The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
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User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5m ago
Over on DSL, someone stated that the first thing they did when they moved into their house was to remove all the smoke detectors so the damn things wouldn't annoy you in the middle of the night with battery beeps. Not my thing, but, yeah.
Worst I do is speeding and other traffic violations. Even with those little violations, you start noticing things. Like... those assholes in the traffic department really ARE out to fuck things up. Do the speed limit (on an arterial) and you hit every red light. Violate it by a significant amount, and you hit several yellows in a row. Like the people who drive side by side for miles if you're doing slightly over the limit will often move over expeditiously if you come roaring up behind them at 15+mph. Like cities love to place no-U-turn and no-left-turn signs so you have to drive across town to go next door... and you can save 10 minutes by ignoring them (and also a no-U-turn sign indicates a good place to make a U-turn).
There's a Robert Heinlein quote
It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier.
A lot of "civilization" is about making it harder to be a live lion. But acting the jackal really sucks if you don't have the temperament.
Evidentally there's a philosopher named Sidney Hook, who Wikipedia calls a philosopher of pragmatism, who said about this:
It is better to be a live jackal than a dead lion—for jackals, not men. Men who have the moral courage to fight intelligently for freedom have the best prospects of avoiding the fate of both live jackals and dead lions. Survival is not the be-all and end-all of a life worthy of man. Sometimes the worst we can know about a man is that he has survived. Those who say life is worth living at any price have already written for themselves an epitaph of infamy, for there is no cause and no person they will not betray to stay alive. Man's vocation should be the use of the arts of intelligence in behalf of human freedom.
But that is not the general thought of the Western world today. Safety uber alles, and the state to make sure it is "unsafe" in a large way to violate that in a big way; this is why people find it perfectly reasonable to threaten a superannuated computer programmer with a trip to Riker's Island for riding a bicycle on the sidewalk. State capacity may be diminishing in the Canadian Interior, it's Orwell's dreamworld in my area.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
38m ago
Your examples have some superficial similarities, but some of them are actually quite different. Assuming none of your kids or their friends is a 4-sigma hyperactive retard, you can just remove or disable the damned WOCDs. This may increase your chances of liability but only by a very trivial amount; as you note, kids falling out of windows is pretty rare. On the other hand, a public slide is going to be involved in at least a minor injury at some point, because kids like to play and unlike their parents aren't super concerned about their own absolute safety. Which means there's a good chance of someone being sued. So if you're going to repair something like that, do it on the sly.
How do we make kids have more agency?
How do we make adults with more agency?
How do we go back to the society Alexis de Tocquevillle's observed?
The short version is that we cannot. The longer version is that the steps we would have to take would have consequences all the Good People would clutch their pearls in horror about. Kids could rarely fall out of perfectly good windows and it would be nobody's fault except the kids! Kids could burn themselves, cut themselves, even break a bone or very rarely kill themselves on playground equipment and the parents would get nothing but sympathy.
One of the open tenets of modern safetyism is that you do not do cost-benefit analysis with safety. This is a tenet violated all the time (because it's completely impractical), but it serves to anchor discussions and short-circuit objections. And a more general principle that is widely understood though rarely openly stated is that neither liberty nor enjoyment have value in cost-benefit discussions. That is, "because I want to" and "because it's fun" are not considered valid reasons to do something that has other drawbacks. Both these rules would have to be repudiated to return to the society you refer to. And they will not be, the safetyists are firmly in charge.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
17hr ago
The principle of cuius regio, eius religio was established by the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and ended with the Peace of Westphalia (1648), so it really only lasted about 100 years. And many of those years were rather turbulent. It also only applied within the Holy Roman Empire.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
The advantage is that C, like C++, D, Java, 6502 assembler, Brainfuck, ECMAScript, F#, Ada, Smalltalk, Swift, OCaml, Haskell, Pascal, and Forth, but unlike Rust, will not demand I check my privilege. Rust was written and is run by a coalition of my enemies; I will not use it.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
The issue is that this argument/analysis doesn't suggest any plausible political program--"we are going to end welfare dependency, invest in policing minority areas to protect them from crime, and encourage stable family formation" has approximately zero takers, for whatever reason.
This is the boomercon take, is it not?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
I thought progressives hated Russia now?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Makes me wonder if Putin is thinking: "And come winter, the Arabs will freeze to death".
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
But Trump wouldn't expend political capital to influence D&D. He doesn't give a shit. If you tried to make him notice, he'd probably call it a kid's game and insult the users or something. Same goes for D&Ds more traditional enemies, the religious who call it Satanic. They didn't want to take over D&D, they wanted to ban it. In a different world, perhaps Geek, MOP, sociopath could describe something other than part of the larger Culture War, but in the real world the entryist sociopaths ARE SJW/woke.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Right, the Ferengi were supposed to be Americans. (Presumably Outgroup-Americans, but Americans nevertheless)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
“Race” is a biologically fuzzy concept.
You can take an MRI or CT scan of someone, feed it into a neural network, and it can classify their race to a very high degree of consonance with their self-identification. It can even do this if you remove the low-spatial-frequency or high-spacial-frequency information. Everything in biology is fuzzy to some degree, even such concepts as "alive" and "dead". But race is reasonably solid.
Even population geneticists behind closed doors have admitted that you can talk about biology at the level of the gene itself without commitment to now outdated and pseudoscientific categories like comparing Nordics and Teutons and Alpines and Slavs, etc.
Sure, they can speak in coded language to avoid being canceled or just losing research funds. That doesn't make the reality go away.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
The Chidi stereotype isn't just a paint-it-black version of a Jewish stereotype, it's been around before as black stereotype, notably Steve Urkel, and to a lesser degree Carlton on Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
And you're being a little unfair to Eleanor; she also had quite a few stereotypical female flaws, such as being vain and self-absorbed.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
I see what is happening to D&D more like a Geek, MOP, sociopath thing than a CW battleground.
Geek, MOP, sociopath IS Culture War. It is describing how the Culture War battle is lost by the geeks by the entryist sociopaths.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
At this point, Nybbler, I think all the waters are sufficiently muddied that we'll never know who actually did what
After entertaining various noxious allegations and then finding they are unsupported, it is at the very least discourteous to then fall back on invincible ignorance.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
If the US actually pursues going closed-borders-for-everyone, maybe it will be overtaken by China, given the slight national IQ advantage
China still has the strongest handicap that isn't genetic or physical. Communism.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
Doesn't work that way. The credit card company can only write off the amount they paid, and any interest they recognized but didn't actually receive. The debtor, on the other hand, has to report all principal, interest, and fees as income. The IRS is the only winner.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
As an American, I have to say I don't give fuck about British royals. We knew they were degenerate retards in 1776, and a couple of popular Queens notwithstanding, why should we believe that has changed, or care?
The only Trump-related thing in the current meatgrinder is years-old nothingburger. Giuffre had a job at Mar-a-Lago; she was one of the girls that Epstein poached. She's talked about a lot of people, including Trump -- and said nothing bad about Trump. If the Democrats were trying to make some hay involving ex-Prince Andrew, they would have used her name. Instead they redacted it so some people wouldn't realize it was her they were talking about.
If you're going to hypothesize that she would have accused Trump if she were still alive, this is just making shit up out of whole cloth. Maybe Jimmy Hoffa would accuse Trump of putting out the hit on him if he were still alive too.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
One of the pet theories I have is pure economics. It is a public knowledge that women make 85% of purchases and they account for 80% of consumer spending.
No, this is just a layer of the justification onion, it's not really a reason for woke media. You can see the justification fail with things like the Gillette me-too ad, female Ghostbusters and other properties that didn't appeal to women either, pushing all the trans stuff in, etc.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Yeah, so at best it's a femdom porno.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Trump is certainly unsuited for Grand Vizier. The Grand Vizier is the one who stays in the background, whispering things into the sultan's ear and manipulating the visible actors from behind the scenes. Like all administrations, Trump's is full of aspirants to that position, but Trump never seems to listen to any of them for long.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
The ones I’d rather not credit are the Chris Rufo types, who are happy to crucify the College Board for anything and everything except the SAT.
Do they deserve such crucification? Even if not, if Rufo was right on this point, he deserves credit.
Oh, and I guess I expect the scientific racists to run with this result, too. Causation be damned.
Assuming you mean actual William Shockley style "color coded by nature" scientific racism and aren't just smearing around slurs towards anyone who believes in HBD... well, the DEI people pretty much handed this to them. They said the test was racist, they got rid of the test, the accepted applicants were dumber, racism works.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
In practice, I'm fairly sure a lot more people believe in polio vaccine than flu vaccine.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Doubt it. Voldemort and Umbridge were existing archetypes. Certainly in the next 500 years someone will write a more current version of them which will supplant them.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
I have no idea what exactly Virginia Giuffre was claiming happened
Piloting is easy, unless you mean helicopters. Dealing with all the nintendo-hard licensing and air traffic control stuff is the problem.
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