JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
20hr ago
The thing is, reducing violent crime is not that hard. I mean not brining it to zero, but bringing it to a place where it's not an everyday concern to a layperson. It has been done, and it has been undone, and in both cases it not a function of genetics or races or any of that stuff. It's just the question of resources and consistent unyielding enforcement. You just need to catch the criminals and put them in jail and keep them there. You don't need to analyze their genes or skin color to do that. It is true that people who un-do it, very much look at genes and skin color as a justification of why they are not doing the right thing, but there's no reason to uphold their framework and only change the signs. It is possible to toss the whole broken framework altogether and replace it with one that looks at the actual behavior and not genetics. You don't put people in jail for their genes, just for their crimes. If you do that, you don't need any HBD. I mean, you can still do a PhD in theorizing about what causes people to do crime, but practically it doesn't matter - if the criminals are in jail, nobody cares about their biology. Everybody cares that they are in jail.
JarJarJedi
20hr ago
And you would be right to do so, if indeed that happened. But it's not happening, and the chances of that happening, however much any random ranging racist wants it, are pretty low nowdays. And that's a good thing.
JarJarJedi
20hr ago
But I don't know, when I see someone essentially laying out a justification for bringing back slavery, how am I supposed to respond, as a black person?
Block them. Or, if you are stronger person than me, ignore them. Or, if you are a real life hero, a model to us all and an enviable example to many, calmly and artfully demolish their argument. But calling them slurs would probably only please them (and the inevitable ban that follows would delight them even more). If your enemy loses it, that means you are getting to them, and that's a kind of winning. To some, the only kind they could ever get.
I'LL NEVER BE ACCEPT BEING A SLAVE!!!
But is it really what is happening? I mean, what are the chances for the reincarnation of slavery in the US, practically? I would say, zero. I mean, if the current civilization collapses - even less, even only the Western civilization collapses, and the US territory is captured by another civilization - then the slavery would return. In fact, the slavery exists right now, in our times, outside the West. But as long as the current United States exist, and are rooted in the Western civilization values, the return of the slavery is impossible.
Thus, these people are not a real threat to you, at least as far as return of slavery is concerned. They are a threat to you as far as making you appear weak, incoherent and unable to argue your side.
Am I expected to lay out some "well have you considered..."-ass intellectual rebuttal, Am I supposed to beg and plead for my own rights?
Actually, yes, if you choose to participate in a forum like this (a free choice), some kind of intellectual-ass rebuttal is what is expected. That's what this particular place is for. Nobody could ever force you to play this game, moreover, nobody would think less of you if you opted out, but if you're playing then those are the rules. You don't have to plead or beg - you can appear as strong and forceful and confident as you like - but just throwing abuse around is not going to do any good.
JarJarJedi
21hr ago
it is quite sad that the book will never have had a proper movie adaptation
There were several attempts, as far as I know, but none was completed and released. I am sad about it too, it would make a decent SciFi, even with world-building potential - one could make even TV series with several seasons out of the setting, with not much difficulty. I would watch it, and certainly better than squeezing the last juices out of old IP that the entertainment execs are mining now. But that's just my opinion.
JarJarJedi
21hr ago
Tarkovsky's Stalker has very little to do with Roadside Picnic except for the basic setup and the overarching idea in the very broadest of senses. But the style, the storytelling, the means, the approach - all completely different. You have to watch it for Tarkovsky, not for the plot or setting, and if you're not into this particular kind of art, it's not for you. The Roadside Picnic has much more generic appeal, and while Strtugatsky brothers are certainly masters of their craft as writers, the driver there is the story, not the art. That's the big difference between the two.
JarJarJedi
21hr ago
Sounds fun! I liked Disco Elysium (and finished it), though I admit it was a bit depressing. Even though I played it straight and one can say after the Big Event - if I understand correctly what you mean - I kind of ended up on top, but still the overall thing is pretty bleak. Intentionally so, as I understand.
Thank you for a very detailed review!
JarJarJedi
21hr ago
and perhaps have a bad benchmark like "women are crazy," which leads to "this woman is acting crazy, that's nothing unusual because all women are like that"
Fortunately, I know for a fact it is not so (I am married to one of the counter-examples, but I know more than one). But it could be just my personal luck, could happen that I would never meet any.
JarJarJedi
22hr ago
It more misinterpreted than massaged - unemployment tracks people who are currently looking for work (at least notionally) but haven't found it yet. By definition - unlike, as you correctly noted, workforce participation numbers - they do not include those who, for any reason, are not looking. There are actually 6 official measures of labor utilization: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm and plenty of unofficial ones.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Turns out, I misremembered Prairieland attack, and the person who was shot in the neck was a police officer, not ICE agent, and he survived. So they tried to murder ICE agents, but they only succeeded in wounding a police officer, and murdering two other illegal immigrants: Miguel Angel Garcia-Hernandez and Norlan Guzman Fuentes (in a different attack). I was wrong to say antifa succeeded in their attempt to murder ICE agents, they tried, but so far other people and not ICE agents suffered from it. I stand corrected on that point. The rest of the points do not change from it though.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
I'd think being bad at reading people is exactly the reason why one would want to nope out of any relationship with a high-drama person. At least this is how it works for me. If you're bad at something, why get into a situation where your wellbeing may depend on being good at it?
Furthermore, I do not think that the SPLC are actually mustache-twisting villains who want to enable far-right violence to justify their own existence.
Why not? There had been plenty of hoaxes that aim at exactly that - creating an appearance of racism where there was none. The demand for racism on the left vastly exceeds the supply on the right. A simple law of supply and demand suggests manufacturing some must be profitable. One doesn't need to grow a twistable mustache to follow a simple set of incentives.
Nor do you go to prison for infiltrating an organization under false pretenses.
If there are non-LARPing Nazis around, prison is not the worst they could do to you. In fact, look what non-LARPing extremists on the left did, for example, to Andy Ngo. And several other journalists since. That's only things we know publicly.
I do not see anything stopping the right from infiltrating violent left wing organizations.
What is stopping them is that Antifa will kill them, and Antifa-loving prosecutors won't even investigate it. Just as there is almost no meaningful prosecution of current Antifa violence - certainly not commensurate with the extent of the violence.
because they do not want to see ICE agents murdered any more than the SPLC wants to see Jews murdered
They very much do want to see ICE agents murdered, and some already were. More were violently attacked, and still are. SPLC, on the other hand, probably does not want actual Jews to get murdered. What they want is a lot of public calls to get Jews murdered, preferable from some scary-looking people, so that they could "expose" and "monitor" them and get those sweet grants for "fighting" them.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
The FBI can lie on financial documents to pay informants. And I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of the supposed Nazis are actually LARPing feds, I mean how many Whitmer plots do you need to get suspicious? But plebes are not allowed to do that. People have largely accepted that the FBI can paint outside the lines and ignore the law, because they are the FBI. But if the same authority is granted to every leftist NGO, the right has no chance to survive in this country. So if Trump admin messes this up and doesn't get jail conviction and corporate death penalty for SPLC, this would be an absolutely catastrophic loss. Not immediately catastrophic, but long term - you can not survive if your enemy is allowed to break the law without any repercussions but you have to walk on eggshells.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Yes, it's leading on, of course, but that's a cornerstone of advertising industry. Like they show a guy drinking $BRAND_NAME_DRINK and then beautiful lightly dressed ladies surround him adoringly. The implication is clearly that the same would happen to you if you start drinking $BRAND_NAME_DRINK even though it's clearly a lie. But it's a lie within socially accepted boundaries.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
"Running Wikipedia" is a very nebulous term. You can take it in a very restrictive sense - paying for hardware, bandwidth and maintenance for the skeleton crew necessary so that the site remains on air. Then indeed, most of the donations do not pay for that. If, however, you allow development of new software and new modes - there are many more wikis beyond Wikipedia, though most are not as well known, but they exist and have their own audience, such as Wikidata, Commons, Wiktionary, Wikivoyage, and many others - then the donations would cover a significant part of this already. If you add some grants that are aimed at improving wiki content - such as paying people for writing software or articles for the benefit of Wikipedia - then you cover the substantial bulk of the expenses. Sure, some of these grants would have very woke tint - e.g. specifically concentrating on some woke selection or aspect and serving specific woke audience - but you can not say these grants are fraudulent and a private foundation has the right to be woke and finance woke grants. While for a federal government distributing tax money the equanimity and absence of any discrimination must be a requirement, for a private entity it is not possible to ask for that, and if they do choose to prefer woke causes, it is not a crime.
Moreover, if I remember correctly, the fundraising banners don't even claim these donations are necessary to run Wikipedia (indeed, they are not for many years now, though once they used to be, Tides foundation's support ensures Wikipedia can survive financially without any additional donations, if necessary, even though at the cost of freezing a lot of projects) - see the example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising/2025_banners#%22Current_best%22_banner_as_of_July It just says, roughly, "Wikipedia is cool, please give us a little money". It does not make any claim about necessity of the donation or where that donation would go.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Is there a reason a state should generally allow private actors to play "undercover informant"?
You certainly can inform anybody on anything. Like, if you know something, you can tell that to somebody else. If you signed an NDA, the NDA owner could sue you for that, even in that case it will be a civil matter. I do not see any criminal statute that could stop you from disclosing anything you know to anybody, short of national security secrets and such. So yes, you can collect "dossiers" on other people, that's just information. You can not become "private police" unless you are also granted enforcement powers - i.e. powers to arrest, deprive of liberty, confiscate property, etc. Some activities are regulated e.g. via private investigator licenses, but frankly I don't see any principled reason to do so, it's more like dog grooming licenses - some people think it'll improve the quality of services to require people providing the services to jump through some hoops, but there's nothing special in activity itself. Some states don't even require that, it's not a matter of principle but more of how much regulation a particular jurisdiction wants to have.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
There's certainly a contradiction. It may not be illegal - after all, it's not illegal to be a colossal hypocrite - but it's certainly looks contradictory when you say you collect donations to fight those people and then give those money - and a lot of money, they mention hundreds of thousands of dollars there - to the same people. Call it "informant" or anything else, it looks like it is - that they very much prefer the cause they pretend to destroy actually prospers so that they could collect more donations and pretend to fight it forever.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Yeah, I think the chances of actual conviction are pretty slim. The chances it could make SPLC brand radioactive and ultimately bring them down by attaching an image of "pretend to fight Nazis but actually are financing Nazis with your donations" to them are much bigger, and getting a grand jury sign under it is a good move in this direction.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
That's practically impossible. Wikimedia Foundation (the org behind Wikipedia) does not do the editing and does not exercise any editorial control (excepting some rare cases where it is necessary to comply with the US laws). The editing cabals and Wiki admins are not controlled by Wikimedia and by any other official organizations, and a lot of them not even in the US. Those in the US would be protected by the First Amendment. Wikimedia sponsors a lot of stuff, including a lot of woke leftist stuff (don't think any Nazis though, SPLC is way ahead of the curve here), but there's no possible way to consider it fraudulent - they do it all in the open AFAIK. I am not very happy that the biggest and one of the most trusted (despite all) knowledge repositories on the planet is captured by the woke, but the US government can't do much about it, at least not without discarding the First Amendment, which would be a much bigger loss.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
covertly recorded video of poor training and poor supervision of daycare instructors and some seriously concerning misbehavior
I mean, they have actual daycare, actual instructors, they even have training (a poor one, but still) and they are complaining? Sweet summer children. They obviously never saw the real Quality Learing.
On the other hand, if there weren't any actual kids there, they couldn't be sexually abused there. So there's that.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
where we draw the dividing line between democracy and dictatorship
Well, at least in the US the answer is clear - where the DNC decides to draw it. And if that line looks like a gerrymandered district boundary in Illinois, that's by design. You can do every single thing that Orban did, and still remain a hero and a defender of Our Democracy, provided you did it in the service of and with approval of the Party. In fact, it won't be to hard to find an example for pretty much every item - maybe with minor tweaks - Scott charged Orban with, from recent proposals by Democrats, arguing this is absolutely necessary to prevent the death of Our Democracy.
Well, maybe not the child porn accusation - they used the accusation of holding secret documents instead. The pedophilia accusations came later, and did not result in search warrants.
I mean I am not to say Orban is a good guy. He's probably very corrupt, quite autocratic (not to the level where the moniker of "dictator" is appropriate, but he's no Voltaire) and likely a lot of bad stuff said about him is true, and he did not play nice. But the problem Scott has - and refuses to address it - is that in his own country, in his own state, in his own city, the politics is full of people who also don't play nice, in pretty much the same way, if not literally then directionally - and as long as they don't play nice to achieve the goals he wants to achieve, he'd been fine with it. That's normal, if politicians are not doing something outrageously stupid (which unfortunately is the filter not many in California politics pass), moreover, if they do what I want them to do, I wouldn't dig too much into how exactly they got there and wouldn't spend too much of my time on getting familiar with all dirt there is on every single one of them. I want clean politics, I prefer clean politics, but I know some amount of dirt is inevitable.
But to pretend there is some way to define "dictatorship" or any other term, so that Orban would fit, and Obama/Biden/DNC would not, and that if that definition exists, this is why the mainstream press is calling him a "dictator" (or any other term), is pure bullshit. It's always tactical, always motivated, always "who whom".
JarJarJedi
3d ago
From what I heard in general about writer salaries, not a lot. But maybe she's lucky. I know a lot of comedians process their own life drama into their entertainment content, I usually avoid those unless they are hilariously funny. Maybe if she becomes a writer on the level where her craft is worth it regardless of the baseness of the content, there would be a reason to reconsider. I'm sure then I'll hear about her somehow.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
I was intrigued by what kind of article may have inspired this longwrite. So I went ahead and clicked (good judgement on that archive link, thank you for that). I read the title and the subtitle. I closed the browser tab. I know this kind of people exists. That's pretty much as much as I want to ever know about them. If somebody would want to torture me, but for some reason only psychologically, giving me a detailed account of their lives and inner thoughts would probably work quite well. That's likely unhealthy, and the healthy response would be to meet the horrors of this world face to face and overcome them, but I am only a weak man. So that's as much as I am prepared to think about Sophia Ortega.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
This is trivially reversible by simple Unicode normalization.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
Yes, but why? Who wants to live like this?
Was worse. Jim Crow does not exist anymore - in fact, it is so officially banned that a lot of freedoms which were considered absolute before - such as freedom of association, freedom of conducting or refusing business, locality of power, etc. - had been abridged by the government to not let it ever come back. I am not going to argue whether it was worth it - that's not my point is. My point is - DEI is with us right now, right here, and impacts the lives of millions. Something bad that happened in the past may be really bad, but it was the past. We can not influence it, and it can not influence us anymore. But DEI is something that is happening in the present.
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