MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
22m ago
I don’t like either one. If we’re to have an open and honest conversation on any political topic, basic facts are key to the discussion. Knowing where Ukraine is, why it matters, its key economic outputs, population, etc matters. For that matter knowing what Russia wants Ukraine for and why Crimea is so important to it’s perceived national security interests, or why having Ukraine potentially join EU and NATO is such a risk is vitally important here. But if you have no idea where Ukraine is, or the history of Russia being invaded because it has no natural features on its borders, or that Crimea was one of the Soviet Union’s main warm water ports to Europe, it’s hard to make sense out of the issue.
Likewise on anything science. If you don’t understand the basics of how the science in question works, or if it’s a legal question, what the law in question actually says, there’s no real point. It’s just vibes based conversation. I lean left you lean right, whatever.
My main beef with modern university education (outside of some job-skills based training) is that it’s not creating people capable of learning and understanding for themselves so much as people who simply believe the consensus views and have large doses of credential-based smugness. They don’t bother to look up the facts before deciding that their side is right. They don’t read books, or bother to find out what the other side of the issue actually thinks. We spend more time and energy on critical thinking and higher education than any generation in human history only to produce a society of people who are the least curious about the world, least interested in finding out the facts before making a decision, least able or willing to think logically than previous generations who had less schooling. My grandfather who didn’t even graduate from college was pretty well educated because he was constantly reading nonfiction books about whatever topics interested him. He was a pretty careful and logical thinker as well and able to make good decisions in business because of that.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4hr ago
Nobody is saying it’s easy, but Trump leaning people do exactly that. Trump’s base has absolutely no problem going onto any platform available to them. They have no problem putting up signs — even in hostile places — or wearing Trump gear, or posting pro-Trump messages on social media. Trumpers are like CrossFit fans, you don’t have to ask, because they will absolutely tell you.
I think it’s a belief problem. Liberals don’t seem to actually believe in the message. They don’t advertise in hostile environments, they don’t put out signs or wear gear, they don’t talk about it with friends and family. They mostly flee.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6hr ago
Exactly. What’s weird about democrats is that they spend so much time and energy to reach out to people who already agree with them and are already going to “vote blue no matter who”. It’s just a stupid idea. Even if you win, you’re winning the converted. If you wanted to astroturf, going for a neutral to semi hostile media network might convince a Trump voter or two.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6hr ago
Honestly I don’t think this is just the foreign affairs people, it’s becoming endemic to most PMCs through the creeping credentialism promoted by university. There’s a large and growing population of people— most of them college graduates— who think that unless you have studied a topic in a college classroom, you cannot have possibly learned it. No, you cannot just read the Western canon and understand it. No, you cannot possibly learn philosophy without a lecture hall. No, you don’t understand math or statistics until you have gotten college credits.
I find the whole notion doubly ridiculous. First because people have self educated for hundreds of years, and it used to be the standard. Abraham Linchpin taught himself law by reading law books. Most of his peers did the same thing. And it wasn’t just law. If you wanted to run a business, you taught yourself accounting, and so on. Books, video, internet and other sources are much more available now than ever before, and any determined person can teach themselves just about anything they want to. They might have to work a bit harder than their peers who get spoon fed readings and practice sets, but in return, they will absolutely know their stuff as they aren’t studying for a test (and going to forget it afterwards) but trying to learn and understand it.
But much more importantly, I see a lot of ignorance in college grads that make me doubt the process does anything more than what they did in high school on most topics. They don’t actually understand the outside world. They don’t understand that electric cars are plugged into the electrical grid and thus would cause whatever types of pollution that our current electric grid causes. They don’t know anything concrete about other countries. Gays for Palestine is a joke that’s been told a million times, but it’s true, they don’t know what Islam has to say about LGBT rights. They don’t know the whole history of the conflict or why Jews went to Palestine in the first place. They cannot find Ukraine on an unlabeled map, nor do they know anything about its population, industry, minerals, or strategic importance. They have no idea why Russia wants it, nor the history of the region. Go down the list and it’s just amazing how the education that’s supposed to make you a better citizen of the country and the world produces a population with strong opinions but no knowledge.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14hr ago
Machiavellian. There’s already a name for it. And to be fair, what they’re describing is exactly how politics actually works in a democratic system. The name of the game is to get people to vote for you and you do that by convincing people to want to vote for you. Propaganda is constant in our system driven into every media and cultural outlet it can be. You’ve been taught to want certain things, to believe certain policies will give you a better life. That’s manipulation, and quite often lying to people, and almost certainly “hiding poison pills under the carpet”.
The truism of politics, no matter what the system actually looks like is pretty simple. If you get power, you get to rule, if you don’t, you watch other people rule. There’s nothing unusual about the concept. In autocratic systems, you have to overthrow the current government, in democratic ones, you have to get voted in. Either way, you have to get access to the levers of power before the policies you have in mind actually count for anything.
And treating peasants like peasants is fairly common. It would be the same in any type of system with any party or faction you care to name. Most people in a nation are peasants or even serfs with little to no political control over anything. The sneering condescension is simply reality — despite what both parties tell the voters every couple of years, you actually don’t matter to them, and they actually do hold you to be beneath them.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
Well, the more friction you can place between you and your addiction the better. Yes, people can and do blow their life savings at casinos. But that’s worlds harder than blowing through your savings when the casino is on an always online phone you carry in your pocket. When you have to go to a casino to gamble, you need to get dressed, get your wallet, drive for 10-15 minutes to the casino, walk across the parking lot, into the casino, find a machine and put in the credit card. Those actions probably mean about 20-30 minutes of being able to talk yourself out of it.
This kind of thing in reverse is true of exercising. The more friction between you and exercise, the less likely you are to actually do it. So they advise keeping your gym clothes and shoes on your dresser, having any needed equipment at home, etc. because at every step you can talk yourself out of it. Do I really feel like fighting traffic to get to the gym? And if the answer is anything other than a very firm yes, chances are you’ll be on the couch Motte-posting instead of exercising. Or maybe you want to eat healthier. The standard advice is stop buying junk food and instead buy the healthy stuff. The reason is that inertia will work in your favor here. You’ll be hungry and all the food in your home is healthy, you don’t necessarily want carrot sticks, but getting potato chips means getting in the car, driving in traffic to the store, walking to the chip aisle, buying the chips, paying, driving through traffic back home before you can finally eat them. The extra effort isn’t worth it most of the time, so carrot sticks it is.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I think this is a textbook case of the wisdom of keeping things that will be addictive as hard to ge5 as possible. Sports gambling in a casino might not be so terrible. The steps necessary to get to a casino for any sort of gambling serve as an important brake on the behavior. The fact that such gambling can now but done using stored credit card information on a device that is carried in the pocket makes it almost impossible for anyone with the proclivity to addiction to ever have control. And this is true of other potentially addictive behaviors— if you have your addiction always available, you can’t easily say no to it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I’m not sure it’s naughty thoughts so much as a deep need for a cause to fight for. For most people the dominant issue is boredom in some sense. There’s no greater thing in most people’s lives than going to work and coming home. It’s a bit empty and quite boring. At the same time our culture has been heavily promoting the idea of heroes saving the world. We’re part of the culture of the spectacle and our dominant way of interacting with the outside world is screens. We’re seeing a movie and want to be the heroes of the movie.
I think there is a rather large dose of narcissism involved here. They’re hoping for disaster so they can be a hero or heroine. I just don’t under the need to put yourself in the center of historic events. I’m hoping for a nice quiet, boring life. I can’t imagine that it’s going to even be helpful to anyone caught in the crosshairs to have the fight taken up by people doing it out of boredom.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
I mean it’s not for everyone because it requires major lifestyle changes. But for the right set of individuals, major lifestyle changes are possible. People do it all the time. Immigrants leave their homes and businesses and families behind and move to places with alien cultures. People join the military which is a huge change from civilian life. Such major changes aren’t for everyone, but even modest changes can be accessible to most people. It’s harder than most people think, but it’s perfectly doable.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
Trans people I’d kinda get, there’s a plausible explanation n the fact that the far right wants to delay transition until adulthood, as well as remove trans people from opposite sex changing areas, restrooms and women’s sports. That’s at least a cause. The women crying in their cars are none of that. Even if abortion were illegal, most women making cry TikTok’s could afford to fly to Toronto to get an abortion as needed.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
I think that’s a bit obtuse. While you can’t go join the Amish church, you can in fact quite easily band together with likeminded people and build a homestead in some rural area.
To me I think a lot of what’s missing is the community. Being poor in the modern world to me sucks a bit more because you’re an atomized individual with much less support in a world that rubs the lifestyle of your betters in your face through the media.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
I think there’s some subset of people who at least unconsciously want these bizarre nightmare 1984 and literally Hitler and handmaid fantasies to be real. I say that because most of the people doing this seem to have similar profiles: almost invariably white, upper middle class, professional, college educated, and highly likely to be female as well. Which if you’re keeping track, is the one demographic, that even if the absolute worst nightmare scenario happens is going to be affected the least. It just doesn’t make sense that the people worried about an illegals roundup are the richest, whitest, best educated people in the country and who live in a bright blue state to boot.
Further, the “resistance” thus far, is the opposite of serious. The protesters in Hong Kong were seriously trying to protest the Chinese government crackdown. They weren’t doing things to make themselves easily identifiable, they weren’t posting about it on social media, they weren’t making videos of themselves #protesting. They did things like wear masks, carry cash and leave phones at home so as not to be tracked. They did things like black bloc does. Our #resistance is doing things like shaving their heads and wearing cute little blue bracelets they bought for $25 on Etsy. These actions as well as the constant posts, videos, selfies, etc., are absolutely not the actions of a people actually afraid that the government is going to go after them. I say that because if you’re afraid of being singled out, you’re probably going to try to blend in, and while they might protest, they’re not going to do so in ways they know can identify them.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
Except that you have the same issue that makes adding more lanes a bad idea. Which is that people who ordinarily would not be looking to Eugene OR as a potential place to live suddenly do because housing is more available there. If there are 50 apartments and you’re looking between several areas, you might pick Eugene, even if without the extra housing you’d probably say F it and move to some nearby town or suburb or exurb instead.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
Hype can certainly help. Without some positive attention even the best product will sit on the shelf. On the other hand most people will be smart enough to notice when the sales pitch is overselling the actual product.
Kamala had a lot of negatives that were pretty obvious. She’s annoying and has a nervous laugh that’s obnoxious. She can’t give interviews, and when she does, her obvious non-answers are barely comprehensible. She cannot generate enthusiasm for her own ideas. Her rallies needed concerts just to get people to show up. At the end of the day, all the marketing in the world can’t make New Coke taste good.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
I think pure data is a directionally useful way of looking at the world, and useful for most problem-solving purposes. I am a theist so I think there’s more beyond just physical reality, but whether or not it’s true, I think that for most projects, reducing the universe to data is going to work just fine. Consciousness is produced in the brain, and definitely experienced there, so I think you can get something like a conscious AI simply by recreating a brain. Might be easier to start with a dog or something like that, but I think even though there’s a metaphysical aspect to consciousness, that doesn’t mean that there’s no point to studying it in brains.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
The alternative would be to not hold funds hostage. You want bike lanes, pass a law making bike lanes and fund them. As a completely separate thing. What happens often is that the money for I.e highways is contingent on X miles of bike lanes. Or school funding rests on the enactment of policies like trans rights and trans students in women’s restrooms.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I think the difference in requirements for agreement are due to the position of each group in the American dominance hierarchy. Democrats are still pretty dominant in most spheres, and therefore they don’t need to tolerate a situation in which they are hearing wrong-think. They don’t need Allies who are imperfect because they control most of the consensus building organs completely. Republicans and conservatives need those imperfect allies because they’re on the bottom of that hierarchy. They don’t wholesale own social media, in fact there’s only one social media platform out of 3-4 big ones where they aren’t actively suppressing conservatives. The6 therefore cannot simply move on if they hear something they don’t like. They’d have to cede the entire thing.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I mean sure, it’s plausible that in some odd universe that it’s possible that someone might pull a gun on a FEMA agent. But again, even with millions of Trump supporters there’s no incident like this. There’s perhaps a need for caution, but there’s a difference between “there have been threats made, so be careful and buddy up” and “avoid houses with [out group] signage because those guys are more likely to be the shooters.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I think just as a matter of principle, we need to prevent commerce clause abuse and the abuse of federal funding which both end up being used as a back door way to force states to do whatever the federal government wants them to. As it stands the government can dictate through federal funding that roads be marked for bike lanes, that schools must teach LGBTQ narratives, that the state can regulate environmental protections on products that have never and will never leave their state of origin. It’s ridiculous.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
Except that there were no such shootings. It literally never happened, and to my knowledge no one actually pointed a gun at anyone working for FEMA. The idea that they were worried about getting shot is a just-so story.
Second, it is part of the job. The job of a FEMA agent is to get people aid, and “I’m scared” is no more valid for FEMA than it is for the local cops. You don’t get to join a first responders agency and then be too scared to respond. Especially if you’re doing checks on the safety of Americans in a hurricane situation.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
Logistics would be a nightmare as you’d need cops on every corner to prevent defiance. Even at that, I’m not sure if it’s possible. There are enough hotheads with guns in America that if Americans decided to actually resist an order, you’d have to either back down or bomb cities like Gaza to do it. I’m not sure if even with the police and NG you’d have enough people to pacify 300 million Americans who want nothing to do with a lockdown. At the very least, it would take a lot of effort.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
Even at an unknown, the known negatives of lockdown are known — and the end dates given by the authorities are known to be suspect. If some government officials told you to lockdown for “two weeks” given what happened in 2020, very few people are going to believe that the lockdown is actually going to end within 6 months. They also know that they won’t get much in the way of support when the lockdown forces people into unemployment and to close businesses, or schools or forbidding social gatherings. And given that, and given the knock on effects of inflation and shortages, it’s going to be very very difficult to convince people to go along. Covid wasn’t exactly a nothing burger but it also wasn’t something that justified the extreme measures taken to slow the spread.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6d ago
He’s head of a movement though. And the movement is not a bunch of limp wristed hand wringing party loyalists. They support Trump as the guy who’s there to basically clean house of the establishment and in their view restore the republic to its glory days. They aren’t going to sit home and do nothing if that establishment doesn’t allow the changes to happen. They’re at minimum going to attempt (probably successfully) to primary any republicans who don’t give them what they want. And that’s if they’re nice. We also have a fairly good sized militia contingent who might not be so nice about it.
Trump is perhaps irrelevant except as figurehead. JD Vance is probably more aligned with the movement as I see it, and he’s definitely going to work to implement MAGA and Project 2025
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6d ago
I would generally put anything law enforcement on a national level into Coast Guard (maybe rename it to state security or something) just for the ability to unify such things under a single legible chain of command. As it sits, CIS, CBP, CG, ICE, TSA, and CG are all doing similar things and even at times crossing purposes without any cross communication possible. A bunch of Migrants picked up by the CG would be handed over to BP or ICE, but why? What’s the purpose of doing so when you can simply dump them off at a port in Mexico and shorten the process by days or weeks?
I’m honestly not surprised other than that it’s taken this long for schools to make it official that only right-thinking people will be granted access to the prestige of high end universities. I suspect it’s been there informally for a while and gleaned from student essays (don’t talk too much about traditional Christianity, and certainly don’t ever mention working for a GOP campaign). It’s just too easy for schools to use that influence culture and to weaken their enemies by making support for them a career limiting choice. I’m not even sure it’s safe to be openly GOP in “polite” PMC type jobs.
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