MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I don’t see the desire to know that the system is fair as “reactionary”. It’s actually quite telling that we actually don’t have a reasonable way to detect fraud or secure the system. Add in a highly unusual election where millions are voting by drop box, introducing more opportunities for fraud, and yeah people might be a bit suspicious. I think the issues should addressed simply because until the state can demonstrate that it’s taking the problem seriously, eventually all elections will be contested simply because it cannot be demonstrated that the system has been secured.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
One thing that I think would go a very long way is taking claims of fraud seriously and taking serious steps to demonstrate that the electoral system is being run to prevent fraud. So if I were in charge of the election system, I’d require that some sort of government issued photo ID be used. I’d bend over backwards to make it easy (with proper source documents) to get those kinds of IDs. Second, I’d create an organized and fair way to validate the voter rolls such that we don’t have large numbers of people on the rolls that should not be there. Matching up names to death certificates seems like a good way to get rid of dead people on the rolls. And I’m probably not too far off in saying that if you haven’t filed state income taxes or applied for state benefits in 3 or more years, you probably don’t live here. If you’re required to prove citizenship to register, I think that would go pretty far to prevent illegals from voting.
The counting I think could be shown online without too much problem. And I think doing so would be helpful because it’s a lot harder to monkey with a count that is done publicly. And I think I’d probably also have the totals by precinct and even voting location would make it hard to inject ballots without someone noticing. I want to make auditing easier without being able to identify who voted for whom is the goal. I’m not sure if it would be possible to have a sort of blockchain setup that would allow people to track their own ballot from the moment they cast it until it’s officially tallied, but if it’s possible, not only would it help with building trust, but would make audits easier as you’d end up having ballots show up that were not cast anywhere.
Third, I’d take reports of anomalies seriously. I don’t care what people think they’re seeing, but if it’s possible fraud, it deserves a full investigation. And prosecution for fraud should be a part of that.
Do all of that, and I don’t think anyone could doubt that the election was honest.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I have accepted that Islamist ideology is the natural bent of Islamic countries. What I do not accept is that we should allow a major portion f the globe to destabilize so they can have democracy. The results of supporting these popular movements is basically that the region is much more unstable, much less secular, and more likely to persecute women and minorities in their own countries and launch attacks against Israel. The result of democracy in Iraq was a radical Shia regime, not a Jeffersonian democracy.
I think any sane alien would be doing much like what I’m proposing. If the results of our democracy were constant attacks on other planets, murder of anyone who didn’t match our ideology, and destabilizing the rest of the galaxy, these aliens would not be in favor of us having a democracy. They’d much rather we were stable, peaceful, and under a dictatorship than that we’re attacking Alpha Centauri, killing Swedes and killing anyone who isn’t fitting in with religion.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I’ll definitely agree on the education part. I think honestly the schools are so bad at this point that they’re meaningless. It seems like it started with the end of the Cold War, mostly because we were moving all the factories to other parts of the world. That triggered a crisis as now everyone needed a HS diploma and a bit more if they wanted to have anything like a working class, let alone middle class lifestyle. And since the biggest determinant of getting a “good job” once the factory was gone was education, all barriers to education were systematically eliminated. You can’t be so cruel as to flunk a kid who can’t do the work because if he doesn’t graduate, he’s going to live in poverty and be basically unemployed forever. Then of course you have student loans so everyone could go to college. Of course colleges saw this as a cash cow. Lower the standards so that any kid who graduates high school can “earn” a diploma.
And now you have functionally uneducated college grads who believe they’re smart competent people, but aren’t and probably wouldn’t pass their grandparents freshman year of high school. Try it. Find math problems that a 14 year old in 1920 was expected to be able to solve and give it to a college grad in 2024. They cannot do it. They cannot read books that were read for fun in 1950. Forget such arcane subjects as geography, history, or science. It’s a scary sad thing that people with college degrees know less about science than high school kids in 1980.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
But if the mandate is to mitigate the logistics and supply issue, legibility is in fact a failure. All of the time spent confronting groups, confiscating their supplies to audit them, and so on means failure at *the reason we bothered to create FEMA in the first place. I think this is one of many things Neo-Reactionary thinking is correct about. The state apparatuses are rewarded or punished and basically held to account on process and legibility rather than accomplishing the mission at hand. And so these agencies spend much time making sure that they aren’t going to get dinged for not following the process that most agencies suck at the mission they exist to do.
I think at this point, most civilians are so done with FEMA that they’re actively trying to avoid FEMA knowing where they are and what they’re doing. Which is a mixed bag. Having untrained people trying to repair things or rescue people is probably a bad idea, but following the rules is likely to see supplies not get into the zone until more people die. The loss of trust in authority is going to be hard to overcome. Not much sympathy as they seem to be bringing it on themselves.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think the aftermath is a complete loss. The Arab Spring wasn’t about democracy, it was an Islamist movement based in getting rid of the old guard who were largely secular socialists and nationalists. Our ignorance of the region and what these despots were holding back is obvious now and anyone familiar with the region and the history of could have easily told you that weakening these secular regimes is good optics and terrible policy. And where these despots were weakened or overthrown, we now have either outright Islamist governments or powerful military junta’s threatening jihad at either the secular government or the designated target of the Jews. But then again our midwits are not exactly scholars and were taken in by the optics that happened to coincide with their interpretation of the neo-liberal right side of history narrative that holds that humans all naturally are alike and think exactly like post-modern liberals and want nothing other than to join the Rules Based International Order and drink Starbucks and send their daughters to humanities programs at Evergreen.
To be blunt, my take on politics both domestic and international is Real Politick. You are a fool if you’re trying to govern based on delusions and fantasies about how you wish the world works. And you are a double fool if you’re misunderstanding human nature. We are not fundamentally good people, no one is. And pretending that if we just ignore reality hard enough we can wish ourselves to Utopia is just going to set everything back.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Honestly, I think the same. We’ve lost the ability to do a lot of things that our great grandparents took for granted that would just work. I could go down the list of usual government functions and for the most part we did them better in 1924 than we do in 2024. And I think it’s a combination of easy living, culture and poor education that’s created an elite that simply cannot handle the realities of running a complex society in the real world.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
The trouble with ignoring the sentiment is that you always have to deal in the reality of limited resources. You simply cannot do everything and as such you need to set priorities that make some sort of sense. And really we don’t have the ability to police the world while also dealing with a major crisis. The same soldiers cannot both be preparing to deploy to the Middle East and mounting search and rescue in the Heléne hurricane zone. Of the two, I think any sensible leader would choose to at least delay until the S&R stuff is finished before packing them up to sail overseas.
As for the post WW2 consensus, I think it died the minute Russia invaded.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
It’s a way to get away with using less skilled workers and cheaper and faster training. Properly training someone to handle a disaster would require the person to have some understanding of what kinds of things happen in disasters to various common systems that run society. You’d have to show them what happens to electrical grids in hurricanes, the issues involved in fixing them, and what upstream and downstream effects might be. This requires at least a basic understanding of electrical engineering. Which takes a lot of intelligence and skill to understand. It’s full of math and physics, after all. Even getting someone to understand the system as well as a journeyman electrician is going to take some time and money. It will help them understand things like why an app is a bad way to distribute aid in a hurricane aftermath zone, but you’ll have to pay more to attract a better candidate, and you have to train them. Or you can set up a generic process for every disaster and hope that they’ll be good enough for most disasters even when executed by Jenny a former secretary at a car dealership who has no idea what the issues even are. Before the disaster scenario happens, you’re getting kudos for doing this because Jenny is a pretty cheap hire, and she’s ready to go within a few months instead of years.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I don’t think that makes much sense. Simpson’s didn’t help that image, but there are a lot of big scary images of nuclear weapons being used, scare propaganda about the aftermath of nuclear war, which certainly don’t help the public image of nuclear power. Add in a few disasters (Fukushima, Chernobyl, and 3-mile Island) and as a power source it has an image problem that long predates Homer Simpson.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I’m not going to deny the tech has a part. But I find the writing part to be a big turn off personally. No character in any story has any sort of real arc, the beats are nearly identical with only minor variations to accommodate the plot. I think part of what made the first Joker so interesting is that the character was different than the usual comic characters and rather than a story that plods along the usual tried and true beats of a superhero movie, it went in a different direction. Authentic and interesting characters, unique stories, and better dialogue I think would help a great deal. I think it would also help a great deal if the heroes of movies and their close associates didn’t have such strong plot armor. They just don’t feel like there are real stakes for a lot of reasons. Nobody gets hurt in a serious way that lasts. The characters aren’t personally invested in the outcome. It’s just watching CGI heroes do CGI stunts and I’m often left wondering why I care.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think the rise of streaming certainly hurt movies, but I submit that it’s the poor quality of the films themselves that are killing the industry off completely. The writing is often boring and predictable, and the plots of most movies can be easily discernible by watching the trailers. The superhero movie is boring, nothing interesting happens in them, and so nobody gets excited to go see New Marvel or New DC because everyone knows the Brand and they know what the experience will be like long before they buy their (relatively expensive) tickets, popcorn and soda. The same can be true of other genres there’s just nothing interesting going on as movies converge on the same Save the Cat beat sheet with the same progressive philosophy and the same Joss Weaten “take nothing seriously” sensibility.
This comes about because of the insular nature of Hollywood. You want in, you have to attend film schools in one of maybe a dozen Big Name schools. You need a patron. You need to go to Hollywood where you get invited to the right parties. The expense and time sink necessary to make it pretty much precludes anyone who doesn’t come from money, and the constant need to network often accidentally on purpose weeds out anyone who isn’t on the liberal side of Woke Progressive. But since everyone involved comes from the same background with the same or similar life experiences, they cannot be creative. There’s nothing new brought in. You won’t ever hear the viewpoint of a mere middle class man, let alone a poor one. You won’t hear anything authentic to a religious person. These writers have likely never had a ten minute conversation with someone like that.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I’ll also point out that there aren’t a lot of alternatives right now with the reach and scale of Hollywood and as such it’s a lot like pro sports. Yes there are minor leagues, or maybe college sports but most often people only choose them when they don’t have easy access to the big leagues and almost no one would deliberately choose the small leagues when given the option to see major league teams.
In movies, a lot of this is based around intellectual property— there are very few space stories that you can do without tripping over something owned by a big studio somewhere. Most superhero types have something like them in either the Marvel or DC catalog. And on it goes. So you either go with small movie houses — either indies or Christian, or possibly foreign, made by people who didn’t quite make it, or you go see a blockbuster made by the usual suspects who will own all the rights to those kinds of films and shows until the end of time. If this iteration of Joker fails, who cares, we own the rights and in five or ten years we make a different Joker movie. Not like anyone else owns the right to make movies about evil clowns like this.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
No, seriously. I think you mis-read what was claimed, and projected previous / other experiences onto it. The hypothesis is not that 'the coverage is the result of Russian trolls.' The hypothesis is 'no matter what happens, there will be Russian trolls trying to make it worse.' Whether the Russian trolls succeed in significantly shaping the conversation, or originated the talking points, or are fallaciously conflated with legitimate grievance is irrelevant to a characterization of their (a) existence and (b) attempts.
Except that every time I’ve seen the claim made, it’s not really backed up by any evidence of trolling. It’s just a go-to excuse for the reports in question and circulated on social media. This isn’t remotely a good faith attempt at explaining what’s going on, but an easy off the cuff statement of “yeah don’t pay attention to this.” And I think at this point, the propaganda claims that Russia is causing or amplifying these stories by far outstrips what Russia itself is actually doing.
If you want to dismiss that, sure, but you haven't actually provided a grounds of disputing either supporting point. Which do you find non-sensible- that Russian troll farms like the Internet Research Agency exist?
Yes, troll farms exist, I’m not disputing that Russia, China, and pretty much every other country with internet access has some sort of troll farm. But if they aren’t capable of getting results and getting good results, then it kinda doesn’t matter. And given that it’s possible for us to track them, we know where the trolling is coming from, stuff like this is probably fairly trivial to block.
And to be clear my grounds for dismissal are pretty simple. First, this is the go-to story every single time a social media story contradicts or embarrasses the cathedral. It never happens that Russian Trolls are pushing the narrative of Project 2025, or calling Trump a danger to democracy, or calling Republicans fascists. That is never considered trolling. But when the story is something embarrassing to the establishment, that’s the trolls. Kinda interesting how one set of stories is always pushed by, started by, faked by, or amplified by Russia, and the other side absolutely never is.
Secondly, we never seem to find out which Russian troll account starts or amplifies these stories. Can you name any troll accounts outed by the regime? Have they given any evidence beyond “trust us bro” for any such claims that a story has been deliberately seeded or amplified by a known Russian troll account? And this seems fairly telling. There’s almost never evidence presented to show these trolls did all the things they’re accused of. They are invisible and leave no evidence behind every time.
Very directly- what do you think the Russians use the Internet Research Agency for? Not how influential it is, not whether it's fair to tar Americans with guilt by association. What do you think the Russian IRA does, and why?
The Russian IRA does cyberwarfare, that much is obvious. To the degree it exists, it’s there to do various forms of cyber warfare in support of Russian military operations. And it’s not like I don’t think they’re occasionally effective. Honestly they might be as good as the ones in the CIA group we have. But again, if you’re going to issue a blanket statement that every anti-cathedral story on social media is based on something Russians are pushing, it’s simply not credible unless and until it’s shown to actually have been done by Russia.
To blame Russian trolls for every negative viral story is a conspiracy theory.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think a big part of it is that the BLM and related leftward groups tend to have people on their side skilled at lawfare and so if a protester gets arrested, they can post bail, and any good lawyer can go into court and paint the guy as a saint. Plus if the guy arrested gets so much as a bruise the same attorney can get their clients lots of money for “police brutality”. Ordinary non-protesters don’t often have that kind of attorney on retainer and therefore the police are much less likely to be sued for stopping them.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
The government or at least substantial parts of it wanted the BLM protests. They aren’t going to call it trolling.
But again, very little of the stuff named Russian Trolls can actually be traced to Russia in any way whatsoever. They can’t find Russians behind the Laptop, election fraud, UAPs, or Q. They can’t because it’s not Russia.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Now adays, any time there is a disaster in the United States, you should assume that there is a Russian social media effort to try and inflame and twist it. Sometimes a disaster doesn't even have to actually occur, and they'll just fake-news one. This is just one of the things they do, independent of any truth to any criticsm.
On the other hand, it’s a very very useful tool to hide incompetence and grift. Everything the government doesn’t want people talking about seems to be “Russian Trolls” and it’s become a sort of go to excuse for why people are saying things the government doesn’t want to hear on social media. Sure, sometimes it’s trolls, but by this point, enough ultimately true stories were officially dismissed as misinformation until they were shown to actually have happened that I no longer find the “Russian Trolls” story to be a sensible hypothesis. In fact, I’m trying to think of a story told in the past 2-3 years where it’s actually traced back to a real Russian whether working for the government or not.
I’m mostly with the steelman here. People who don’t know what they’re doing wandering about a disaster area are more likely to create situations where they need rescue than to do substantial good — unless they have enough knowledge to know what they’re doing. A bunch of rednecks coming in and sawing through things or chopping down trees or whatever might well injure people or need rescue themselves. Disaster areas tend to be dangerous and the dangers aren’t always obvious. Taking your John boat over downed power lines is pretty dangerous. So the government probably is turning people away because they don’t want to rescue the redneck brigades who have no experience rescuing people.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
You’d also have to compare it to the good available in allowing these things. Reduced speed increases the cost of business and increases the commute time for workers. Outlawing bookshelves above a certain size limits books.
Hard drugs provide no real value, and huge downsides. Alcohol has benefits is promoting socialization, but has drawbacks in drunk driving injuries, bad decisions, etc. fireplaces and candles provide backup heat and light when electric power isn’t available.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think all of it is good. In elite circles the ability to curate an image of yourself is a critical skill to have.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think I’m largely going in the same direction. Though I think part of the rot comes from the idealized democratic values being promoted and thus ideas like expertise, merit, and self-sacrifice are being lost as people choose to live out the ID experience because that’s certainly easier to do than work hard and achieve things.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I could make a case for the law not being a respecter of who stands before them. A person should not be seen as different before the laws because they’re really good at something. I wouldn’t want a person to get away with murder because he’s better at some skill than I am.
But I think somehow the idea came to mean that no one is objectively better than anyone else, and therefore nothing that those people choose to do is better or worse than anyone else. So you doing drugs all the time, not holding a job, and stealing is exactly equal in worth to my studying medicine, curing a disease, and giving thousands to humanitarian causes. I view self esteem as an outgrowth of that idea. If everyone is equally good, and all modes of behavior are okay, I can feel good about myself even though I’m doing bad things. Even criticism of other cultures as to whether those cultures promote good behaviors that will let people thrive is seen as evil.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I’m rather sympathetic to the idea. There’s just something that happened around the end of the First World War that just sort of shattered the self confidence of Western society. Where before we had no qualms about striding across the world stage and doing so in our own interest, of saying that our own values and ideas are of course true and right and that we could and would build a bright future for all humankind. I think the experience of war coupled with the technology disasters of the era (Hindenburg and Titanic especially) shattered our self confidence. Except that rather than simply learning from the mistakes we ended up deciding that we couldn’t be a force for good.
Looking at East Asia, I kind of see how we could have been. China has no qualms whatsoever in trying to promote Chinese interests. They absolutely promote the idea that they are good people and that their ideas are good and right and should be supported and respected. China isn’t self flagellating. And for that matter neither are the Japanese or Koreans. They are allowed to be the good people. And the thing is I think they’re much more healthy as a culture than we are.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Most of academia works this way outside of the sciences. I suspect a couple of things lead to this.
First, most of these topics are literally useless outside of the academic world. Nobody who isn’t majoring in a particular branch of the humanities gives any thought to the subject. And to an extent, they’ve always more or less been something like what they are now — useless subjects studied by essentially nerds who are just really into the subject. And much like there’s no need for serious rigor when a bunch of Star Trek nerds discuss the Trek canon, there’s no real rigor in discussions about English literature. (This is somewhat better in a history class which still requires that a description match up with primary sources) if Shakespeare has a queer reading, it can be anything you need it to be. Nobody outside the subject is going to interrupt because seriously, who else is reading these papers?
The second is that because these subjects are useless and worthless, nobody who is smart really chooses to do them. If you’re a smart individual looking to study something, you’d go toward things that actually matter. Studying physics can unlock the secrets of the universe. Chemistry can let you invent some new materials to solve real life problems. Accounting can be used in business. So immediately you have a problem because the people doing the work are people who don’t really have the intelligence to recognize bullshit. In fact, they’re constantly making their works difficult to understand with absurdly complex vocabulary to hide that they’ve said nothing interesting. Philosophy especially seems to be really bad about spending hours debating the meaning of every word used that it obscures the fact that the papers rarely make any sort of claim with implications outside of academia. In other subjects, jargon is used to describe things happening in the field and to make it clear what my results actually mean. When I redefine common English words in philosophy, the point is quite often to make a simple argument sound profound.
And as a final point. Because of the first two problems, it tends to create bubbles. The people in these subjects are not moonlighting in attending physics symposiums on quantum mechanics, or reading books outside of the field. They’re in one world, and thus to them, these silly papers about nothing sound intelligent to them.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I’m firmly of the persuasion that in all honesty you absolutely shouldn’t move with a person that you’re not full on engaged to. And personally I think you make a clean break of it as quite often LDRs are more theoretical than real without a very strong and exclusive relationship (AKA actually engaged with ring and date).
I think the legitimacy of elections is probably one of the most important things to protect in a democratic society. If people don’t believe the election is fair, eventually it’s going to go much farther than it did in 2021. Voting is the alternative to warfare and revolution. And if people don’t trust the election, they won’t accept the results. The best remedy is to take the accusations extremely seriously and do a thorough investigation, and if nothing is found, fine. But the tactic used in 2020 of blanket dismissal, condescending comments about disinformation, and generally mocking the very idea not only didn’t reassure the public that the government was committed to fair, open, and honest elections, but often pushed people the other way. The perception was “the government isn’t going to look at the evidence, and is going to simply label all of this as disinformation and call anyone who dares to question it a conspiracy theorist, so why should I believe it?”
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