Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
18hr ago
Bro you are looking at a story of successful modern-day assimilation. This guy has assimilated as thoroughly into the Blue Tribe as any Rawhide Kobayashi.
Bartender_Venator
19hr ago
What I find really funny is that, right before the war, I was in Ukraine, and I said "Kiev" - my guide's face darkened, he took me around the back of an armoured van, and he explained "I know this is what you say in the west, you should not say that here, it's sensitive, might cause trouble. You say Kyiv" and coached me on how to pronounce it like a Ukrainian until I got it right. But it's nothing at all like how westerners now pronounce "Keev", it's more like "Kyuff". I know that you should never expect libs to understand any of the cultures they valorize, but this drives the absurdity home to me every time it comes up.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I also do not recommend adopting the parenting habits of poor families in the Bronx, just pointing out the distance in experience. I was a horrifically picky eater growing up, but kids often grow out of it (it helped, also, to grow up in the first generation to learn that broccoli, brussels sprouts, etc. could actually be delicious if you char them instead of mushifying them).
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
It does seem to me that the most parsimonious explanation is that the developers involved in this are mostly treating it as a gold rush rather than coming in with well-thought-out plans. OK, maybe it's cheaper to convert an old company headquarters into a data center, but it's also certainly understandable that people don't like it. Not helped by the AI companies' intentionally terrible PR strategies.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I think it's important to note when someone's pulling a fast one like that.
I honestly struggle to discern which of these possible points he's making:
- We should confiscate the wealth of antisocial financiers and redistribute it
- The top end of the capitalist economy is parasitic, the wealthy should be taxed heavily and the money given to the workers via subsidized groceries (n.b. the top band of NYC income tax currently starts at $50/60/90k/yr depending on marital status)
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I agree. Rural communities correctly believe that their local government will absolutely shaft them in return for short-run gains, and data centers pattern-match to that hard - and in many cases probably are tech companies trying to shaft the community by promising the local government short-term gains. I'm not sure how to fix this except for tech companies explicitly targeting governance trust/quality in their location decisions.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Well, the only way out of capitalism, that doesn't involve replacing big macs with eating grass to survive, runs through building an AI capable enough to simulate the economy and coordinate economic decision-making (this was already obvious in 1970). It's really a mark of the deep intellectual unseriousness of leftists that they're freaking out about Current Thing AI instead of scheming to align it their way.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I'm a great believer in the Hamiltonian-Listian outlook too. However, in the long run, price is the only true discipline in economics, and you can't count on wise men forever.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
It would greatly reduce confusion if in future mods drop a modhat comment saying "banned and removed for ban evasion".
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I could imagine a cyberpunk future where ultralights are the main form of solo transportation.
The Okavango Delta and central Botswana are pretty much like this, particularly the Okavango. More dieselpunk vibes, though.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
The shared reactionary/populist explanation of that is that the people don't want to have no elites, they want to have good elites, and we certainly don't have those. But the idea that abolishing the jury trial is the solution assumes that the fish is not rotting from the head down. South Africa abolished jury trials because even the Apartheid regime realized that the populace were too racially polarized to deliver justice, but they had a judiciary and assessorate genuinely committed to the rule of law and to public order, whereas many of our judiciary and many more of our professors of law are less committed to that than the man on the street.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
This is the Moldbug thesis: everything that actually works is a vertical command structure restrained/guided by price mechanisms. With, uh, certain fluctuations, because the price mechanism is a cruel mistress.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Nobody hates shoplifters like a low-wage clerk who has to watch it every day and isn't allowed/able to do anything. One time in Chicago I thought the kid at the counter was about to launch into that one Chris Rock bit.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Yeah, poor kids in the Bronx don't have those sort of preferences, or if they do they get beat with the cooking spoon till they don't.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
That article does not support the claim you're using it to make.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
It's hard and expensive to take cases to court and potentially all the way through trial with what I guess would be a DC jury (I don't know the nuances of how the system works with regard to the severity of the offence and the parks jurisdiction). To be fair to libertarians, I'm sure that Binion would also complain about people being charged and successfully plead out for much less serious stuff from the other side, but to be fair to everybody else I'll also point out that the balance of these sorts of cases is not exactly equal, in terms of who gets charged and whose charges make it to sentencing. Of course, a more efficient justice system would just summarily deal out minor punishments to people who commit obviously intentional vandalism on camera, but that's a regime-complete problem. The "shoddy contracting work" point has been hashed out elsewhere so I have no need to address it.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Good and interesting point.
It actually reminds me somewhat of the role of moderation in Socratic philosophy. The first precept of philosophy is moderation; the ability to make any progress in philosophy whatsover is contingent on the student's practice of moderation in respect to worldly things and appetites. However, it's not-very-Straussianly-hidden in Plato and particularly Xenophon that Socrates himself is wildly immoderate with respect to wisdom and to the love of the Good - that is, with respect to those things in which, pursued properly, there is no need for or value in moderation, because they are purely good. If the natural slave is one who cannot moderate his appetites, then one could read Socratic philosophy as recognizing that one is in a sense never entirely leaves that state, but becomes a slave of that to which it is appropriate for a man to be enslaved. Aristotle denies this because he's writing in the Politics, not the Metaphysics, and so is concerned with man as he contributes to the polis, but there are some hints of that elsewhere in Aristotle too, once we're no longer speaking of practical wisdom.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Ah yes, I tend to forget the remake exists. Testament to the uglification of modern animation.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Glad to see Reason is still in business; I wasn't aware. Of course, this fellow did, by all the eyewitness accounts, reach into the reflecting pool and start pulling the lining up, to the point where the park police noticed and demanded he stop, but maybe, given his background, he's just a pool lining autist, and also a true libertarian who believes that every citizen has a right to audit the structural integrity of the pool without state coercion interfering.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
This originates, in the modern tradition, from Hobbes - he argued that no man knows another's business so well that he can claim to rule over another through virtue of superior intellect (obviously, an idea murdered and buried by modern states). But, in that framework, it's also perfectly compatible with absolute monarchy, so long as something occupies the position of sovereign-but-not-master. Lewis, in that Anglo-Christian inheritance, can only agree that no man can be master based on contingent facts about the world, as you point out. A man, or artificial man, fit to be master cannot exist, because we are fallen and the science to create artificial men (including the body politic) is also fallen.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
I think in order to do real damage with your bare hands it has to be at least a bit fucked up already. Interesting that they don't seem to have attempted to bring charges against the other people who were apparently apprehended by the park service, but this guy seems to have really tried to get it - pulled up a lot more than either of the two women and then started beefing with the cops.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Honestly don't have an obvious candidate to mind, it's not the sort of fiction/movies I go for. The South African novel series Spud would be a good example, though it's aimed at kids of that age and very much not high art - Spud suffers through all the angst and pimples, but he ends up in a loving relationship and on course to as normal a life as one can live in SA. Generally the sort of people who do more artsy things tend to be older, and more focused on the negative, or at least the aporeic aspects of the psyche.
Stephen King is one of the absolute last people I'd go to for an accurate portrayal of that kind of interiority. I think insofar as a man can write this, the obvious go-to is Twin Peaks - except that Laura Palmer has to be this cipher, that we only learn about from others, precisely because Lynch can't be in that part of her head (note the extremely strong parallels between the EoE hospital scene and the scene of Laura putting on her stockings in FWWM, both beating you around the head with "I KNOW YOU'RE TURNED ON BY THIS CHARACTER AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD ABOUT IT").
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
With the Romans we knew that they explicitly sorted soldiers based on experience. The Triarii were probably generally in their thirties, and while they were spared some of the scut-work they were kept in reserve precisely because their experience was valuable and potentially decisive.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Not really "about the horrible inner experience of [female] teenage sexuality", except, uh, maybe some true crime narratives I'd prefer not to read. Given the general higher cultural discomfort involved (as I typed that sentence with male/female I half-expected some jackass will call me a creep just for that), I'm guessing not a show, but a book by a woman author, maybe an Anna Kavan type. Maybe an arthouse film.
Open borders and demographic replacement is a, if not the, mainstream Blue Tribe progressive position, though obviously they would not use those exact phrases.
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