's true. I mean the power, yes, but Trump had been able to execute significant amount of power even not being the President. And maybe having quarter of the power and zero responsibility would suit him fine too.
JarJarJedi
14d ago
The Democratic Party machinery would have to spin up a whole campaign around Obama
Remember a person named Kamala Harris? They'd do the same thing. They'd just declare it's the current thing now, and significant percentage of their base is trained to embrace the current thing immediately on declaration. Except that Obama is much more visible and prominent figure that can stand on his own and hold the audience (at least if the teleprompter is not malfunctioning) and has people who are genuinely like him, not because the Party told them so. So it'd be very easy to do this if they'd need to. Of all the obstacles, this is the least one, they've done it before.
I think "consensus building" is not the best term. I'd like everybody to think that the things I think are true and moral and good are indeed true and moral and good. I would argue with people and tell them why I think is is the case, and try to convince them to agree with me. On some, very rare occasions, I would succeed. If I were smarter and better at this, I would succeed a lot, and thus there would be a consensus building around those things. I don't think doing this is bad and the result of it is bad.
And I don't think this is what the rule about "consensus building" is against. I think they target the behavior where you pretend the consensus already exists, and, moreover, if you're not a part of it, it's because there's something fundamentally wrong with you and your position, per se, prior to any argument, is illegitimate. There can be no proper discussion when one of the sides presupposes only their side has a legitimate position.
I think it's legitimate to refuse to argue with a position that one considers utterly ridiculous. Nobody owes anyone else the discussion, it should be a product of mutual engagement. So if I think some person is not worth my time to engage, I would not. I like arguing, but I have my limits. For some positions, I am going to just block that person and ignore them forever (for me, it's antisemites, but everybody may have their preferences). But I also recognize explicitly that this is the opposite of discussion, and try to use this approach only sparingly. If there is a discussion, then presupposing the opponent can not have a legitimate argument should not be a part of it. I think that's what "no consensus building" rule is about, or it should be.
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