TheFooder
8d ago
My problem with it is they never once question the mission. They believe deeply in it and they are (were) efficient at it and scientifically minded (my sister is one of the hated PhDs that was just fired, FWIW), but they simply never question the deeply held belief that every child must be educated and every person should go to college. And these two big beliefs are stressing the hell out of schools and individuals respectively. Schools are bogged down in lawsuits and budget constraints while they try to make sure even the most disabled people get a HS diploma and we have a saturated market for grads and post-grads who are simply not realizing the financial 'promise' of their degrees. I read that post and thought...so what? It changes nothing.
TheFooder
8d ago
You probably need to start off with a secret or higher security clearance.
TheFooder
10d ago
I was absolutely sincere, very confused why you thought it was threat. I think Doxxing is about the most evil and dishonorable thing you can do with the Internet. I consider Swatting a form of doxxing.
What other argument--aside from "moral high ground" is there to not dox people?
TheFooder
12d ago
It turns out the moral high ground is not useful.
I, as a person who hates and argues against the act of doxxing--regardless of who is involved, have just met an argument I can't defeat.
"Moral High Ground?" Fuggedabout it.
TheFooder
14d ago
I just re-opened my Everquest2 account. So...yes?
I don't play many modern video games anymore, probably for all the reasons. I thought Diablo 4 was absolute dog shit, No Man's Sky was boring, Gloomhaven was fun but ridiculously time consuming and pretty much every other game I turn on turns me off in the first 5 minutes. I just figure I'm getting too old for this stuff and now I just want to piddle around for an hour or two harvesting resources and grinding stupid, pointless quests for crap gear.
I think the single thing I hate most about all games in the past 10 years is the pathological need to turn everything into a story. I don't care about the plot, I don't care about the NPCs, I don't care about voice actors or dialog or the poetry of the stars. I want decent mechanics and an interesting gameplay, maybe hidden stuff or puzzles. I think the last game I really liked was Fez, though I played the Conan MMO for untold hours. I was playing Hogwarts Legacy with my kid, which isn't bad, but even that can't seem to hold our attention. All she wants to dink-donk around in Roblox and build little towns in Minecraft.
TheFooder
15d ago
If you deport someone they're off the books. If you Gtimo someone you have to pay for feeding tubes for life.
TheFooder
17d ago
It seems to me that Musk might be one of the only people with a positive vision of the future, even if one finds it totally ludicrous. Everything else is rear-guard action and accomplishes very little.
TheFooder
21d ago
Arent there active campaigns coming up in the next few months? Like to replace congress people and governors? I'd presume they want cash for that stuff.
TheFooder
28d ago
Wholeheartedly agree. I don't know what happened but I can barely even finish an article these days and I stopped paying him after the first year was up. It seems like there's a lot of "own-side" bias creeping in but also just some amount of laziness. Your point about straw-men hits, that's something I see a lot of lately. Maybe it's bad incentives? A different type of audience and audience capture? I'm really at a loss, but I've definitely lost a lot of interest in what Scott has to say these past few years.
TheFooder
1mo ago
I would have to imagine if they can apy 5 million dollars they will be relatively high quality.
That's funny because I would presume they're drug kingpins, grifters and mafiosos.
TheFooder
1mo ago
I feel like that would fit my theor that the Dems have been hoisting flags and wearing belief that force them into ever smaller corners. They can't act because they, through their own speech, have outlawed the beliefs needed to act.
TheFooder
1mo ago
I have a feeling this calculus is understood by the Trump team and is the fulcrum of their attack: ain't nobody gonna do nothin about it!
fundamentally, congress is just 435 dudes.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/congress-needs-be-way-way-bigger/611068/
EDIT: sorry. I posted this because I thought it was a pretty good article about why congress is too small and how we might imagine a much, much larger congress. Every time I see "435" now I snort in derision. The number is too low to be representative and too high to be functional. Representatives should be regular shlubs from around the block not life-time politicians. It should move fast--voting with a phone app or something--none of this mugging for the camera and grandstanding. Anyway, thought you might enjoy the read. didn't mean to drive-by post.
TheFooder
1mo ago
Cults of personality seem to swing both ways don't they. I am also radically apathetic.
TheFooder
1mo ago
Wouldn't conservatives get want what they want just by driving out anyone? The "replacement" part seems like a superflous second order effect when the goal is "shrink the gov't"
TheFooder
1mo ago
Funding kids shows in Iraq is a loss because Middle East TV simply pushes Islamic fundamentalism and jihad.
I've seen television in the middle east...hours of it. You know who the big star was? Oprah Winfrey. After that there were tons of music video stations for each of the different leading countries. Sexy lebanese videos, super sappy Saudi Orchestras with lame poets, Emirate gun twirling and cane dancing...and Iraq? It was all blue jeans in night club dancing shows, like a very tame American Bandstand. I would not be surprised at all if Iraqi Sesame Street was popular. that's one of the USAID expenditures I find least offensive--even admitting that modern Sesame Street is peak Wokoso.
Anyway, it's not all fundamentalism. That's what's on the radio...
TheFooder
1mo ago
Opening the Overton window doesn't mean implementing every idea that flies in, it means we have a breadth of ideas that weren't previously accessible to us. That is precisely what has been killing us--an unassailable belief that nothing could be changed or fixed.
Anyway...
I do not want the US to be the only global power. I don't even necessarily want it to increase in size. I'm merely saying that the course we've been on since 2001 has been one of mass global suicide, partly because the heat death of the United States, post 9-11, guarantees chaos and war everywhere else on the planet. Until this month I was certain it was unavoidable. Now that very weird and unexpected things are being said, in public, by the president, I actually have a hope that we might change course.
For instance, try with all of your might to imagine a State of the Union address that doesn't begin with, "The state of the Union is strong!!!" and every dumbass congressperson rising to a standing ovation. It's performative disinformation top-to-bottom. What we have happening right now is another crack in the facade--one that was failing to hide our rotten core. Prior to Trump (and it should be said I never voted for him and am not a fan) our political class had no way to stop pretending. No way to be normal, rational or real. There is a game called "American politics" it consists of lying, laundering, lamenting and lambasting. The only time the public gets meaningful truth is by accident. The 2016 Republican primary debates laid this at our feet and the Biden/Trump debate burned it into our foreheads.
Gaza is another perfect case. The truth of the Palestinian plight is they lost all claim to their lands in 1948 by dint of being conquered militarily. Someone decided that instead of resettling them there'd be some kind of humanitarian compromise...or something. Well, the outcome of that "civilized" reaction is 80 years of misery and an increasingly intractable problem. Our modern Gordian knot. The only solution is to cut the knot. Curtis Yarvin Donald Trump is the first one to publicly acknowledge it. His prescription is probably wrong and his political capital such that he is unlikely to make it happen, but he's saying out loud what has been apparent for ages to anyone with a brain. Gaza as a paradise that might actually benefit Palestinians (as shareholders--not citizens) is now on the table.
This is consistent in regards to Panama, Greenland, Canada, Mexico--all places with decades long intractable economic and political problems that hinge almost entirely on the inability of politicians to deal with anything directly.
Here's another one that's coming: defaulting on our debt. Assume this will happen because the only thing that would prevent it from happening is actually Making America Great Again, i.e. rebuilding and re-centering our economy, taking the huge --and increasing-- financial hit that's waiting for us and ensuring we have a political class that serves the polity. If we default, we tank the global economy. Defaulting on our debt would be infinitely worse for Canada, Mexico, Europe, Saudi Arabia, Japan and even China than threatening them with tariffs. If it takes some economic saber rattling to wake people up so be it. We can't afford to be weak and we can't afford weak allies.
Anyway, I find all of this craziness refreshing and long needed. I've also been on this tip for 20 years; heterodox and contrarian to the max. Feel free to dump my opinions straight into the garbage, but I do reasonably well on Metaculus, so I can't be completely insane (that's my hope anyway). The levee was always going to break and frankly this is far more controlled and moderate than I imagined it would have been. The churning Earth--the tumult of the political class is like nothing I've seen in my life nor in my limited study of history since, maybe, FDR. People are bitching about how years are happening in weeks, but that's what it looks like when reality deferred asserts itself. I'm here for it.
Well, I used to live in Illinois. I'm not sure they could figure out how to bake an ice cream sandwich.
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