You will not be around these "pleasant" people for long, because they will suicidally turn your neighborhood into a shithole and then possibly move away from you to do damage elsewhere. It is false dilemma such as saying you don't like pitbulls roaming the streets and breeding, but you do not mind living next to neighbors who feed and protect them, because they are nice animal loving people and they mean well.
georgioz
5hr ago
If you will live around this type of Democrat then that you will also get Muslim immigrant as well as ruined school, criminals and the rest of it. It is a package deal and it is literally what happened over in Michigan and why there is a Muslim candidate in the first place.
georgioz
5hr ago
This is aged old tactics of fake sympathy where you blur the difference between jab and reality, maintaining plausible deniability. It can be something like "I'd never buy Toyota Camry given how it breaks down every other week leaving John stranded and missing work". You just plant this idea in people's mind making it acceptable to talk about at least in this indirect manner.
georgioz
5hr ago
How does one waste four months of investigation on this? And why is no one terrified that the cops are now involved in a plagiarism scandal? How does it even occur to this guy to call the cops on this issue and be right to do so?
If I was police investigator, I would do my best to investigate this for at least couple of months covering my bases. We are talking about prominent minority scholar who feels threatened by a racist. This reeks of huge problems where Guardian and the like will pour through results of investigation to find even hint of investigators showing their racial bias not investigating it properly.
I've asked her many times and she can't explain it. Like for example, if I make sexual jokes to her about Anna from Frozen, she gives me the look. But when the actress in the Frozen Broadway musical takes the character in a totally sexual direction, and makes throaty murmers and feels up a suit of armor while singing "The First Time in Forever" (yes this actually happens in the taped produced movie of the Frozen musical that is currently on Disney+, go see for yourself), she gets annoyed if I think it's a little weird for a kids production to feature that.
It makes sense if you acknowledge the late-stage feminism main normie message: feminism is whatever women do. The idea is that women cannot be judged for almost anything, if women do it then it is expression of their feminism and empowerment. There exist a huge carveout out of this if women do adopt more conservative stances. So if women are against abortion then of course it is not feminism, but false consciousness and internal misogyny and we do not talk about it maybe except that they are victims of their for sure terrible and abusive husbands. But in general any degenerate thing that women do should not be judged, it is just expression of feminist empowerment. At worst they had to be forced to do it by men.
So sorry to break it to you, but you sexualizing Disney princess is disgusting, your wife sexualizing the same princess is feminism. And do not dare to judge her or ask her to maintain any level of moral consistency or ask her to fulfill any moral duty. It is as simple as that.
The jury came up with the final number, they could have said it is $100k per family. Claimants originally asked for $550 million - a dollar for each view of the video. Why a dollar? Because it is nice number, there is no history behind it, there is no calculation or anything. It just sounds nice and reasonable. This is by the way a common practice in jury system, where you provide a psychological anchor for jury, so you massage them toward maximum payout.
The jury then just said - fuck it, Jones will pay almost three times that number, because why not? He is a stupid evil goblin. Or maybe it was something else and jury came up with some novel idea of how to calculate these punitive damages as $2.54 per view, or maybe they used a different key. We will never know because jury does not have to explain shit.
Sympathetic victims, goblin perpetrator who is crazy enough not to even defend properly and good jury is what is key to get class defining payout. By the way the verdict also stipulates that 50% of Jones income is to be transferred to victims indefinitely despite not even being sentenced for criminal activity without ability to go bankrupt. So he became something akin to debt slave by this. That is exactly how the jury system works.
One of the Anglo things that is commonly criticized in continental Europe is the judicial system. The complaint is usually formulated as "I wouldn't want to delegate the question of guilt to twelve randos that have no understanding of the law".
This is strawman of the position that it brings laicism into the law. But it is not only about understanding, it brings whole new baggage. There are things like emotional appeals and courtroom theater, there are issues with outside influences by pressure campaigns or even threats to jurors who did not select this as a career. There are issues with tribalism where jury plays favorites, there is a reason why Jim Crow juries is a term. Who knows how jury system will work in Somali communities. There is of course other stuff, we are far from 18th century and juries are there to decide complex fraud schemes, patent litigation and other stuff. It is not just about stealing groceries.
The biggest bonus is ability to insert local values, however this also works against you. If you are known in community as fraudster by hearsay, then good luck. The biggest advantage is extra check on judiciary corruption, however it is also double edged sword as there is no written deliberation of their verdicts and it introduces system uncertainty. This also provides incentive toward frivolous litigation - what if you randomly get a "good jury" and make some free money? Even better if you strike gold and you are sympathetic victim against nameless corporation or goblin like Alex Jones, then you can get 1.4 billion in damages for defamation, basically using the judicial system as class defining wealth transfer.
Average gross margins for grocery stores in NYC is 1,6% on total revenue of around $50 billion a year. The proposed stores should offer unachievable 30% discount with revenue of around $50 million, one thousandth of overall grocery store market volume. It cannot work for a problem at hand, it is not designed to do it.
If he is smart, then he will offer some selected number of discounted goods with limited volume per person as with normal shops, who use this promo tactic to attract buyers. He can then make photo ops of happy customers, while the rest of the store will be competitively priced in order to prevent empty shelves and related PR disaster. It will work splendidly for the main purpose: generate positive PR and reward people in his circle who will be involved in this money hog.
georgioz
6d ago
I think this is just equivocation of the word ambition. It is not only "I want things", it also means possessing relevant character traits like: goal and result orientation, task ownership, ability to face adversity with grit etc. Ambition does not mean a porn addict lump who wants to have lambo in a year with this new system to win in blackjack or trading.
But maybe I am wrong and you actually have ambitious people in your office who bust their asses, ask for tasks, chase their goals like crazy etc. Only they are bad at it because they are stupid and unqualified.
Like most social codes, I'm sure it can be and has been extensively weaponized by bully types, but at its best this privilege discourse can be steelmanned as just formalizing attitudes of modesty, generosity, gratitude and perspective-taking that in a saner time would be universally agreed to be virtuous.
Sure, but this is not usually what is meant by the progressive privilege. It has a very specific intersectional structure and it has to be part of a system(s) of oppression and has to be less individualistic. Trailer white trash is still privileged by virtue of their whiteness.
Let's try outgroup = woman, advantage=good-looks and charisma. Picture the most pampered mean-girl college sorority girl you can imagine, rich family, beautiful, smart but also well-tutored, people falling over themselves to give her things. She's trying to get the awkward pimpled nerd out of her lab group. "This loser is actually the lucky one, because people feel sorry for him! I'm the real victim
This is unironically the critique people have today for progressives who talk about privilege exactly in this manner. Celebrities like Michele Obama cannot stop talking about how hard they have it - such as when somebody told Michele that she is not Princeton material, that was obvious example of racism and misogyny.
This. The thinking also created structure of universal leftist conspiracy theory. You have oppressed class Red and oppressor class Blue. Blue people have access to some specific property, they call Privilege and restrict access to this privilege to oppressed group. They also create a system that perpetuates this dynamic indefinitely, lets called it privilegeism.
In traditional Marxism you have proletariat vs bourgeoisie. Bourgeoisie has access to privilege in form of capital and limits access of workers to it by creating system of capitalism that reproduces itself over generations. In feminist theory there are men and women, men have male privilege and create system called patriarchy to restrict access to this privilege. In Critical Race Theory you have Black and white people, white people have access to whiteness and use it to create system of white supremacy. In queer theory the oppressed are Queer/LGBT+ people vs cishetero people. The cishetero people have access to "normalcy" and deny that to queer people by creating and perpetuating the system of cisheteronormativity. The same simple conspiracy template then copies itself to basically all progressive thinking.
The point being that privilege has a specific meaning in leftist thinking, it does not signify an individual thing in common parlance. It has philosophical and metaphysical meanings, exactly like capital has different meaning to somebody about to start his business vs Marxist revolutionary.
America has already integrated a bunch of different nationalities and ethnicities into one country. We have done it successfully for 250 years. Successfully enough that we just lump "white" people into a single category. Europe has dozens of bloody and heated rivalries that were plenty active up until 50 ish years ago.
Yeah, if you account for actual civil war, forced boarding schools for natives and other populations, "educating" religion, culture and language out of their slave population, fierce fight against hyphenated Americans since WW1, it was remarkably successful.
USA is not exceptional in this sense, many other countries did the same forced assimilation, except we now use different words for those projects such as Germanisation, Russification, Magyarization, Italianization etc. If anything, there is actually a European "melting pot" project not unlike USA - France. In the past it was very diverse country of many smaller nations speaking different languages and having diverse histories: Occitan South, Celtic/Bretonian West, Flemmish and Germanic North East and various others. France pursued aggressive assimilation in form of forced secular republican tradition and generations of focused public school education. It worked beautifully so much so, that by 1951 French approved usage of local minority languages in schools, firm in their sense of victory after centuries of the project. It remains to be seen if it was not a hollow victory.
I absolutely agree that this works relatively well - although even there are many exceptions. There are some very tenacious ethnicities like Roma, or Basque etc. It however does not mean that it will work forever, there is equal number of examples of failed assimilations and ultimate splinter of states even in Europe.
To all the Adam Smiths of the world. Why is having an ethnostate good for the jews but not anyone else? Why don't jews benefit from diversity in their western style open democratic society like everyone else? Why doesn't the magic freedom dirt in Israel transform your third worlders into engineers and scientists like it allegedly does everywhere else in the west, who would be just as Jewish as anyone else in a few years. How is it possible to represent anything the Democrats have represented the world over and then believe this for Israel in the back of your brain?
This is not only supposed contradiction in Liberal Zionist thinking, but for the rest of progressives as well. The thing is that much of their sociology is driven by ideas similar to that of W.E.B. Du Bois, author of The Souls of Black Folk. He invented the concept that progressives use even today when they talk about Black folk. He is an interesting character as he was a black man who studied in Germany in 1890s. The word "folk" in his book is literal translation of German concept of Volk of second half of 19th century German romantic nationalism. Volk is an organic group tied by language, blood and shared history, it together creates Hegelian Volksgeist - this Hegelian Geist is what Du Bois means by Souls. By the way the modern Zionism is literally a child of the same movement, it is literal national awakening similarly to what happened in Europe around the same time.
Progressives can be viewed as continuation of romantic national awakening movement, they just want to carve out different nations. You have Black Nation and Native Nation and Queer Nation, that is what they mean when they use the term community. They also use the rest of romantic vocabulary; these nations have their own culture: Queer Culture and Black Culture, they have their own art and history and mythology. If it does not exist, then it is fabricated in the same way romantic nationalists created creation myths for their own nations. Some if these identities are literally related to blood such as Black or Native in the same way romantic revolutionaries viewed that. Of course there are important differences: progressives are generally integralists as opposed to romantic revolutionaries, who were all about separation and creating state to serve their definition of nation.
But the thing is still there, they just combine this idea of various nations living under benevolent roof of multicultural imperial state - of course led by learned, enlightened progressive people like Krystal Ball - which protects and arbitrates between these various nations living under its roof. She is not there to deny existence of Jewish nation, she is there as a bureaucrat in court of Austrian Empire arbitrating disputes between Hungarians and Slovaks and other acknowledged Volk to uphold multicultural intersectionality, while Adam Smith is something like Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson who is there to fiercely advocate for Slovaks. But it is not exactly against the whole idea, there are many literal Black Nationalists inside progressive coalition with their own fierce advocates. They just have to know when to shut up and give authority to intersectionalist beurocrats if they clash with other nation - e.g. religious Black Folk with Queer Folk. Liberal Zionists are in the same situation, they are advocates of oppressed group and that is fine. However they should just read the room and see that powers that be decided, that now is the time for Palestinian Volk and that they should bow down and make concessions.
It seems contradictionary: you have imperialist ethnonationalist progressives? Come on. But it makes sense if you take their ideology seriously. Moreover, living with contradiction is part and parcel of this ideology, it is at its core a Hegelian project which loves contradictions, synthetizing contradictions via philosophical "revolution" in a spiral is the core of what "progress" means, how we achieve the ultimate synthesis of all contradictions in progressive eschaton of ultimate Social Justice and true voluntary equity.
I've never heard either this objection or anything about water vapor feedback being anything more than a minor contributor.
What? This is basic stuff. Water vapors are even as of now contributing over 50% toward heating. There are other heat trapping substances such as clouds (liquid atmospheric water) is another 25%, methane is 5% and CO2 maybe 20%. There are other important things in the models such as albedo effect stemming from disappearance ice replacing it with earth with different reflection rates. There is a thing of 4,000 gigatons of CO2 trapped in permafrost and microbes etc. in soil.
All these things are part of climate models, they act in nonlinear and unpredictable way, they have their own natural cycle often with different branches etc. Some of them provide some solution, for instance you can trap atmospheric carbon by growing woods, burning them via pyrolysis and producing biochar that can be used as fertilizer, replacement for some construction material such as asphalt or you can use lignin from wood to produce carbon fiber etc.
georgioz
17d ago
Agreed, Epstein was also involved in financial laundering and weapon smuggling with dealers such as Douglas Leese and Adnan Khashoggi. Human trafficking was only one of the arms of the whole criminal enterprise.
Now, it was obviously reasonably for the ministry of health to acquire some face masks even at inflated prices common for medical equipment -- at least for people working in hospitals, but he overestimated the amount required by orders of magnitude. Per WP, he bought 5.8 billion masks for an average price of about an Euro per mask. That is 70 masks per person in Germany, most of which were later destroyed when they expired.
To be fair, as far as I know this may have even been on the lower end of necessity. FFP2 and N95 masks were always supposed to be one-use, for maybe 4 to 8 hours of continuous usage, the filter stops being functional as it gets dirty. After that, the mask becomes just a dirty rag without any filtration functionality, as well as a health risk with bacteria and mold making breathing through them hazardous. Of course the reality had nothing to do with medical advice, people used the same mask for months often having it somewhere in a car or dirty jacket pocket to use while shopping or whatnot. All in all, it probably caused more damage than good.
georgioz
20d ago
For example, consider the game Wolfenstein 3D, which has you killing Nazis. Is this video game immoral?
Forget Wolfenstein 3D, you have to play Alex Jones: NWO Wars.
People still use bedlam as idiom for craziness even in USA, it actually comes from the name of mental asylum outside of London. Sending to Coventry to me seems much more horrific than simple ghosting.
Maybe. And maybe aggressively punching the clock served as therapeutic way to express your hatred towards your employer, scars from bruised knuckles were badge of honor proudly displayed in front of your colleagues in factory canteen. Kids these days do not even know how to properly hate their job anymore, they just quit quietly like rats they are.
Again, this is nothing new. There actually was something called software crisis of 1960s. Shitty programmers made costly errors, delivered faulty code with years long delay, causing immense damage in terms of wasted time of expensive mainframes. It was direct effect of the early thinking that software is a work for "calculators", akin to clerical and administrative jobs. All the really talented people focused on hardware. If you have a software company that thinks software is a job for low paid foreign labor, the results will be the same.
I actually think this is only half truth. The issue here is with the welfare state and rise of taxation. The tax as percent of GDP was remarkably low in 19th century: between 1-3% of GDP. This changed after WW1 and The New Deal rising to 15% and 20% GDP, peaking at 30% by 1960s.
This is however artificial incentive. For instance today the average cost of elementary school student in USA is $17k a year. Imagine if family with three children can decide: wife stays at home, maybe creates a pod with other mothers and manages schooling and the government gives them $51k tax credit a year and they spend it as they want. Maybe children have to pass a test on par with at least with second lowest decile results compared to local public school. On top of that the wife can cook, she can take care of household chores and to other management such as driving and so forth. Also she could easily sell her surplus of cakes or jams on market or outside of house without constant government meddling with endless regulation. Her net contribution toward household could easily approach $100k a year.
This is the tragedy of the current situation. Women still take care of children, do the laundry, they do bring beer and sandwich to men, they still take care of elderly and sick as they used to do it in the past - in capacity such as teachers, maids, waitresses, cooks and nurses. Only they do it for strangers and not for their own family, losing value in the process. It is all just and illusion and scam.
Like others said, it is a real concept. I think even you would put the line somewhere - maybe directly beseeching your audience for somebody to do the killing, with a promise of fame and eternal gratitude? If not that, setting up a monetary account similar to what actual terrorist groups do for suicide bombers? There has to be a line. Stochastic terrorism is just the level bellow that. "Please can somebody kill that motherfucker already? In Minecraft of course". Just thinly veiled plausible deniability.
Maybe somebody has a problem with the word itself - stochastic terrorism may look like some manipulation, using the scary word terrorism to astroturf a concept creep. But it is nothing new, this is just an annoying modern trend of noticing age old issue and inventing new word for it, there are hundreds of those such as "quiet quitting" being a hot new trend of age old "punching the clock", the same for other things such as ghosting, gatekeeping, gaslighting and many more.
Going back to stochastic terrorism, there are similar old parallels. Just to name one - the wave of anarchist assassinations across the globe toward the end of 19th century. The response by governments across the democratic west was swift and decisive: banning of anarchist newspapers, persecution of anarchist instigators, forming new counterterrorist forces by governments infiltrating anarchist cells and more. It actually happened in USA after McKinley assassination, you had Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 targeting immigrants with anarchist background, you had Criminal Anarchy act of 1902. You had famous cases such as Emma Goldman who was arrested many times until she was stripped of citizenship and deported to Russia in 1919 together with almost 250 other radicals. Anarchism and especially its propaganda of the deed died, the freedom of speech survived.
By the way this is something that happened in IT since the beginning. Programming evolved from hardware level binary programming to assembler programming to structured programming to object oriented programming to todays Agentic AI programming. The same fear existed before - from programmers forgetting how to get most of the hardware, to bloatware memory hogs that loaded useless libraries to todays agentic AI which just moves it one step further.
I think it is inevitable, there will be some niche space for old school thinking, but it will resolve itself in time. For instance knowing some basic coding in Assembly from university is a good exercise and knowledge, but you will probably never use it outside of specific niches such as cybersecurity or firmware coding. Future good programmer will probably look quite differently from you now, but your skills would also be considered useless for programming Apollo 11 guidance system in 1969.
I was thinking about it from the EU point of view of a regular employee and I think a lot of this comes from how insane the modern state costs. Let me make my case from numbers in Slovakia.
Direct income and payroll taxes in Slovakia for average salary is around 45%. This includes social contribution, income tax and all the rest. Out of 55% that is left you pay 23% VAT on all goods and services. Other than that you need to pay property tax, excise taxes for gas, alcohol and tobacco. In reality, you might be left with about a third of what you earned. But it doesn't even end there.
Fees and other direct payments There is constant and very opaque stream of various payments. You pay for building permits, you pay for your passport or other state documents, you pay car registration fee, you pay road tax and highway toll, you pay even a fee for your dog. It is numerous small things that however add up quite quickly and more if you are bellow average income as many of these are just nominal prices.
Indirect taxes These are various hidden taxes often paid by producers. Manufacturers also pay various taxes and fees: they pay for carbon emissions, they pay packaging recycling fees, and they pay customs duties on imported raw materials. Or take another example: developers pay cities and the state infrastructure development fees and for social policies, because what cities collect from your income tax and property tax isn't enough for them. Builders, of course, pass all of this into the price of your apartment, and you end up paying VAT on top of that non-transparent indirect taxation as well. All of this drives up final prices and reduces your purchasing power out of the pittance you have left.
Forced labor. The state has literally enslaved people, demanding labor for absurdities—like how you have to wash out beverage cans at home like an imbecile so they don't smell and attract wasps, and then wait in line at grocery store for the one functional reverse vending machine, just so the state returns your stolen, exorbitant recycling deposit, the recovery of which cost you a bunch of time and your own water. But it also enslaves companies and individuals through filling out various forms. You pay accountants for tax returns, and companies must comply with regulations like GDPR, for which they have to hire extra consultants like a GDPR Data Protection Officer. They have to fill out paperwork, they have to pay corporate lawyers and attorneys who must track thousands of new directives, regulations, and amendments that the EU and member states churn out every year. Behind this is an army of office workers who produce nothing, not even a single nail—they only produce paperwork for the state bureaucracy, such as the new paperwork on the gender pay gap in your company according to the latest EU directive, because that is exactly what was missing for perfect prosperity in our countries. And the great thing for the government? This is officially considered added value, and you pay VAT on it too. It’s a perpetuum mobile, where every new hidden regulation brings an increase in corporate costs, which companies then use to raise prices, and that increases tax revenue at the expense of your wallet.
Conclusion: The Shift to Autarky If you add everything up, your real purchasing power is maybe a quarter of what you produced. This spiral of higher tax and regulatory burdens completely demotivates people from producing. Even now, domestic autarky combined with bartering and undeclared work—which is tax-free and unregulated—is paying off for people. If you cook that $20 burrito at home, perhaps using your own ingredients from your garden, you bypass this entire machinery. The state is shocked by the "illegal" sale of homemade Christmas cakes. A person who bakes cakes and sells the leftovers is now literally treated as an enemy of the state, simply because they found one of the few remaining ways to increase their standard of living without non-stop bleeding. And yet this I think is what people are feeling right now. It is not exactly affordability crisis, it is just that some things are so overpriced that it stops making sense.
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