WhiningCoil
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User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
11d ago
I think the Maxwell connection makes Israeli Intelligence unavoidable. The only open question is whether it was a collaboration among several agencies, or they kept him all to himself. Wouldn't be unprecedented. I recall a cyber attack (Stuxnet?) on Iran's nuclear weapons program that had the fingerprints of US, Israeli and German intelligence agencies.
WhiningCoil
11d ago
Yeah this is plausible I suppose... but dude if the intelligence agencies are covering up for huge pedophilia rings like... what the hell?!
I keep meaning to read Chaos about how the CIA "created" the Manson Cult. Supposedly it's very well researched, and if it's somehow all smoke and no fire, I'd be amazed.
WhiningCoil
14d ago
It's a funny theory, but I see memes where apparently every liberal politician's wife (except Hillary Clinton) is a tranny. Macron, Obama, Chuck Schumer (who's wife is very unfortunate looking), other random liberals I've never heard of. I even saw one random "uno reverse" meme trying to say Melania Trump was transgender.
Frankly the plurality of these memes kind of disproves all of them. One high profile liberal married to a transgender woman I could believe. Virtually all of them? Are there even that many middle aged transwomen that would have transitioned 20-30 years ago?
WhiningCoil
14d ago
I'm pretty sure he's a post turn of the millennium kid, so to an extent, when he talks about "90s" games, he's being exposed to cherry picked games from that era. Namely the absolute classics, the ones that stood the test of time, and thus were what were recommended to him when he was older.
Honestly I don't buy this. I think some genres have, by all objective measures, gotten increasingly worse with time.
Take 4X for example. Once upon a time, you bought a 4X game for retail price, and that was that. You got a complete game. Now the average 4X game has dozens of expansions where they piecemeal out mechanics or factions that would have been included in the base game. Sometimes we even know this for a fact because the previous iteration of the game did in fact have those exact mechanics or those factions in the base game!
I forget the exact comparison, but some meme went around with Avowed getting compared with Oblivion or Morrowind and not looking the better for it. Some 10+ year old game had more interactivity that some cutting edge AAA game that aspired to it's style of play. There are good odds Avowed could be the highest profile RPG released this year. Top 5 at least. And by most of the talk I've heard, it significantly misses the mark made by games that are old enough to drive.
I think possibly the only genre of game which might be "better" is the highly competitive sweaty kind of game. If your jam is the sort of global competitive network where you can definitively prove you are the top 1% or even 0.1% of players, we had nothing like it in the 90's or 00's. Factorio style games too. There were some economic games, but nothing like the sort of logistics/programming involved in Factorio.
I have mixed feelings about Boomer Shooters. I haven't exhaustively played a ton of them. Dabbled here and there. I think a lot make noble efforts, but many are still afflicted by the desire to include some sort of meta progression systems trying to hook into the compulsive part of your brain, because that's just how you get people "engaged" with your game. Lets call this one a draw.
WhiningCoil
14d ago
Yes, games were better back then. Post mobile game design is all based on farming engagement. There is zero reason Doom Eternal needs weekly quests, or a bajillion cosmetic unlockables, or a weird meta progression mechanics. It's just more shit trying to hijack the compulsive part of your brain. Because game devs now are either evil, or stupid. They know the difference between compulsive and fun, and try to get you addicted out of selfish desire, or they don't and they just follow along because it's what is done.
Also, games were more responsive back then. On a console hooked up to a CRT TV, or a computer with interrupt based input (PS/2) and a CRT monitor, input to action was virtually instantaneous in a properly programmed game. These days there is a distinct fuzziness to game input, and many games actually allow you to input commands late and have them still count to compensate for this. I recall watching a video about some rogue like that let you jump a few frames after you had already walked off a ledge because of input lag.
WhiningCoil
15d ago
Never successfully. But they were invited into the Empire with the full expectation they would be Romanized like the Gauls, Hispanics, North African peoples, Celts, etc. The Emperor would declare them friends of Rome, and expect them to cultivate the lands and pay the taxes, often of areas thoroughly depopulated by civil wars, disease and famine. They expected to be able to levy troops from these peoples. This was largely a fiction since the Empire lacked the manpower or resolve to really keep them out, so they would just decree that these tribes were being made Roman subjects. Some, like the Goths, took this pledge maybe halfway seriously?
It's just that by that point, either the Goths, Vandals, Saxons, Franks etc were a unique challenge, or the empire had lost whatever mojo it had that got the people it ruled to Romanize.
WhiningCoil
15d ago
I mean, on the one hand, I'm with you 100% about the school system treating young boys like defective girls. But if the problem is a fundamentally matriarchal school system that doesn't understand boys needs for physical activity, hands on learning, and stern discipline, I'm not sure more matriarchal bureaucracy is the answer.
WhiningCoil
15d ago
I mean, if you're going to bring up the Romans, you can't get away from the collapse of the Roman empire, and it's eventual failure to keep "Romanizing" the people it ruled, eventually collapsing into a bunch of basically ethnic nations. Debates about how much the Huns, Franks, assorted Goths, Vandals, Saxons etc were distinct ethnicities, or banner bearers for tribal confederations aside.
WhiningCoil
15d ago
I've just let it ride. Im still up over 20x. I may rebalance at some point this year and divert some into my S&P fund, but paying the 15% cap gains tax doesn't seem worth it at the moment. I may harvest some losses off Intel with it though.
WhiningCoil
15d ago
Don't worry about it. I first started my 401k in 2006. A year later I saw a shit ton of it poof and vanish in the 2007 financial crisis. It might have been $6000-10,000. That shit hurt. I panic sold the bottom, left it in some inflation protection fund for too many years, and missed out completely on the recovery. Learning this lesson is best when you are young, so by the time you are middle aged and have real assets, you have developed diamond hands.
Now I have a seven figure portfolio. I'm down almost six figures. I honestly don't give a fuck.
Let the S&P 500 and the tech ETF ride. In 20 years you'll be alright. Don't sweat the $1000 you put into relatively riskier plays, so long as the 10x leveraged option can't wipe out the rest. Leverage can be scary like that.
You're a student, and provided your degree is of any actual use, you'll have your entire adult life with an income to keep contributing to a portfolio. There will be more bull markets, there will be more dips. Investing is a marathon, not a sprint.
WhiningCoil
15d ago
shop classes
Random thought, is shop class even a thing anymore? I mean I remember a shop class in middle school every year, and I think my freshman year of highschool too? But that was 20-30 years ago now. Even then it was pretty meager because of the safety aspects of working with power tools. I think there was a drill press we were allowed to use in middle school, and maybe a band saw in highschool? I remember the class being 95% "nothing" or stuff I don't remember, and 5% getting a supervised turn on the drill press. That and sanding. Every time you asked the teacher a question about your project, the answer was always "You should probably sand it more" and being pointed to this giant box of worn out scraps of sandpaper with random grits. I have no memory of a table saw, but it might have been there but verboten on account of how dangerous they are even for experienced woodworkers to use.
I'd love for there to be more shop in school, but I'm not sure the risk profile of working with power tools sits well with most moms.
WhiningCoil
15d ago
I had a friend who used to be a teacher. He was all in on virtually every neoliberal shibboleth of teaching. Against school choice because it took resources away from public schools. Always making snide comments about what will happen to special needs kids if schools got fully privatized.
Naturally, his sons all have some non-specific emotional/behavioral problems that lets him game the system for them to have personalized education plans and extra resources. He's always been good at gaming the system like that.
We're currently struggling with some shitty behavior our daughter is tracking home from school. My wife is adamant that it's something the school should be "fixing", and I keep asserting it's not their job. It's our job. So our daughter is currently grounded.
I donno man. I guess there is some theoretical intellectually in tact individual that needs extra resources either because of a physical disability or idiosyncratic mental problem (like dyslexia) that if gotten over the hump of not being able to help themselves, can go on to utilize their education for the betterment of society. Personally, I've never seen one. I mostly only see parents pushing their parenting duties onto teachers through fake special needs, or fake special needs students becoming fake special needs employees, expecting all the same accommodations around their emotional needs and learned helplessness.
I do expect lots of malicious compliance around this though. Totally normal shit like just wanting to have a conversation with a teacher about how to help your child in an area they are struggling with becomes "Sorry, Trump said I'm not allowed to."
WhiningCoil
16d ago
I was correcting the record. I thought the cheap shot of "This woman doesn't want Sam Ceder, a jew, in her country" was a gross mischaracterization.
I mean, going from steel manning the woman in the video, to my own personal beliefs, I find myself nodding along with things I've heard Saagar Enjeti say. And his stance on immigration, at least at the time I heard him say this, was that America is in too much cultural turmoil for any immigration right now. He cites as the historical example that from the 20's through the 60's America had an incredibly restrictive immigration system, largely in backlash to how mass migration from other European nations was altering the make up and social contract of America. It took a solid generation or more for America to figure out who it was again, without further waves of mass migration causing even more chaos and social incohesion. It just took that long for the melting pot to melt, before American Chauvinism was destroyed by demoralization propaganda.
Like I said, I find myself nodding along to that. I think America needs 40 years to answer, for itself, what it's culture is going to be, without either side trying to import allies to tip the scales. And it needs more American Chauvinism to actually assimilate the people we already have, if that's even possible any longer. I can only imagine how much more fucked up prohibition would have been if the prohibition side began mass importing Muslims who don't drink, and the anti-prohibition side scoured the globe for alcoholics. And it's hard to imagine either approach making America better off long term, even if the short term culture war issue gets "settled".
WhiningCoil
16d ago
You know, it's funny you went straight to the bronze age, cause I just wrapped up The Iliad and The Odyssey, and it was a trip. The morality on display was virtually amorality. Common stories included murdering someone in a town, and having to flee before their brothers kill you back. This was bad. If you fled to another town and found allies, who would then help you finish off the entire family of the person you killed, this was good! If you manage to steal the flocks from a town, that's awesome. If the town you stole them from hunts you down, steals them back, and burns your town down for the effort, that was bad. And all along the way, it's all as Zeus wills it. Zeus doles out success and failure, and the most common reason anyone's attempts at murder, thievery or revenge fails is insufficient piety. Even the most talented individuals must be beloved by the gods for their murder and mayhem to succeed.
The only exceptions are of course, the lands, flocks and people's that belong to the gods, those are verboten to fuck with.
Increasingly I lean into religion/morality as a social technology with consequences. Does it promote prosocial values that help your civilization flourish, or does it burn out or wither and die? Morality is not a single axis, it's a 4X custom civilization screen with lots of pluses and minuses, and it has to compete with a lot of different people's that made different choices, possibly adapted to their environment.
Whatever else you can say about Sam Seder's morality, it's clearly dying. Either because the legacy American's it seeks to rule over no longer feel like being oppressed, or because the foreign legions it imported to keep the natives oppressed don't actually have any buy in to it. But one way or another, whether Sam Seder knows it or not, his morality is an evolutionary dead end.
WhiningCoil
16d ago
If you think "We should have a dominant culture", "We should have assimilation" means "Deport Sam Seder", yeah, it's intractable. But if you hear what she's actually saying, brashly, it's that there should be no hyphenated Americans. You need to abandon your native land, your culture and your history at the door. Sam Seder needs to leave only in so far as he's incapable of dropping his distinctly Jewish identity.
And if this sounds like a horrific ask, well, that's what the White Europeans of this country have been forcefully subjected to the last 20 years with demoralization propaganda and the rewriting of our history, and the defamation of our culture.
It's not unreasonable to want born again Americans, not entriest who try to mutate the "idea" of America, or even hate the pre 1960's history and people of it.
WhiningCoil
16d ago
I guess that woman debating Sam Seder is getting more attention, but it pairs well with this other guy who "shredded" Sam Seder.
https://x.com/IamSean90/status/1898979265615409509
In this clip, Sam basically fails to articulate a single moral principle beyond "Well, that's just what our society had decided is right and wrong" and when dude says society can change it's mind over time, Sam's only meek response is "Please don't".
Pair this with lady who points out this whole "melting pot" narrative undermining the Christian European roots of America, and Sam comes off as a guy who's left hand is constantly working to change society (through mass migration and media control) to match his preferences, and who's right hand just shrugs and goes "I donno man, things just happen to be the way I like them because of society or whatever man."
There was a story sold to us growing up that we can accept immigrants who want to work hard, and by working hard make America a better place, but that they will assimilate and the America we experience will not meaningfully change. People will experience diversity of shopping and dining experiences with zero externalities. This story, broadly, got widespread support. This story has also been exposed as a complete falsehood. There is little assimilation, and towns are becoming foreign countries out from under their native residents not in generations, but in election cycles. And the response from our ruling class is basically "Fuck you, you suck, your standard of living is too high and you vote wrong, so we're replacing you on purpose and there is nothing you can do about it." We get a bunch of unprincipled and self serving "America is only an idea man, and ideas can change" rhetoric. But change can cut both ways, and people are waking up to the fact that they are faced with America being changed into a completely foreign country out from under them, or being changed back into a more explicitly Christian European country.
But one way or another, the change is coming. Clinging to the status quo is no longer an option.
I'm not shocked more people are nakedly ethnonationalist. It's the gold standard for all of human history, lots of the world currently still is, and it's the only meaningful alternative being provided to "Just let infinity third worlders have your legacy because you suck". I personally don't think legacy Americans have the vitality or institutional capacity to stop it, though I sincerely hope I'm wrong. The project is going to take a lot longer than another 4 year Trump term.
WhiningCoil
17d ago
I think the idea is that people don't want to waste taking time out of their day to vote for a loser. That the pain of having had skin in the game and being disappointed is enough to discourage people from putting that skin in the game in the first place if you demoralize them enough beforehand.
WhiningCoil
17d ago
Surely he’s burning credibility, too.
You know, I want to take a longer stab at this part. This is less "What I believe" or even "How I think things should be" and more "Is this just the human condition?"
What even is credibility? Is it being absolutely truthful and aligned with reality in every word you say? Or is it delivering the goods, what you said along the way be damned? Musk has a long record of optimistic timelines for various technological achievements. I recall full Falcon 9 reusability was regularly years behind where Musk would confidently say it would be. All's said and done though, none of those "lies" mattered. SpaceX developed a fully reusable rocket and nobody else is even close a decade later, much less beat SpaceX to market in the few years Musk was off in his estimates.
I also recall the story about how Tetris was licensed to Nintendo. Some businessman shamelessly lied that he had the rights to it, signed the paperwork with Nintendo, and then flew off to Russia to do whatever it took to actually secure the rights. He lied... but he did deliver the goods. What does that say about his credibility? He certainly wasn't blacklisted or anything, and in fact goes around bragging to an adoring press, telling the story over and over again.
I was reading The Odyssey lately, and towards the end there was this peculiar part that really struck me where it's mentioned that Odysseus' maternal grandfather was a "world renowned perjurer and thief". Just the way it was phrased, as an admirable thing to be known as struck me as a hilarious bit of bronze age morality. But this more or less meshed with the rest of the bronze age morality on display in The Iliad and The Odyssey, where lying, cheating and stealing is just smart and brings honor if you succeed. Only failure is dishonorable. The line about his grandfather just served to further snap it into focus. One might think we've left that behind, but we're the same human animal now as we were then.
We still say "Fake it till you make it" after all.
So, with respect to Musk, Trump, or anyone's credibility, I think they can lie as much as they want so long as they deliver the good more often than not. Zelensky has a 4% approval rating? Fuck it, why not. Does a ceasefire get declared soon, or some sort of lasting peace agreement? That's credibility. Nobody will remember Musk's tweet when peace and prosperity returns.
World War 3 breaks out and Kiev eats a few megatons? Well, that tweet might end up in the history books, and not in a good way.
I don't especially enjoy this view of the world. And when the shoe is on the other foot, I will likely be losing my ever loving fucking mind that the other side is lying up a storm and "getting away with it".
WhiningCoil
18d ago
Learned helplessness? Hmmmm, perhaps. Its been 10 years. I don’t think there is any shame in realizing I'm outgunned in an information war. I ignored as best I could the breathless coverage of polls for the entire election cycle, and I can't say I missed anything. Likewise, I simply cannot be made to care about Elon's or Trump's tweets, Cabinet drama, etc. I'm waiting for peace or world war 3, for my life to get better or worse. All the beefs Hanania has with Elon are just noise. Sour grapes that he didn't make it into the cool kids club like he hoped.
WhiningCoil
18d ago
Maybe! But that is criticism unrelated to Hanania's thesis which he is absurdly and laughably wrong about.
WhiningCoil
18d ago
My point is not that I believe Zelensky has a 4% approval rating. It's that Hanania is point of fact wrong that the lies Trump & Elon are telling are in any way, shape, or form morally or qualitatively different than the lies the last regime told, and especially not in any way that makes them look worse. He's sanewashing the last 8 years of neoliberal hegemony in media and the deep state because in his little bubble, they weren't that bad.
WhiningCoil
18d ago
Believing this requires significant sane-washing of the last 8 years of media. I mean, to pick a random example off the top of my head that Youtube reminded me, Joe Biden's mental decline. The behavior of those in the media is completely unhinged and totally detached from reality, not to mention nakedly self serving. They've gaslit all of the country on an industrial scale about innumerable topics, or instituted a bizarre form of cognitive mutilation where you are only permitted to think of fact in ways they have told you that you are permitted to think of them. Impossible tangles of double-think abound for sex, gender, crime, equality, equity, you name it.
I would hope Elon has better sources of information than I have. But, to pick at Zelensky's 4% approval rating Hanania leads with, is it even possible to know what the real number might be? Also, I'm supposed to be assessing these "debunks" in a media environment where all the election polling around our own election was purposeful lying. Trump's internal polls showed him winning. Biden and then Kamala's internal polls showed him winning. At no time during the entire election cycle did anyone's internal polls show anyone but Trump winning. Public polls on the other hand, with the exception "low quality" pollsters like Rasmussen, all showed Harris winning. The Harris campaign even went so far as to gaslight the nation claiming Trump was lying about his internal polls as a pretext for election denial.
So why should anyone believe anything these people say about Zelensky's poll numbers? How can they possibly claim to be more credible than just making shit up? If Trump and Elon want to parade around some fake numbers the IC gave them that serve their agenda, they are in good company. Well, maybe not good company, but you know what I mean. Don't pretend this is a deviation.
I mean, this is just naked revisionist history and sane washing right here.
When it comes to arguing about platforms and media outlets, we usually think in terms of political bias. It is true that the old system at Twitter disadvantaged conservative voices. In the past, conservatives and liberals would argue about what books you should read or where you should get your news from.
What past is he talking about? "Misgendering" was a ban on sight offense on every social media platform. Books about it were banned, at least temporarily. Liberals didn't calmly argue with conservatives about where to get news from, they banned it. It's pure imagination that anyone, anywhere, was calmly debating what sources of information were preferable to seek the truth. It was a boot stomping on a human face thinking the roles would never be reversed.
Furthermore, I keep going through Hanania's supporting evidence, like "Editor-in-chief of The Federalist joins others in repeating repeating the completely made up lie about Zelensky meeting with Democrats beforehand." except, oh wait, here is a Democrat tweeting about meeting Zelensky before the Trump meeting. Just finished a meeting with President Zelensky here in Washington. He confirmed that the Ukrainian people will not support a fake peace agreement where Putin gets everything he wants and there are no security arrangements for Ukraine. . Did the original rumor name the wrong Democrats? Yes. Is it a made up lie that Zelensky met with Democrats beforehand? Absolutely not.
Frankly it's barely worth the effort to continue to pick apart these sour grapes that Hanania isn't making the living on Twitter that he used to or expected to. Though I am especially tickled he cites Elon being on the wrong side of an argument with Sam Harris about how bad COVID was going to be. The same Sam Harris who has horribly beclowned himself with extremely motivated reasoning about the measures that he still believes were justified to deal with it. Elon might have been wrong about the numbers, but he was directionally correct about how serious to take it. Especially in retrospect, and especially compared to Sam Harris.
WhiningCoil
19d ago
I had no idea who Ian Carroll was and was going to skip this episode, but the top comment was "Ian Carroll is not suicidal" and I knew I was in for a good time. I think they barely exchanged names before they launched into conspiracies and alternate perspectives on history.
IMHO, Ian Carroll is the definitive consequence of a young man growing up effectively historically illiterate, "having to teach [himself] all this in the last two years", and growing up in the era of mass government censorship and lies (Russiagate, COVID, climate alarmism, etc). The conspiracy theorist have been right about nearly every major event for the last 10 years, so the desire to look into the past and run up the score is overwhelming.
Which is not even to say Ian Carroll is enormously misinformed. He brought up CIA coups to protect US commercial interest (Banana Republics) like that was something shocking Joe might not know about. He focused a lot on the Dulles Brothers and the founding of the CIA. To him, there is a very blurry line between organized crime and the state, and he harps on the Mafia controlling dockyards in WWII a lot. I don't know this to be true, but it wouldn't shock me at all.
For the people complaining that saying Epstein might have been a Mossad honeypot operation is antisemetic, I'm just wondering where they've been the last several years. Literally everyone of any public profile has publicly wondered that, and not without merit. In fact, I think the political winds will only have to change a very little bit before Zionist are bragging about it with the same zeal they brag about the pager bombings, or other famous intelligence operations from their past. Assuming they were actually involved.
That aside, knowing nothing else about Ian Carroll, even listening to him on Joe Rogan I suspected he was hiding his power level a bit. He threw out a few things like "Nasa fakes space footage all the time" that he dropped pretty quickly with Joe asked some pointed questions. I think he is largely a casualty of growing up in an education system that has turned history into proselytizing diversity versus any understanding of the timeline of human development, and the last 10 years of the government and all the intelligence services telling naked, obvious lies that are revealed in near real time. When you grow up being told shameless lies by every authority figure in your life, you'll be left with zero foundation to resist the lure conspiracy theories which, lets face it, are just fucking fun.
WhiningCoil
22d ago
I wonder if the Democrats will eventually have a moment when the stark reality of their failures simply can't be tolerated anymore, resulting in a change in tact. I was hopeful right after the election last year, but most signs since then have made me pessimistic. I just hope it comes sooner than later, because, as bad as SocJus is, I fully expect Republicans to be just as bad if they find that they have nearly unchecked power without a strong opposition party.
I've lost all capacity to steelman the DNC. I can barely form a notion of what motivates them that doesn't come across has a hateful parody. And yet clips like this exist and I find myself going "What else am I supposed to think?"
I know left leaning people want a DNC that improves their quality of life, some form of socialized health care, living wages. I'm not hating on them.
But the DNC, the organization that tries to develop a bench of candidates and spend scarce political capital and state capacity on it's top priorities seems absolutely insane. All we got was infinity immigrants, trans kids and censorship. Oh, and lots and lots of graft for a DNC patronage network. I can only possibly model these as top priorities for people that are stupid, evil, or both. They don't even attempt to explain a through line from open borders, trans kids and censorship to living wages and health care for their base.
Say what you want about Trump, he can at least tell a story about how deportations will lower crime and cost of living, how tariffs with improve wages, how DOGE will lower your taxes. I get that people will claim those are all lies and there is no causation between one or the other, but the case is at least made by Trump about what he's going to do, and how it's going to improve people's lives. And then he actually is seen to be doing the things he said he was going to do. If everything goes to shit and none of it works... well... at least he was honest about what he was going to do.
All I see in the DNC is weird ideological crusades, corruption, and zero sum power jockeying.
It's not because of the autopen, it's because of the accusation that Biden was too incapacitated to even know it was happening. That the broad authority to grant pardons was not, in fact, being exercised by the president at all. And I for one would love to see Biden deposed about, well, anything having to do with these pardons and see what he remembers.
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