jake
10mo ago
The Booker's had a string of weak winners since George Saunders' deserved win for Lincoln in the Bardo. The best of the stack is Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida but read it vs the last South Asian winner, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger.
Karunatilaka:
The memories come to you with pain. The pain has many shades. Sometimes, it arrives with sweat and itches and rashes. At other times, it comes with nausea and headaches. Perhaps like amputees feeling absent limbs, you still hold the illusion of your decaying corpse. One minute you are retching, the next you are reeling, the next you are remembering.
You met Jaki five years ago in the Casino at Hotel Leo. She was twenty, just out of school, and losing pathetically at baccarat. You were back from a torrid tour of the Vanni, unhinged by the slaughter, breaking bread with shady people, seeing the bad wherever you looked, and wearing your notorious red bandanna. You had sold the photos to Jonny at the Associated Press and cashed a welcome six-figure cheque. Even in Lankan rupees, six figures are better than five.
You had outplayed the house at blackjack, whacked the crab at the buffet and washed it down with some free gin. A regular day at the office.
‘Don’t bet on ties, sister,’ you said to the strange girl with frizzy hair and black make-up. She looked at you and rolled her eyes, which you found strange. Women usually like the look of you, not knowing that you prefer cock to cooch. A trimmed beard, an ironed shirt and a bit of deodorant will elevate you above a herd of sweaty Lankan hetero males.
Adiga:
. . . That's why I want to ask you directly if you really are coming to Bangalore. Because if you are, I have something important to tell you. See, the lady on the radio said, "Mr. Jiabao is on a mission: he wants to know the truth about Bangalore."
My blood froze. If anyone knows the truth about Bangalore, it's me.
Next, the lady announcer said, "Mr. Jiabao wants to meet some Indian entrepreneurs and hear the story of their success from their own lips."
She explained a little. Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don't have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs -- we entrepreneurs -- have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.
You hope to learn how to make a few Chinese entrepreneurs, that's why you're visiting. That made me feel good. But then it hit me that in keeping with international protocol, the prime minister and foreign minister of my country will meet you at the airport with garlands, small take-home sandalwood statues of Gandhi, and a booklet full of information about India's past, present, and future.
That's when I had to say that thing in English, sir. Out loud . . .
(that thing is "Fuck!/Motherfucker!")
Adiga's a natural, Karunatilaka's a purply tryhard.
2019 was the most transparently political of all the recent transparently political awards. It was a double winner despite the rule against it, Margaret Atwood won (her writing is excellent, but it was for a Handmaiden's Tale sequel) and Bernadine Evaristo became the first black woman to win for Girl, Woman, Other. I'd rate GWO above most of the other recent winners but that's not really praise. The others all do this varying combination of purple prose, idiosyncratic writing, and "unconventional structure." They might not be consciously or even unconsciously trying to be Cormac McCarthy but there's a shitty sameness of what reads as McCarthy wannabe-ism from writers who don't understand the great works succeed in spite of such style because of masters who know when and how to break the rules.
Milkman
"My poor deprived class!" cried teacher and gain she was bluffing, pretending sorrow about our lack of color, our hampered horizons, our mental landscapes, when it was obvious she was a person too defined within herself to be long perturbed by anything at all. And how come she was this? How come she was doing this antagonizing, this presenting of an anti-culture to our culture when she herself was of our culture, where the same rules of consciousness regarding the likes of color – regardless too, of church affiliation – as applied to us ought equally to have applied to her? But she was laughing again. "There is no blue in the whole of the window," she said. "Look again please. Try again please – and, class" – here she paused and, for a moment, did become serious – "although there's no lack of color out there really – there's nothing out there really. But for temporal purposes please note – the sky that seems to be out there can be any color that there is."
"Testicles!" cried some ladies and gentlemen and a frisson – the only French of the evening apart from "le ciel est bleu" and that literary guff the guy in the book had been posturing –went through us. It seemed to our minds that no, what she was saying could not ever be true. If what she was saying was true, that the sky – out there –not out there – whatever –could be any color, that meant anything could be any color, that anything could be anything, that anything could happen, at any time, at any place, in the whole of the world, and to anybody – probably had too, only we just hadn't noticed. So no. After generation upon generation, fathers upon forefathers, mothers upon foremothers, centuries and millennia of being one color officially and three colors unofficially, a colorful sky, just like that, could not be allowed to be.
Jesus Christ, editor totally MIA.
The Promise
I should have been there. So Astrid thinks. That she was flirting with Dean instead only adds to her guilt. She believes, wrongly, that her younger sister knows the truth about her. Not only this truth, others too. For example, that she vomited up her lunch half an hour ago, as she regularly does, in order to stay slim. She is prone to paranoid fears like these, suspecting sometimes that her mind can be secretly read by people around her, or that life is an elaborate performance in which everybody else is acting and she alone is not. Astrid is a fearful person. Among other things, she's afraid of the dark, poverty, thunderstorms, getting fat, earthquakes, tidal waves, crocodiles, the blacks, the future, the orderly structures of society coming undone. Of being unloved. Of always having been that way.
Shit editing again.
Prophet Song
You were supposed to bring Molly to practice, Larry, I had to cancel another call with our partners, I have only just returned back to work after maternity leave, how do you think this looks? He stands by the door with a foot half-pulled from his boot and then he lowers his eyes like some abject and beaten dog, he shakes his head and looks her full in the eye and she sees a change come over him, his voice an angry whisper. They are trying to disrupt us, Eilish, they are spreading lies within the union, you will not believe what I heard today — His voice falters before her narrowed gaze and then his eyes seek the floor again. Look, he says, I hear what you're saying and I'm sorry. He shows her a small pay-as-you-go phone, a burner phone he calls it. Even if they wanted to listen in, they could not know the number. She watches him thinking of the children listening to them whispering in the hall. You are behaving like some criminal, Larry, listen, it looks like Bailey is coming down with a virus, he's gone upstairs.
Now Prophet Song, which maybe I should have started with because that's what you wrote about. There are weak Booker winners but the writers still show some skill. Burns and Galgut have chops they just had shitty editors. Prophet Song is the first Booker winner I've read I would call a bad book. I felt less disgust after finishing Hank Green's "I can do it too" YA trash than that shit. Lynch is a shitty writer, this is a particularly shitty piece of his overall shitty submission. I've read significantly better from anons on /lit/ and if someone posted this to a /wg/ thread they would have been mocked relentlessly for being so far up their own ass without even having something good to show for it. The book is poorly conceived, poorly written, and that's besides the terrible structure that should have magnified the shittiness to everyone judging but for some reason put it on track for the preeminent English literary award.
Coetzee's Booker-winning Life & Times of Michael K is unconventional structure, no chapters but three sections, set in South Africa during a civil war the novel implies the whites are losing. The book is rich with commentary, but being Coetzee who can actually write, it's usually subtle and beautifully so. There's an idea in this space; still set in Ireland, a revisiting of the Troubles where the racial line is Irish and not. A story of a person who keeps experiencing events and actions against them beyond their control. Proper punctuation and structure but like Coetzee with very long sections instead of chapters. But all of this would require an intelligence and thoughtfulness and above all skill in prose Lynch does not possess.
A woman won the second Booker, a Trinidad-born Indian Brit the third. This stuff is such a bummer, and it's also insulting because writing might be the purest meritocracy. If someone could write like Rushdie they could look like anything, be anything, believe anything, and they'd succeed, because his lower peers have for decades. Wherever there is a "lack of representation" it's because there's a lack of skill. You can take the angle of social and economic factors keeping that writing skill from being developed, but that's the only angle there is. If it's good enough, people will read it. Political awardings do nothing, they aren't incentivizing anyone to pick up the pen who wouldn't so they're not bringing anything new and good into the field, they're just making the brand worse and the field worse as they further encourage publishers to keep facilitating this bullshit.
Getting into the weeds of English, "justified" most literally means "to make right." Deontologically, evil deeds cannot ever be right. My usage of "necessary" was deliberate. Murdering a hundred thousand Japanese civilians in two flashes was necessary to prevent a million from dying in a war on Honshu but it wasn't right. Tyranny can be necessary but it is most philanthropic to understand it as always evil lest we put ourselves on the path to endless destruction as we think we can do evil that good may result. The Nazis, Soviets, and Mao China (and still Xi China) were evil for what they did, not who they did it to or why.
The second part of the issue of Carlson was in my original comment. The right would be ecstatic if every grifter had his competence. As for "be afraid", it's me trying to subtly make people recognize calling him a grifter isn't the criticism they think it is. If he can explicitly say "I hate Trump" and then be welcomed in their circle and eyed for VP, his having ulterior motives would mean he's playing a vastly different game than simple profiteering and that would make him the most terrifying political actor in this country.
Finally, I said in my original postulation many months back I'm not certain of what happened, I'm only certain elections would be stolen if possible. Because of that the burden of proof rationally falls on those conducting the elections. As elected officials and public bureaucrats vested with certain powers of the people, they are specifically bereft of the right to claim a presumption of their acting in good faith (this even before but obviously intensified by the rampant corruption and general criminality), they must be able to prove it; so if they can't prove they didn't cheat, the presumption is they did.
150 million people could have died and the measures would still be tyranny.
A government's mass seizure of power from the people, for any reason, is evil. Governments can do evil things from necessity, using nuclear weapons against Japan was evil even as it saved millions of lives. The failure in discourse is people who either downplay the tyranny of coronavirus policy or else employ the non sequitur of "It was necessary, so it wasn't tyranny." The relevance here is the usage of terms: they care about tyranny when convenient; they care about the constitution when convenient; they care about the law when convenient.
As for Carlson, this picture does some heavy lifting. What we have came via Dominion who had Carlson fired as part of their settlement, they're untrustworthy. If the full communications are available in raw I'd read them to see what he actually said, and if what Dominion released was fair enough it'd ratchet up "Carlson's a grifter." But first, the Trump circle still looks highly on him so they clearly don't consider the communications meaningful, and second, he's the most effective individual political commentator in the US, if this is his "grift", be afraid of when he plays the game for real.
... are they? I know some people in the Democrat Establishment. Mostly, they follow the law and the rules and try to do what's right. I don't think this is good evidence against election fraud, but it is strong evidence against them being moral mutants who hate truth and all that is good. Are my enemies innately evil?
So do I. I like them and I care about them but I wouldn't call them "good" except in the sense of the greengrocer. They do what is expected of them, they are obedient. They are not specifically righteous or moral as their morals are not meaningfully distinct from or independent to their political alignment. They're good members of the herd, just like pretty much everybody who's ever lived. They aren't deliberately seeking ill ends, but they believe what their superiors want them to believe and so they think they're being moral and philanthropic when they don't truly know what good is or what it means to love their fellow. As to their superiors, the politicians, just about all of them are moral mutants. Bernie Sanders probably not, Thomas Massie probably not. Exceptions otherwise few and prove the rule. The desire to have power over people, from the pettiest internet bureaucrat to highest office, is intrinsically inhuman and necessarily evil. It's pretty ancient wisdom that nobody who wants power should be allowed to have it, and equally how the best leaders never want power and are often only spurred to taking it to fight against the former. Or to directly answer your rhetorical question: bureaucrats and politicians are my enemy, for they are innately evil.
jake
10mo ago
Tyranny underwritten by corporations/financial interests.
Lockdowns, mask mandates, mass testing and compulsory immunotherapy are each tyranny. Restrictions to movement and the operation of businesses and of course the money spent to acquire all manner of medical equipment and supplies and pharmaceutical interventions produced significant gains for major multinationals.
Trotsky's actual definition, poor as he articulated it, is just anti-communist populism. But that's not what anybody means when they say fascism.
jake
10mo ago
In May 2020 there was a real chance my mother was going to die alone in a hospital room because of fascist policies enacted to stop transmission of an illness that doesn't kill people. Day after week after month after year I still see people entirely seriously using the term fascist to refer to those most opposed to pound-for-pound the worst lie in the history of this country. Of course I know they don't truly understand what fascism is, if they understood it, they could recognize it; if they recognized it, they would realize everybody screaming fascist over the last 10 years are those most inclined to supporting and perpetrating fascism. I know it just means to them "this thing is viewed by my ingroup as bad, and with this term I am signaling to my ingroup that I am one of them." It's galling, at times I've felt the temptation of a rage and frenzy, but I'm pretty good at keeping a cool head and I know when it comes down to it the people saying these things are deeply unserious.
You provide no substance here; the story of Carlson's supposed texts is old and baseless. Dominion sliced apart internal communications and arranged them to falsely portray things like Carlson hating Trump. His frustration has been known and as a non-federal-voter with limited subject interaction with Trump supporters, my impression has been they too view him as not delivering much on what they had hoped. If he's actually grifting, well his latest grift is getting Alex Jones back on Twitter and being Melania's pick for VP so I imagine Trump might be wondering if he could get any more Tucker-tier grifters on his side. On the prosecution, Carlson voicing concerns is easily explained; he believes the system is sufficiently corrupt to baselessly convict. I'm sure /pol/ is full of the blackpilled who would describe moral certainty of Trump's innocence and equally of his inevitable conviction. Nybbler might have even said it here already. Thinking that means any of them believe he's guilty is kafka shit.
But that's not what I'm here for, this is: is the American government bursting at the seams with depraved criminals? You can answer wrongly, but it's yes.
I have a postulate I put here a while back detailing my view on election fraud, most briefly it's "If possible, certain." The basis is that depravity. I saw someone here last week thinking apropos "They would [defraud voters] if they could" a suitable response is nevertheless "Sure, where's the evidence?" But no, you don't understand, if you truly understand how they are criminals who will take whatever they can the only rational consequent is "Can they prove they didn't?" And so likewise with the prosecution of Trump when you truly understand the overwhelming criminality present within the American government it's not the midwit's pattern-match of "whataboutism" it's the necessary consequent of "Can everyone involved prove their allegiance to justice?" Nope, they can't. So what do you go to, "He's a unique threat to the constitution"? Government organizations and taxpayer dollars censored speech, 1A out. The left is quite clear on guns, 2A out. NSA soldiers spying on homes and American citizen communications, 3A and 4A out. Or to cut to the quick, believing people who don't pay taxes should get to vote, that's the foundational ethos of the country out. The law doesn't matter to these people and the constitution doesn't matter to these people. (And please, I speak not the map but the territory.) What remains?
Trump won't be convicted. If and when this reaches the supreme court they'll rule 8-1 on what could be the utterly flimsiest of procedural issues that won't otherwise be immediately applicable as precedent for however many thousands of cases. The 8 members of actual merit will understand this is all politics, and so those 8 members of actual merit, appreciating their places in history and/as the only people with real power and real principle in 21st century America, will decline from participating in fuckery befitting the Roman senate.
So, if you too understand this truly, that this is entirely politically motivated, then you won't waste my time with the unserious person's poor gotchas or crimestop pattern-matches. Trump could have broken the law, probably even, so arcane is much of American law, but the law doesn't matter to those prosecuting him so why waste everybody's time here talking like it does? Trump does however represent a threat to their particular order, and that finally brings us to the only thing worth discussing in this entire affair: of Trump or those on the side of his prosecution, who deserves power?
My mother survived, and a politician I campaigned for as a bright-eyed youth got my dad in the hospital room. I'll back him forever for that just as I will never forget those who made it so I had to make that call.
jake
11mo ago
idiosyncrasy
I've actually grown tired of it, but I've been dealing with some monster writer's block lately and was hoping the "looser" nocaps would help get the ball rolling again.
jake
11mo ago
the human terrain does act rationally, historically, when smalltime warlords make contact with the empire. fight and everyone dies, or submit and live. "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." and the palestinians are not the neutral melians.
if they're astute enough to make moves for the reasons you suggest that's worse, they have no excuse to not know they have no realpolitik win condition. they kill a few jews and get bombed in response, some win. their dream scenario of a land push victory that kills a lot of jews ends with every nuke israel has and 100 million dead arabs.
the greater their intelligence as actors then the necessarily more irrationally-driven-by-jew-hate. you can't beat israel. if as a people they were actually smart they'd start cutting their sleeping leaders' throats. but they don't. supposing israel has some hand in supplying and motivating their own quasi-insurgency is also farcical, i see no reason to doubt israel would take final peace without further bloodshed, and i am left, especially if they possess the faculties you give them, with seeing people of such hate they would rather murder jews than live in a functioning state.
blowback risks? nah. the cause of blowback isn't brutality, it's not enough brutality. there's not a 21st century solution to peace in the middle east. it could be decades, but israel is eventually going to stop listening to outside complaining and start responding to terrorism with wildly disproportionate force. when their neighbors know a single guy sneaking into a house will result in a dozen sorties per dead kid and there isn't a power in the world who can get israel to stop, then there will be peace.
right, the point: pleading for israel to stop almost assuredly causes more deaths, not less.
jake
1yr ago
You equivocate; on the entity you call "Union" and conflate with its successor and on what "allegiance" meant to the man. Lee considered himself Virginian first, this is fact, the federalized gestalt US and notion of American first not existing until the 20th century, also fact.
And when I point out that “War of Northern Aggression” is a revisionist attempt to gloss over all the ways the South started it, your response is to cry Both Sides and insist that Southern suffering is overlooked.
This is very bad. It is low-effort, uncharitable and antagonistic. In a discussion about causes of the civil war, the south suffering from economic policies enacted to benefit the north is wholly relevant. Your poor mockery amounts to "but other than taxes, what did the south have to complain about?" Frame this in context just-antebellum America would know well: "But other than taxes, what did the 13 colonies have to complain about?" Or most crudely but certainly most accurately, "Aside from all that shit the north did to the south, what did the north do to the south?"
I can’t even tell why you’re quoting “die to free black men” as if it’s something I asserted. Again, I did not mention slavery at all until you brought it up. Perhaps it was buried in one of the sources you’ve tossed out? No?
Again low effort, uncharitable and antagonistic.
The Lincoln and Lee quotes were provided because they alone settle this matter. The President of the United States and the final commander of the Confederate Forces could have only been more plain in conveying "Slavery is not the cause of this war" if they said that verbatim. You, or rather those whose words you repeat, go to incredible lengths with total institutional backing and control to call liar on both sides.
You claim it is ahistorical revisionism to dispute the relevance of slavery: the south suffered tremendously under tax policy enacted to benefit the north
You claim it is ahistorical revisionism to dispute the relevance of slavery: the Corwin amendment would have made slavery constitutionally protected
You claim it is ahistorical revisionism to dispute the relevance of slavery: two northern states refused to ratify the 13th amendment
You claim it is ahistorical revisionism to dispute the relevance of slavery: northerners would not have died to free blacks from bondage
If two factions were poised for war and the supposed cause at issue was commonly viewed with apathy by one faction while the oppositional faction could have achieved their goals peacefully, why did they still go to war?
You must either contrive some many-stepped rationalization or take the simplest explanation: the cause of the war was something else.
It wasn't Fort Sumter. First shot, yes, in a war that was inevitable. A first shot there is no controversy(archive) in saying resulted from Lincoln's maneuvering. Please fully read that article as I expect the title may provoke misconstruing. A plain reading will enlighten you to that inevitability of conflict.
I hope you apprise yourself of my history here, the image you have of me is false. You do not know how I think, you do not know why I chose to comment on this. It was not to make demons of the north, nor martyrs of the south. I'll leave you on that, as your poor behavior has made me disinterested in dignifying your words again after this final reply.
jake
1yr ago
I would have responded to this earlier but I didn't want to ignore your first line, and there it looks like you meant to include a link.
Pleading for clarity while citing Wikipedia in a two-sentence reply is poor decorum.
Yes, the field has been captured by those united in ideological opposition to any who argue the north shares blame in the war. The north as righteous crusaders is their orthodoxy, one which quite naturally requires such suppression of dissent when individuals like Lincoln himself so immediately and totally dispel their false history of the war in the quote already given:
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the union without freeing any slaves I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”
Lincoln governed with extreme use of nonexistent power. He would have addressed all those grievances he had power (or contrived power) to solve. Had slavery alone been the issue, he could have simply done nothing at all as the Corwin amendment would have prevented secession. Had tariffs then been the remaining issue, Lincoln would have found a way to lift them unilaterally or else pressured congress to removing them, perhaps even pursuing beneficiary changes to those once hurt by the tariffs. But decades of northern antipathy toward the south and the sum of harms resultant meant the final grievance of the south became the Union government itself. They were no longer interested, and indeed no longer consented to its governance. With that, Lincoln's only remaining option was war. The south fired the first shot, but Union soldiers remained at Fort Sumter in hopes exactly that would happen.
The words of a man with allegiance to, and respect for, a higher federal Union
A Union that no longer exists, a Union that had he fully felt his own prescient words he would have fought against to his dying breath:
“I can only say that while I have considered the preservation of the constitutional power of the General Government to be the foundation of our peace and safety at home and abroad, I yet believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the States and to the people, not only essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard of the continuance of a free government. I consider it as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the States into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.
(And a Union that had all Americans of the time known would follow, would have themselves seen Washington burned to the ground.)
Ahistorical revisionism is ignoring the economic destruction the north wrought on the south and the nullification crisis that spurred decades before South Carolina seceded; it's ignoring their secession despite the Corwin amendment; it's ignoring the refusal of New Jersey and Delaware to ratify the 13th; it's ignoring how so many of those who would "die to free black men" went on to murder, often first raping, untold numbers of Native Americans in the decades that followed, atrocities led by such wonderful Union officers as George Custer. Ahistorical revisionism is most of all the idea whites would fight a war in the 1800s over the quality of life of blacks. It beggars belief so incredibly dissonant positions as the supposed totality of racism to this day, only finally being truly addressed, can be held simultaneously with the belief racism weighed so heavily on the hearts of American men 160 years ago to be the sole basis, absolutely-no-other-reason-whatsoever, for nearly a million of them to murder each other.
And that ignores so much on just the financial interests involved in the conflict. Still, there is nothing difficult, for there is nothing truthful in denying the part slavery played in the civil war; reciprocally, only falsehoods are found in asserting that without slavery secessionist war would have never happened. Rather, it as as we so often see ("Wet streets cause rain"), if slavery were truly the only issue, the war would have never started.
jake
1yr ago
Hundreds of thousands died because he, and people like him, chose to stand up for a garbage cause. Nothing personal about it.
This is the outcome of pernicious lies about American history; not yours, though the use of "traitor" reveals so much of the ignorance in those speaking. Lee saw no superior allegiance to the Union because the gestalt US is a postbellum creation. Today states have such say in mutual governance because of the vast expansion of the federal government--both disastrously alien ideas in the 19th century. Slavery was the flashpoint on the magazine of this idea as the north asserted previously nonexistent authority on the south but were slavery not at issue it would have been something else. As insulting as you and many may feel at the idea of southerners fighting for states' rights, it is far more insulting to be told 19th century Americans would die in mass to free slaves, an insult not least of all because so many weren't American.
It was a war over the government of the country, federal or decentralized, and while the gestalt US has on balance made the world a better place (though this wanes by the day) than would be if the US had stayed decentralized, the term "War of Northern Aggression" still most accurately describes the conflict and is the reason men so principled as Lee found reason to oppose the north.
“If I owned the four millions of slaves, I would cheerfully sacrifice them to the preservation of the Union, but to lift my hand against my own State and people is impossible.” (Same article as above)
jake
1yr ago
I'm glad you commented on this because I wanted to ask something in the same area of a judge imposing a gag order.
It's always seemed to me that charges of "Obstruction of Justice" or "Contempt of Court" are small tyrannies of the justice system. For obstruction because I view it as only applicable to what is already a crime--theft, assault, murder--where it would be considered an aggravating factor, but that otherwise one cannot obstruct justice in itself as a crime, such as by nonviolently resisting arrest (fleeing police). For contempt because in part I view it as a fundamental right to be contemptuous of court, and more because of examples such as H. Beatty Chadwick who was imprisoned for 14 years for failure to comply with a court order. It does seem like he hid the money, but that the judge & courts could do nothing but threaten him with prison strikes me as "a 'you' problem"; that his "crime" was in no measure deserving of incarceration, or if so, certainly not 14 years; that if it is supposed to serve to discourage others from doing the same that breaks us into the topic of ordered alimony and the enforcement thereof as a reasonable interest of justice and, ah, lol. lmao.
I'm open to being wrong on the theory level but it seems the practice level is full of abuse.
jake
1yr ago
The pictures attached are identical prompts submitted to DALLE-2 a year ago and DALLE-3 a few days ago.
Visual art is to my great amusement in the midst of the purist communist revolution in history. In just a few short years the haves and have-nots of artistic talent will be equal in a way no living humans have ever been equal; ah, patronage, patronage . . . man, how many art schools will even exist in 20 years?
/images/16966985571948996.webp
/images/16966985575455763.webp
(my politics are whomever brings the future where i can use this software's successor to make animated shows)
jake
1yr ago
Great comment. How does the ban work in practice? Still simple enough to acquire for those interested?
jake
1yr ago
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1365902/?page=3
Rats, repeatedly.
jake
1yr ago
"Hoax" is the critical term. He didn't say "the climate change agenda is profoundly misguided and by design can't solve its claimed problems." He said it's a hoax, a malicious deception, the same "we don't need to do anything about it" as just saying climate change is a hoax. The reason he didn't say "climate change is a hoax" is because he didn't want that floating around as a weaponizable quote but you reading that into his tweet is the benefit anyone could see coming from his particular phrasing, something that is once again my entire point in this line of discussion.
Meanwhile, his stated policy does say he thinks it's closer to the "Chinese lie" side of hoax.
Drill, frack & burn coal: abandon the climate cult & unshackle nuclear energy (Heading 02)
Aw man, cmon, what is the western culture war but a religious schism? Those high IQ people--specifically those within who would describe themselves as ideologically congruous with the modern American left--don't believe in God, transubstantive atonement (exactly) or afterlives as such, but they believe in sin, original sin and metaphysical moral obligation. They are Godless Christians, they view the world with fundamentally Christian moral framing, they act essentially as Christians act, insofar as they are Godless, they judge others for their failing to behave as what they consider proper of Christians. They have holy days, religious celebrations, sacraments, saints, martyrs, heretics and blasphemers (and the punishing thereof) and excommunication. They are recognized by the state and they hold tremendous power within the state. I am not being strict with terms or pedantic; in fact referring to them as "still technically irreligious" would require severe equivocation.
The relevance of this is in rebuke of the idea that "greater" intelligence relates with a proportionate decrease in religiousness when the evidence shows firmly it does not. They still take the impossible as possible in faith, they still need and yearn for religion and the moral guidance it provides. You're a smart guy, all of this is an understanding I know you're capable of reaching through reasoning. Why then doubt this of Ramaswamy?
You fired off a comment asserting he's a lying atheist with no effort to substantiate your belief until called on it. If you were seriously considering his religiosity it would be in your first comment and I would have felt no reason to reply. Your initial low-effort is consequent of your belief that he couldn't possibly be religious, something that shows again in your response as you again fail to consider how you could be wrong. I could be wrong for the exact reasons you list, but I understand how this would make him unsuitable for the highest office.
Look at what he's said and find another serious candidate other than Trump who even comes close. There's not one, but the strength isn't just the novelty of those positions from someone with a radically different image than Trump. There's strength in the intelligence his specific words indicate he possesses. Where you see a "white lie" or "fib" I see someone who is deeply considerate of and articulate on many matters save one and your attempt to excuse that one inadequacy is poor.
As I said to another, if his "God exists" statement is a lie, it means he is either unable or unwilling to endorse Christianity in a way so as to not lie. If he is unable to endorse Christianity without lying then he is significantly less intelligent than I assessed, and if he is unwilling to endorse Christianity without lying, all of his positions must be reevaluated within the maximally cynical frame. That he is making a play for pure power and is at risk of shedding all stated positions for political utility. His strength as a political figure comes in honestly presenting himself to the movement that has formed around Trump as of the like mind with them. Any willingness to lie for political gain is a grim indictment of his leadership, regardless of a "protection" against being Hindu-coded.
On that, I can't ding you for having the larger-world image of the United States, but as someone who lives in deeply red, deeply Christian America, the idea of evangelicals still being a meaningful demographic in the electorate is a bad joke. It's insulting, really, every time I've been subjugated to the inanity of unironic usages of the term "Christo-Fascism." The Church has no power. Past that, political lines are swiftly approaching pure "because fuck the outgroup" motivations. If Ramaswamy is on the ballot there is not a meaningful number of Republican voters who would pass on him even if he were known as a Hindu or an Atheist. If he goes all-in on supporting Trump and for whatever reason the latter is unable to run, between Trump's support, the (R) beside his name and being up against Biden as a non-Trump face, he'll steamroll the general with no whit of obstacle from his personal beliefs regarding religion.
There is an extremely high chance he's on the ballot come November 2024. If he is, he will be the next President. That's why this is so important. We're not quibbling over the positions of an obscure candidate, he's the frontrunner after Trump which means after 2024 he also has a very good chance of winning in 2028. Everyone here should be looking as seriously as I am at what the man who has the highest chance of being if not the 47th, the 48th POTUS, is really saying.
jake
1yr ago
They're the same statement, his is the more intelligent way of phrasing it. This is my whole point: he shows clear care in framing his positions, meaning he could endorse Christianity without lying about what he believes.
jake
1yr ago
Yeah that was verbose.
Ramaswamy is a very smart, very successful guy who takes positions like "climate change is a hoax" and "we should give Israel less money." He knows what he's saying, he has a real ethos and speaks from it. Opening a list of tenets with "God exists" is endorsing religion, and since this is the US, it's endorsing Christianity, and he knows this. Why would he lie about what he personally believes while nevertheless endorsing the church when he could just not lie and endorse the church? Unwilling or unable, either would disqualify him.
jake
1yr ago
I think his claim to believe in God is one of those useful lies to the voter base rather than anything he sincerely believes in
This is the second time I've seen this idea expressed. It's been funny both times because both times the commenters were praising Ramaswamy while they dismissed his statement realpolitik, not realizing they, you, are insulting the man. There's a reason he said "God exists" besides actually believing it, it's the idea he could have said without lying: "The Christian Church was foundational to modern civilization and remains the moral basis for all popular discussions of ethics, including those among individuals on the left whom espouse belief in obligate Christian treatment of others and not only sin but original sin and the perpetual atonement thereof. I forever reject their Godless branch of Christianity."
His religiosity would remain ambiguous, and were he an atheist it would mean he is not the sort of man to open a key political statement with a lie. "I'd totally vote for that [not-too-clever grifter]" isn't much for praise.
I'm no proselytizer, I'm not the right material for it and this isn't the place, not with its certain decorum. Decorum like I must be charitable, that I must take your comment as made in earnest and good-faith and originating from reason. Good-faith enough, yes, but the problem I face reading so much of the by-atheist, on-atheism comments here, like you saying Ramaswamy couldn't possibly be religious, is they do not originate from reason. You say this of Ramaswamy because of the solely emotional importance apropos your self-concept that intelligent men ought not be religious. Yet it takes little searching in our past to uncover rich fields of brilliant and highly religious men; it takes no searching at all to see the greatness of western civilization, directly resultant from biotruths Christianity identified and curtailed where degradative and saw flourish where beneficiary. What else is this but the final testament of transcendental intelligence? What would someone counter with, "appeal to tradition"? It worked then, it doesn't need to now, because now we "know better"? Okay--for its know-better Godless Christianity, Western Europe and the UK have maybe 25 years before war returns when the movements that rose a century ago rise again for bloodshed that will only be stopped with whichever side achieving permanent victory. At least we knew better.
edit: realized i forgot my own point. none of that list will have 1/10th the image boost to the right as him saying "if 2020 was a legitimate election, it wasn't for lack of ability and willingness to steal it."
looks like rams gets why trump exists, unlike the rest. trump's continued utility as a political figure is being the single strongest signal of antiestablishment alignment. "your boos mean nothing" and all. the antiestablishment vote is what puts him ahead. it's why desantis flamed out attacking him, he can't attack and look like he's not just another stooge. rams' best strategic move is probably a "united" divide and conquer: loudly and unconditionally backing trump/more or less categorically support trump positions, including the high shibboleth of fraud, which in his rhetoric would really be pure antiestablishment signal. he'd be instantly unacceptable to the ruling powers and so the guaranteed second-runner behind orange man; brown orange man. rams does that and he's got 2028 on lock, 2024 if all the lawfare succeeds. not to mention a real shot at destroying the GOP.
not that i intend or ever expect to vote for rams. but years of annoyance at people, even sometimes here, not getting why trump is still in play means i can't help but have some respect by the ones who do. especially when they're a politician. middle finger molotov. that's trump. always was.
jake
1yr ago
guess this is the only comment i can reply to.
you raging about threads here is a tough look. same for deleting your top-level, something @ZorbaTHut & co should block as an option, at least when the thread it's in is the weekly.
i don't know of anywhere online where discussion is as good as the motte. i see twitter commentators racking up followers and media appearances/cred for observations that are at best watered down versions of ideas posted here years ago. it's all i think of with the hanania hubub. his pieces i've read, not many, would receive bipartisan scorn if posted by a rando here. yet i see people here treating him with respect and i know a lot of that is only because he's a known name. it's not his old and just bad arguments, it's certainly not his asinine leaps in reasoning or pure worse writing. not when a lot of people here could go on twitter and make a name for themselves, and i think more than a few would do better than hanania. how couldn't they? he'd be a motte washout.
i maybe get some bit of what you're feeling, i try to comment only when i think i have something to add. but i'm tired of people being critical of this place because they can't get a handle on their own emotions, whatever the angry/nihilist/impotent root. yeah in some cases, by no means all, quality dips here because a matter's clearly settled and there's no good faith arguing to be done. or to counter my own point, because it's been hashed out and explored enough everybody knows the positions and without anything novel it suffers from repetitiveness. but in whole, the motte is better at so novel and astute posts than all of substack. i'd like to find the time and impetus to contribute one of those, maybe you should strive for that too. posting something truly interesting, not attention-seeking complaining on the meta level of the best place for real discussion on the english-speaking internet.
also--scott stepped back from this community because for all his brilliance, he greatly lacks conviction.
jake
1yr ago
it's very interesting how you recognized the problem at the heart of the show the good place without having seen it. i put off watching for years because the only thing i knew was its setting in heaven and i had doubts on how that was going to be handled. eventually i did watch it, all the way through but not as a binge, i enjoyed it until the ending.
the mistake ZHPL made, the same as @self_made_human, and one that's understandable but not in the best way from people who didn't watch it, is thinking it's an atheist work. if ZHPL did watch it and missed it, bad look. it is ostensibly atheist: heaven with no God, hell with no devil, what's going on? it makes no sense, to disregard God is to disregard the source of objectivity and in the context of a show about the domain of God it renders that show nonsense, it destroys everything. i don't mean this on a level of modern soullessness or even just logically. the grand narrative of the show has a God-shaped hole, it's nothing without it. thing is, the hole isn't supposed to be there.
imagine a fan cut of fight club. the sole purpose of the cut is removing the last reveal of tyler durden's identity. it would leave in everything it could without it being explicit that "pitt is norton's alter-ego." this cut would probably work well enough, it would seem off, like it was building to something and the bombings at the end don't quite resolve that feeling, but it'd have beginning middle and apparent end.
that's what happened with the good place. the show lacks the fundamental truth of the world of the story, and in a show about heaven and hell that can't just be skipped. michael schur is a smart guy, he wasn't ignoring this, it's there the whole time, i think the writers didn't know how schur intended for the show to end because schur didn't want to accidentally ruin the show with a cliched and bad ending.
i'm certain it was supposed to end one of these ways:
-
the whole show was eleanor in purgatory. the ending was going to be her realizing something was still missing, but how can heaven be missing something? so we get the final twist: she's still not in heaven, she was never in heaven, and what she's missing is God. she'd pass through the door, find herself in actual heaven, and meet God.
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reality in the show--hell, mundane, divine--is a simulation, and when eleanor passed through the door at the end she would have met those running the simulation.
the season 1 finale is famous and the narratively perfect bookend with the s4 series finale would be her meeting God, or "god", contrast with the dissonant ending we get. ZHPL criticizes parts of the show as escalating soullessness, like the character of the judge, but it's so obvious as meta-level escalating absurdity. schur takes it farther and farther into nonsense to the point the judge character is as good as schur screaming at the audience "You still don't get it! The characters still don't understand what's actually going on! They still don't see the fundamental truth!" The first intended ending has to be done perfectly or it nukes the show's legacy. The second is the choice if he can't pull off the first, but then it becomes the "too smart for its own good" ending.
schur went with door to oblivion, why risk the legacy of it-was-all-a-dream-ing his show? but that's the problem with the good place: it's so damn obvious it was all a dream.
Aw man bummed I missed this. Almost a month late to the comment, a week late for Christmas. Don't care, call it long-prep for next Christmas.
King of citypop Tatsuro Yamashita's 1983 Christmas Eve. His most famous track, the easy listening better-of-muzak with Christmas vibe layered on perfectly. A fundamentally pleasant, hopeful song that even being of secular Japan feels Christian.
Out of Norway, Röyksopp's 2010 Le Cantique de Noël. A thoroughly unexpected given-their-discography, ethereal instrumental of Adolphe Adam's Cantique de Noël, which American listeners who would know would know as "O Holy Night."
The first Tyler Joseph song on the list and the first sung Christian carol, 2014 O Come, O come, Emmanuel. The emcee comes back out to say "Wow, that was dark." Dark and beautiful it is, like Carol of the Bells.
As for Carol of the Bells, composer Calvin Jones' 2022 arrangement of the original Ukrainian Shcedryk. While full of liberties in Jones' interpretation it's replaced the Mormon Tabernacle Choir as my favorite version.
Tyler Joseph again for Twenty One Pilot's 2021 Christmas Saves the Year. Lighter lyrical fare than Joseph's usual writing but certainly still meaningful to the spirit of the holiday.
Kaskade, who I'd think most people outside of Utah don't know is Mormon, appropriately released his second Christmas album last month. As a fan of electronic music and particularly his work in house and its subgenres I've quite enjoyed both albums, with my favorite off the latter as Angels We Have Heard. (Off-Christmas music, Kaskade previously worked with The Moth & The Flame on the excellent Haunt Me)
aaaand oh I gotta round off with Carly Rae Jepsen since she covered Last Christmas. I think Jepsen's at her best on higher BPM and-so higher energy tracks, but it's still good.
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