Lizzardspawn
No bio...
User ID: 594
Lizzardspawn
2hr ago
The easiest way to lose a (culture) war is to lose touch with reality. Seems now it is my side's turn to learn it.
Trump is in the age in which decline is geometric not linear. His zingers in 2016 were hilarious, in 2020 meh and in 2024 degraded to what could only be classified as street brawl insults. In two years he will be even older. In his first term his rating was bad but stable, now is on stable declining trajectory.
He had only 4 tasks for his second administration - improve the standard of living of the working class, mass depurations, make legal hispanics feel at home, no new wars. This would have cemented 2026, 2028 and eventually 2030.
Lizzardspawn
3hr ago
That is what I love about electricity. You never need bother remembering anything if you have just basic math skills.
Lizzardspawn
3hr ago
Fair point. I will rephrase - I don't think the credentials helped them in their career.
Lizzardspawn
4hr ago
Monty Python: Three members of the troupe studied at Cambridge (variously studying medicine, law and English literature), two studied at Oxford (studying English literature and history), and the sixth had a degree in political science from Occidental College. Fry and Laurie: Stephen Fry was offered a scholarship at Cambridge and studied English lit, where he met Hugh Laurie, who was studying archaeology and anthropology.
That means mostly - we are members of the British upper or upper-middle class and we are a bunch of smart chaps.
Smart people generally speaking do well in universities. This by no means that the university helped them in their careers (except by socializing and connections) or that the people that do well in universities are smart.
Lizzardspawn
4hr ago
That's pretty different from studying something like medicine or law, where the degree is much more directly tied to a particular profession.
There is right now an interesting trend going on. First generation UK migrants sending their second generation progeny to study medicine in my EU country because it is relatively cheap and the tutors take bribes (and anyway are forbidden from failing them because the university really like the tuition fees). When they come back to UK they will be more capable killers than SAS and Spetsnaz combined.
Lizzardspawn
9hr ago
Trump will remain the most powerful politician in America likely until the day he dies.
No he won't. Neither did a guy you may have heard about for whom there were such expectations - he was called Ofama or Osama or something. Now pushed into complete irrelevance.
Trump is on the verge of going senile, can't really connect with his disgruntled base anymore and well - doesn't have many years in front of him anyway.
Presidents can't become gray cardinals. The nature of their job forces them to step on too many toes, to grate on too many nerves, to cultivate too much dislikes.
Lizzardspawn
9hr ago
The most popular comedians are not at all the smartest, in fact many do poorly in school, like Gillis / Louis CK / Theo Von
Um... you are posting a jab against credentialism, and yet with straight face consider academic success in the mandatory battle royale gulag as a measure for smartness?
The overreaction to this fairly mild joke is brutal - I don't know why the observation that there are more camel toes in a modern gym than in a zoo struck a nerve. And even less why said nerve was so exposed. I think because it was the offhand way the comment was delivered - not only he did what modern blue tribe hate the most - being judged, but that he dared to make this judgement not a center piece of the monologue or even the joke. A fat unattractive straight guy has the audacity to think so little of their hypersexualization attempts, that he give the hot jacked gay guys more screen time than to their vaginas. The ultimate insult.
Credentialism except from telling something about the mindset of the person with the credential - the more indifferent said person is about the piece of paper, the higher the chances of real brain functioning behind the eyes. The moment you say - I have a bachelors in something, which means you should take me seriously, you know it is safe to discard their following sentences.
A friend of mine, and me graduated from really high end and very selective school for gifted kids. That is actually one of my achievements in life that I really hold dear. She continued with the academic path, it took me more than 15 years to get a bachelor's. She really likes to lean heavily into her various diplomas when discussing stuff - both from - I have studied this so I know more than you, and life owes me a bit of nice things to happen to me because I am educated angles. So I had to snap at one point with "Look - you think you are smarter than the others because you graduated X, I graduated X because I thought I was smarter than the others. We are not the same." . It didn't land as well as the Shane's whore joke did.
As an offtopic - the step by step episode where Dana and Cody are into di.. SAT scores measuring contest, to which Cody is even unaware he participates in is one my favorite.
Lizzardspawn
1d ago
Certainly I don't mean all war crimes are nonsense but the prohibition on economic targets is.
You and nato agree on the matter.
If President Milosevic really wants all of his population to have water and electricity all he has to do is accept NATO's five conditions and we will stop this campaign. But as long as he doesn't do so we will continue to attack those targets which provide the electricity for his armed forces. If that has civilian consequences, it's for him to deal with but that water, that electricity is turned back on for the people of Serbia.
https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/events/transcripts/1999/05/25/press-conference
Lizzardspawn
1d ago
Ukrainian habit to litigate everything in twitter may eventually play a nasty trick on them. I wonder if USA starts messing with starlink latency (that can always be technical issue) and just keep it functional but ineffective with plausible deniability - what would Ukraine do then.
Lizzardspawn
1d ago
History is quite unfavorable to Hitler, but it's not as unfavorable as that.
Almost any big decision Hitler took after the fall of France was retarded and backfired quite well.
I like Trump. He is amazing at identifying problems and terrible at actually solving them. He lacks the willpower, consistency and persistence to use any of the crises he has started to something fruitful for the usa.
Lizzardspawn
1d ago
War crime. You are not allowed to attack purely medical staff/facilities.
Now if you are like Hamas and figure out this one weird trick to hide your C&C and munitions depots under or inside hospital - it is fair game.
Lizzardspawn
1d ago
Tell that to the Germans. Or Argentinians. And their guy was Austrian to add insult to injury. Trump may be consequential in many ways. Doesn't mean that future historians won't judge him harshly if the processed he accelerated turn out to be detrimental to the USA.
Lizzardspawn
1d ago
Defensive yes, existential - they made it one. Russian demands while onerous - mostly veto over Ukraine security were not unbearable.
Zelensky didn't refrain from anything. He just lacked the capacity. And still lacks - the fabled Flamingos are underperforming for example. The moment they could strike russia - they did. Or invade. They pulled every long strike they could do. They started attacking the Crimean bridge years before Russia decided to start Kiev bridges (which also could be matter of capacity, russian munitions became precise last year). The two sides have been going all in since the beginning.
They are the same people. Only Ukrainian nationalists that think sincerely that there is even a shred of difference culturally or genetically between the Russians and Ukrainans. The two sides are equally smart, equally matched and equally indifferent towards the suffering of theirs or others' side populations.
Lizzardspawn
1d ago
Just as a coincidence there some absolutely unverified claims by pro-UA accounts in twitter that starlink has imposed speed limits that had disrupted some Ukraine drone strikes.
Lizzardspawn
1d ago
And what happens with your brisket when your smoker decides to have firmware update? /s - but it has been known to happen with other classes of devices.
Ok - let me describe you an utopia:
Your devices have well defined api-s, you have some raspberry pi that is used as a server, your phone is connected trough headscale to your home network. You have rock hard security, absolute privacy and solid control. All of the benefits of cloud accounts with zero of the downsides.
I am not against api enabled devices (although I would greatly prefer to have the sensors and open firmware that I could tweak myself), I am against cloud connected ones. Your doorbell, thermostat, heatpump and wifi capable buttplug don't need internet access. They don't need wifi and bt access and cloud account before they can have basic functionality. They need open standards for management and authentication.
The whole model of - device needs internet access, makes nat traversal, needs account that is on cloud that is managed by the manufacturer and could be managed only trough their proprietary app that also needs a cloud account is hostile, stupid and risky. Someone eventually will figure out how to overheat a smart water heater and some poor soul will get scalded.
Being able to monitor and change systems at scale is incredibly valuable, and the risk algebra actually does favor some centralized control from the corporate nexus.
Only if you are serious about security. If you are lax about it what is you have is central asshole waiting to fucked. Without lube.
Lizzardspawn
1d ago
They will become really amusing for a short time. For the life me I really can't understand why there isn't major effort right now in just disconnecting things and putting vpns and firewalls. It is cheap easy and actually quite effective.
Lizzardspawn
2d ago
No. Cyber criminals have been brought to trial and convicted. I am saying that due to the way Internet was designed - crime prevention and defense burden is on the victim, because the state has no capacity to prevent the crime.
Lizzardspawn
2d ago
Assume that we have a world in which death notes are common. France's laws can't protect you. How will you deal with the threat?
The default assumption about meatspace states is that they control a physical space, have the only say what goes in there, control the inputs and outputs. And because to commit a meatspace crime you have to be in physical proximity to the victim - it means you are at least nominally under said state power. And this arrangement works well and is easy to understand. You kill a man in Reno just to watch him die and then you go to Folsom. To commit a crime you have to overcome the state.
What does the death note change - that you could kill a man in Reno from Uganda, but there is no way the crime can be traced to you (or prevented). You totally bypass the state. In that world dying by death note because you showed your face or told someone your real name - will be classified as death by natural causes - aka stupidity.
Hacking is inevitable feature of the internet. To be able to prevent and police crimes you have to be able to control all of the infrastructure. And this is where my argument comes into play - if the state is incapable by definition to secure the cyberspace - then it is up to the sysadmins - because they have total control over what goes in their networks.
Lizzardspawn
2d ago
To a large extent we've gotten beyond that and in my opinion there's no reason the same thing shouldn't happen in cyberspace.
Because for that to happen you need to disable out of country communications, encryption, running unsigned software and to have state firewalls that will inspect every packet.
Lizzardspawn
2d ago
Everything you do is subject to the laws of the place your body occupies.
Yes. And defrosting French freezers is not a crime in North Korea. This is how North Koreans say hello to each other.
I don't mind being a fuckwit.
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" while less true than in the 90s is still true enough today. Same as with malicious activities. Internet (okay apranet) was designed as military communication network capable of transmitting information even while severely degraded. That lead to a network that was anarchistic in its core. Just copy pasting meat space concepts and territories doesn't change its nature. Internet allows someone in Kenya to fuck you up in your country, in your home, in your bedroom for the lulz and destroy your life. This is why security is your responsibility - because the state as an entity that is entrusted and capable of providing protection is just not strong enough or not existing even in some contexts.
The only true internet crime is having bad opsec.
Lizzardspawn
2d ago
Yeah, the stores should have better IT security, but who would have thought anyone would be destructive for the sake of mindless vandalism to do something like this?
Anyone frequenting IRC in the late 90s?
Do you have any proof that the hackers were in jurisdiction in which spoiling French food is a crime?
I think you are missing my point. To commit crime you have to have law, the DNA of the internet was always lawlessness and anarchy. It started as a warzone. The fact that meatspace has claimed control and thinks its rules apply - doesn't change the nature of the place. Hackers are not criminals - internet was created to be unrulable - well it was created to be undisruptable, but the two kinda go together. So the burden is on the defender, by default. In the real world you have the whole monopoly of violence thing that says rape is not ok. Internet was designed so that monopoly of violence is impossible. Well the governments figured this one clever trick that if they can put chokepoints and match your digital to physical identity they could break your kneecaps. But still.
Lizzardspawn
2d ago
The most guilty party in any situation is always the actual guilty party.
Yes. The sysadmin. IT security with minimal exceptions[1] always had serious component of victim blaming in the 90s.
The difference with the rest of your scenarios is that in IT there was never trust which could be betrayed. Everyone knew from the beginning that everyone is out to get you. There was never presumption of safety on the internet.
So a better analogy is who is to blame when a soldier dies on the battlefield - the enemy shooter or the soldier that didn't take cover?
[1] Technically illiterate activists in the third world and the likes.
It takes some real effort to create worse plan for winning existential war than Zelensky but you seem to have managed it.
A huge country taken by coup that will lack absolute legitimacy in the big cities, led by 80 year old with waning charisma, record low approval, no clear successor, or a figure that people like in that movement aside from said 80 year old, a military that is by no way sure will even follow orders or obey. On top of that you seem to really want to turn it into whites vs everyone else, when the police forces and the military itself is quite integrated. And unfortunately for you the US military is not made out of 2 million Animal Mothers that will do it for fun. In the country in which there are more legal guns than people and ammo is sold like pez dispensers.
Doctor Strange: (panting) I went forward in time... to view alternate futures. To see all the possible outcomes of the coming conflict. Peter Quill: How many did you see? Doctor Strange: Fourteen million, six hundred and five. Tony Stark: How many did we win? (Doctor Strange pauses for a long, heavy moment and looks intently at Tony) Doctor Strange: ...One.
In the current situation to move towards authoritarianism that exclude the latinos (people with european ancestry and culture) - you need total support from all the whites and blacks. Yes even the ones suffering from TDS. Unlike
Don't get me wrong - there is probably a way to pull it off. If you completely automate the nuclear arsenal, take control of it and SV really have AGI and said it is on your side and hacks and disrupts organizing ability and you hold the country hostage with domestic nuclear strikes and demonstrate you are not bluffing. But then what would prevent Dario or Sam to just take control of the nukes and remake USA in their image? And who are the competent people in Trump's administration that could organize it?
More options
Context Copy link