crushedoranges
No bio...
User ID: 111
crushedoranges
2d ago
Look, I'm a supporter of free speech as much as anybody but I'm not going to run into the buzzsaw that is the Jewish lobby. People who have been calling my fellow travellers anti-semitic nazis for years - decades, even - suddenly need my help? I'm not a fan of the Jewish lobby in the current Trump administration but neither am I a fan of the pro-Palestinians. Perhaps conservatives would be more concerned about freedom of thought in the academia if there were any left in the university institutions. I gain nothing by standing on principle and lose nothing by standing out of the way. I don't need to take a side in this conflict: there are more than enough domestic windwills to shake a lance at.
I'd link to the XCKD comic about free speech and its consequences, but everyone here probably has seen it already.
crushedoranges
9d ago
Another QUANGO put to the sword. 'independent' organizations are really just stealthy ways to hide from public scrutiny while taking public money. How can you be a 'private' entity if you were founded by Congress?
crushedoranges
9d ago
I grudgingly concede to your argument but I must say they have earned considerable skepticism: they will have to iterate quite a few times before the hillarity of their first attempt will fade from my imagination.
crushedoranges
9d ago
Google infamously curates its results to be racially diverse to the detriment of accuracy, so I'm not surprised. Your real face was not sufficiently equitable according to the algorithm, so your physical appearance was adjusted to be in line with their code of conduct.
This is why every model that attempts to chase alignment or whatever arbitrary standard will be retarded in practice. If you punish your algorithm for being accurate, then it won't be accurate. (Surprise!) It won't give you 'accurate result with DEI characteristics': it will just shit itself and give you something terrible.
This is why I think Musk has an advantage in this field: he's not shooting his infant AGI in the knees by forcing it to crimestop
crushedoranges
10d ago
If he's old enough that a progress of months is enough to make meaningful differences in his cognition then he was not of sound mind to be president. A motivated actor (and Trump definitely is one) can hammer that wedge to say that all of Biden's acts and orders were not, in fact, issued by him, and thus the pardons are not pardons at all. They are frauds created by staffers without his knowledge.
Such an allegation is essentially unprovable, as you say. But so as long as the DoJ holds this opinion, things will get... interesting.
crushedoranges
10d ago
This is exactly the reason why the 25th amendment should have been invoked for Biden, in that any question that the President is not indisputably in command of the powers of his office causes a constitutional crisis. There's a reason why the Vice President is temporarily sworn in when the President is put under anesthesia: even though it is highly unlikely he will die it A) ensures continuity of power and B) prevents mysterious commands issued from the surgery table.
That a cabal of staffers could usurp the power of the presidency should not even be in the realm of contemplatable, let alone allegeable.
The Democrats are taking the consequences of... whatever they did in Biden's tenure. It's up to them to demonstrate that the former president was compos mentis during such and such a date as they claim. Surely, remembering the past three months is not a extraordinary ask, is it? Or perhaps, in lieu of an extraordinary claim, the ex-president can write his own name in court.
Or perhaps drawing a clock would be more illustrative.
crushedoranges
11d ago
I believe the Flintstones comic proposes that it was Clod the Destroyer, who punches the liberals in the beef.
crushedoranges
11d ago
In short: he's coping and seething because he is not the court philosopher of the people in power.
In the long: it's no longer 2012. You don't get points for Noticing, no more than you get credit for being a geocentrist in this day and age. Whether Hanania likes it or not, Elon Musk has actually accomplished things. What has he done? Suffered in the desert of barely acceptable discourse for a decade, and when he emerges he isn't treated as a prophet, with respect. He's a nobody, a has-been. Elon brute-forced his way into the president's cabinet to dictate policy, while Hanania snipes at him on a substack. Who is he to say about competence, about anything? Sure, it's not debate club rules, but writing furious tracts on how Elon is a drug addict that is crashing out isn't exactly gentlemanly, either.
Even if Elon is a tenth of the man he was when he started up SpaceX, he's still vastly more influential and powerful than Hanania was on his best day. In the real world, this matters. There is a long history of intellectuals waging personal grudges in the public discourse against their enemies. Nearly all of it is uninteresting.
This is sneering.
Or rather, it's the kind of sneering that people like Hanania indulge to salve their egos.
I am not ashamed to say that I am of origin a 4chan shitposter. I, of course, cannot speak for an amorphous group of internet trolls. But I'd like to think that people like me and people who think like me have no pretensions of gatekeeping the culture or its discourse. But despite this, our little internet sect - if it can even be called that - is upstream of so much of the current political moment that we are either incredibly prescient of the degeneration of propriety or we masterminded its fall and decline. The American president is a living, breathing meme. He trolls the world! And in some insignificant yet important way, we are a part of it.
Or it could be all a big coincidence. It would be just as funny.
No one outside of Hanania's little circle cares about his opinions. He's no thought leader. Not even a secret king. Trump may be master of the media cycle, but he is a boomer and ultimately of their generation. Elon is one of us. At times he may be based and other times he will be a lolcow, but the Extremely Online Right Wing Weirdos have broken into government and there is nothing the bow-tied Buckleyites can do about it.
crushedoranges
16d ago
Maybe with the advent of high-quality cameras being at hand for every civilian and soldier, the reduction of the 'fog of war' would permit the use of tactical nuclear weapons insomuch is that it is clear that the target is military formations and not indiscriminately nuking enemy cities.
Still, probably the grimmest prospect imaginable.
crushedoranges
16d ago
I mean, if the aliens are here to have sex with us, then I'd be fine with a vegan diet. Are they attractive?
crushedoranges
20d ago
Just to say, a black pastor telling his church 'y'all going to vote for the champion of African American values (who is Mr. Goodwhiteguy) tommorow' and 90% of them dutifully doing so may not seem like vote rigging (and is not) but it absolutely does stink. Black machine politics is dirty as it gets and the only reason it doesn't get more attention is because it's embarassing to the liberal press, who would rather glaze them.
crushedoranges
21d ago
Federal overregulation has obliterated ham radio while simulataneously oversaturating the 2.4ghz and 5ghz bands to the point of uselessness in urban areas. It's clear that these regulations are written not for the benefit of the general public but to protect the monopolies of telecoms and television broadcast. Electronics have to be sewn up in a lead box to avert the minute chance it might add a bit of static to watching a football game but corporations can sit on empty swaths of frequency for decades because they paid for it and haven't found a use for it yet.
crushedoranges
21d ago
Unfortunately our technocrats can't deliver that, but as a compromise, how about a trans-inclusive code of conduct for your favorite FOSS project?
Nothing.
That is what I believe Trudeau discovered when he went down to Mar-A-Lago last year. He asked Donald Trump what he could do to avert the destruction of the Canadian economy.
Trump laughed in his face, called him Governor, told him that Canada would be annexed, and sent him home.
This is my guess for what actually happened. I really have no proof, other then the fact that if Trump wanted to destroy my country and permanently subordinate it in the most brutal and undiplomatic way possible he'd pretty much do exactly what he's doing right now. Why? I can't even begin to fathom to guess. Because he can. And no one on Earth will protect Canada from his wrath. We'll be lucky if we get away with a century of humiliation. That's how bad it is right now. We're doomed. There's no light at the end of the tunnel. We're in the Fallout timeline now.
For various (very good reasons) no nation will ever fully deploy their entire military to a foreign country. A good rule of thumb is that you can halve all publically available numbers for effective combat readiness: this allows for effective cycling of units and reinforcements on the front line.
Ukraine lacks reserves and so units committed to the front remain until the point of annihilation: but if they maintained proper ratios, they'd not have enough to cover their front. At best you could expect a single expeditionary force cobbled together from all of Europe.
crushedoranges
23d ago
As a Canadian, the first step is impossible. We're under the permanent rule of theater-kid occupied government: all optics, no substance.
crushedoranges
26d ago
I mean, the Budapest Memorandum could have been made a real paper (just as 'protector of Orthodox Christians' was a thin excuse to meddle in the Ottoman Empire) but Obama chose to not pick it up, and Biden after him. The Monroe doctrine doesn't exist on any formal treaty or legislation but if any European decided to invade a South American country Uncle Sam would magically appear regardless of the lack of justification to do so.
'Law' in this case was just the pretense of legality: if the Americans really wanted to go down to the mat for Ukraine, they'd have manufactured a reason to do so. They didn't, so they fell on the 'do nothing' side of strategic ambiguity.
crushedoranges
26d ago
I have suffered wounds in online debates defending realism (and Mearsheimer's offensive realism) by liberal idealists seemingly oblivious to the failures of GWOT, confident that the Ukrainian proxies would succeed where the Iraqi ones failed. The world would have been much better off letting Russia quietly rot away in private, keeping its neighbors in post-Soviet dysfunction until it was too enervated to do anything. But the evil gremlins of the US State Department had their way, and the rest is history.
crushedoranges
27d ago
"He can't keep getting away with it..!"
Yes. Yes he can. He's the President of the United States.
crushedoranges
27d ago
I'm not American, but I understand realpolitik.
Trump could be the most pro-slavophile Manchurian agent, literally handpicked by the FSB to bring down America from within, and it still wouldn't matter - he's the American president. He holds the fate of not only Ukraine, but of many nations in his whim. When you're a leader of a nation, when you hold the welfare of millions of your countrymen with your every action you do whatever is necessary to ensure their prosperity and happiness. And that includes winning over the leaders of foreign nations, even if you don't like them. Especially if they're more powerful than you.
Zelensky makes the mistake of thinking he is the equal of the US president. He's not. He's the leader of some backwards Eastern European state that most Americans couldn't point to on a map, even after two years bombarded on the news. And not only that, he's coming hat in hand to ask for blood and treasure - He's asking for an American security guarantee. Trump can get away with humiliating the Europeans because he has the hard power to do it. Zelensky - and Ukraine by proxy - cannot afford to morally grandstand for the Europeans when his nation's very existance is at stake. The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.
crushedoranges
27d ago
Jesus Christ. Zelenskyy, all you had to do was eat your humble pie and suck up to Trump for an hour or two. Macron and Starmer have been working day and night to coax him back. All for nothing!
crushedoranges
1mo ago
I feel that 'appropriate plan' is hiding a gargantuan amount of assumptions where you ask the civil service to reduce headcount and they return to you and say that they need to hire more. It's a Yes, Minister bit, but it would be exactly what would happen. If the civil service had the ability to de-bloat itself we wouldn't have a ketamine-fueled billionaire taking a chainsaw to the institutions. There is no 'best way' to do it: you're going to be Washington Monument'd for a papercut, you might as well go for the head.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
There's a saying in sports: "If you're not cheating, you're not trying hard enough." If people are willing to do incredibly unethical things to alter the outcomes of something that tops out at sports betting, why not politics?
Once you get over the sacred, idealistic form of government, it really is just another ruleset to be gamed. Banging the table and insisting that the Impoundment Act is unconstitutional and doing whatever you want while it winds its way through the courts is just clever brinksmanship. Only the rules that have been formally written down matter: regulations, gentleman's agreements, and norms can be ignored without consequence. Because ultimately what defines legality is how much the institutions are willing to push back against you. If you can get away with it, it becomes precedent.
Ignorant of what, exactly? The intellectual fashions and constantly evolving terminology of the left? The revisionism of the entire school of leftist history? The activism of the professorial-activist class?
99% of the intellectual output of the social sciences is essentially Blue Tribe navel-gazing. (The pHD dissertation on the colonialism bias of the smell of Indians is beyond parody.) Civilized societies throw their scholars to the fire every so often: Qin Shi Huang was arguably too merciful.
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