crushedoranges
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User ID: 111
crushedoranges
4d ago
If it's a straw man, then it's a very common one: it's a cliche Redditism, at the very least. Blue Tribe will always call their enemies stupid: even Vance is called a Appalachian hillbilly when he is arguably one of the most self-made men of our times. It stems from the belief that their enemies are stupid and evil. You can't possibly be good and smart and oppose what they do.
When Arnaud Amalric said 'Kill them all, God will know his own', there was a recognition that at least some people in the city were good Christians and not heretics. It's an olive branch from the Red Tribe to have at least some tokens within the institutions to have them not recognized as partisan enemies: a university full of gay race communists has no Reds within it and can be attacked without regret or pause.
Well, congratulations, academia: you drove out all the witches, and now Trumpemort is here to destroy you. Universities have lost tax-free exemptions and their endowment because of racial prejudice before: certainly the universities have uncontroversially engaged in such as the Asian lawsuits have revealed. If they're not even capable of denouncing their own radicals then what are they good for? As Pol Pot wisely said: 'to keep you is no benefit: to destroy you is no loss.'
crushedoranges
6d ago
Those extremist strawmen are already well represented in American academia. You can easily find academics who are in favor of open borders, the complete abolition of gender, men not having the ability to vote, draconic gun control, and voluntary white extinctionism. (Flat earthism is the only one that doesn't belong.)
The fact that these viewpoints are tolerated while the slightest bit of pushback to global race communism isn't is strong evidence that this measure is necessary.
You misunderstand: it's not DEI for conservatives, but ensuring that there's at least one witch in every panel and body of importance. There doesn't need to be parity, or quotas, or anything like that. Just the minority report. If you don't consent to the witch, then you're not really in favor of academic freedom: you're a monoculture of our enemies that needs to be blown up and you certainly don't need tax dollars that are paid by witches. If even the smallest of token concessions are impossible to negotiate, it's time to start indiscriminately nuking civilian targets.
After all, it's Hogwarts: School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and not Harvard: School of Progcraft and Libbery.
crushedoranges
6d ago
American pirated versions of gacha games that give everything for free and have all the girls say 'Long Live Great President Donald Trump' would be a cultural victory similar in impact to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
crushedoranges
7d ago
The barn door has been flung open and sent flying a dozen miles by the tornado at this point. Trump really should ask his critics whether or not they'd prefer him to send Reaper drones after illegal immigrants: maybe they can patrol the border and fire hellfire missiles at groups of people crossing the border at odd times of the day.
If the US government can extrajudicially murder you with a drone (Anwar al-Awlaki) who was an actual American citizen, then it's difficult to argue that its remit is constrained in alien nationals abroad.
Granted, the way he was removed was probably not good, procedurally, but once you're off American soil, questions of jurisdiction render that a moot point.
crushedoranges
9d ago
That's a pretty non-von Neumann thought to have, my fellow clone of von Neumann.
crushedoranges
10d ago
Scott Alexander has transitioned from someone with deep insight into a guy who makes obnoxious, Facebook-tier takes that are meant to be nodded to and not thought about. Obviously people care far more about what systems do than what they were created for! Only a pendant (maybe with extremely nerdy glasses) would nasally insist 'it was made with the best of intentions! that should matter!'
Which I would reply: get back to laying the bricks for the HSR to Bakersfield-Tartarus, dude.
crushedoranges
11d ago
It's getting annoying enough that I say there should be a rule that deleting a top-level post is grounds for a permanent ban, but that's probably not a strong enough deterrent.
Rather, the ability to delete a post should not be given to new accounts. I'm not sure if that's possible to do, admin-wise, but it should be considered.
crushedoranges
12d ago
China lacks both interest and ability of being world hegemon, and you wouldn't want them to be anyway. Even a bad American hegemon is restrained by Western cultural mores and ethics: the Chinese have no such limitation.
Multipolarity isn't some sort of kumbaya where everyone gets along and does trade: it's great power competition and world wars.
crushedoranges
14d ago
When all of those Silicon Valley oligarchs came in I was worried that Trump would sell out and abandon his populist roots.
Well, that didn't happen. I suppose it's a matter of perspective whether or not you see it as a good thing or a bad thing.
crushedoranges
14d ago
This is the death blow to the Democratic party nomenklatura: if it goes through then it will be Trump's Great Purge, utterly destroying the federal government as an institution for generations. Even if Vance loses in 2028 there will be nothing left to rebuild. No one will make a career that can be destroyed on a whim every four years. We will see a return to the spoils system where government appointments are cycled in and out with every new administration as payoffs to supporters.
crushedoranges
16d ago
Moving forward, everyone should pepper into their posts the words 'based', 'cringe', 'redpilled', 'pepe' and 'kino' because no LLM would ever use it in their speech. Embrace the skibidi toilet of authenticity!
crushedoranges
17d ago
That was the advent of social media: elites could no longer gatekeep the masses. In previous eras media elites controlled both context and expression so that the political elite could pretend to have a popular mandate (because that is the basis of legitimacy in a democracy). Even in the so called golden era of democratic norms it could only exist because it was tightly controlled.
The masses were never wise, temperate, or well-informed. The current failsons of the western world came into power naively believing in their own liberal rhetoric: and thus, they have no defense against the crudity of the people they ostensibly lead. They can't even muster a defense without twisting themselves into knots as Hanania does, trying to bring forth the nanoangstrom of difference between bad populism and good democracy.
The truth is cold and unforgiven. There never was such a thing.
crushedoranges
18d ago
The problem with a less educated support base is that it simply has a less accurate understanding of the world. In fact, I think the problem is much worse than a simple analysis of voting patterns by educational attainment would suggest. Populists not only often fail to appeal to college graduates as a broad class, but they do particularly poorly among the small slice of the public that is the most informed about policy and current events, like journalists and academics.
Thinking that the electorate MUST regain the confidence of the elite is a notion reserved only for the most biting of satires and Hanania's midwittery.
See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Lösung
News flash: the people have ALWAYS been stupid, always been short-sighted, provincial and backwater in sensibility and lacking in education. And in a democratic system, their votes are equal to your well-educated and informed one. So you better have a convincing argument to sway them to your side! Use what they say, rhetoric? The classic politician's art?
What is presented here is not even an argument. It is simply a fact. Most people are uninformed. You can't govern a country as if it consisted entirely of reporters from the New York Times. Any argument against populism is inherently a argument against democracy. The masses chose their own elites in defiance of reality or whatever standard you might impose on them. There is no argument against this that does not end in 'some animals are more equal than others'.
Hanania is merely restating what the Greeks have always known, which puts into doubt the depth and quality of his education. If democracy requires the electorate to be highly educated elite human capital like himself, perhaps democracy is a BAD IDEA because such a thing will never happen. If he would just flat out state that he wants democracy but only for himself and his pals, it'd be more honest but he is not in the business of honesty, is he?
crushedoranges
25d ago
crushedoranges
25d ago
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.
crushedoranges
28d 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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.
Haidt's foundations of morality is a good basis for this.
Imagine you are in a kindergarden and you open up your lunchbox and find out your mother has packed you a candy bar, and the kid immediately besides you starts whining to you to share (fairness). But you were given this chocolate bar by your mother, and it is yours (liberty). Eventually, the kindergarden teacher comes over and obliges you to share with the whole class (authority).
Now, I bet you can come up with results where fairness is liberty, and sometimes that does line up. But in many cases, equality to all means coercion to some, and to the conservative mind that is intolerable. It's a difference in terminal values that is irreconcible, but it's not evil. And if experts (authority) are not on the side of liberty, then it doesn't matter how much they know (or claim to know.)
The kindergarden teacher may have infinite knowledge compared to a kindergardener but it never feels great to be coerced to do the right thing. There is no such thing as an expert in moral authority (the absence of the philosophical numina known as God.) The experts, lacking omniscience, are merely imposing their moral preferences on you without attempting to convince you and that is fundamentally against freedom as a value.
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