pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
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User ID: 278
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
20d ago
Heinlein was directly on point:
“Suppose you merely scolded your puppy, never punished him, let him go on making messes in the house . . . and occasionally locked him up in an outbuilding but soon let him back into the house with a warning not to do it again. Then one day you notice that he is now a grown dog and still not housebroken—whereupon you whip out a gun and shoot him dead. Comment, please?”
“Why . . . that’s the craziest way to raise a dog I ever heard of!”
“I agree. Or a child. Whose fault would it be?”
“Uh . . . why, mine, I guess.”
“Again I agree. But I’m not guessing.”
pusher_robot
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24d ago
How convenient it is that we live in a world where doing what matches my preferred ideology also results in making more money! You'd have to be a complete idiot or an extremist bigot not to pick up that free money that's just sitting there on the table!
Ironically this might actually be true (eg, Candy Crush), but at the same time the autists and transgenders that primarily pushed this reasoning at AAA game devs and were tasked with designing them were uniquely unsuited to designing games actually appealing to the modal woman.
pusher_robot
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24d ago
Thus I would phrase it more as "Membership in a group is not an acceptable reason to treat one person worse than another."
I don't believe "group membership" was ever a significant factor of the issue. It was always the characteristics of the specific individuals involved. E.g., nobody ever campaigned against allowing a gay man to get married to a woman.
'The joining of two complementary sexes to form a well-rounded whole', being, if not a religious belief per se, at least religion-adjacent, is not a legitimate foundation for government policy
This is only true if you take for granted a very modern libertine view of the role of government. In reality, "religion-adjacent" concepts like morality, justice, and the promotion of human flourishing have more or less always been the proper aim of law, since prehistory. The movement for gay marriage won not by persuading some people that these are illegitimate ends but by persuading them that gay marriage does not in fact have any negative consequences along those lines. However, not everyone was persuaded by that judgment, and it is not an act of hatred to be skeptical, a mere handful of years hence, that that foretold negative consequences will never manifest.
pusher_robot
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1mo ago
One thing that might be likely is for him to get to appoint a SCOTUS justice. Sotomayor could and probably should retire and let Biden appoint her replacement while the Democrats control the White House and Senate, since there's no telling how long it might be before they control both again. A quality pick would be a good legacy.
pusher_robot
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1mo ago
I think it's worth noting that levels of fluoride in the water much higher than the recommended dosage are unlikely to be caused by intentionally dosing the water, and more likely to be caused by naturally high occurrencee of fluoride in the source water supply. So, if this were a scandal, the scandal would primarily not be the dosing of low levels of fluoride for dental health, but the laxity of the water safety regulations.
pusher_robot
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1mo ago
He doesn't want the World's Fair, he wants an American exposition similar to some of the great World's Fairs, with the states showcasing themselves instead of countries.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
Covid, definitely. The fear of both the disease and our response politically activated people to an unusual degree, and we have regressed to mean.
pusher_robot
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1mo ago
You might think so, but as far as I can tell, Trump did absolutely nothing to protect free speech or slow down cancel culture.
Rescinding the Dear Colleague letter, for example
pusher_robot
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1mo ago
Not exactly, but I think the law school to career politician to president pipeline is discredited. I think a lot of Trump's advantage is that he's been a familiar figure in American lives for so long as to actually be source of nostalgia, which is an electoral superpower, but without having been a career politician, who people generally dislike. This was Reagan's power as well. Both parties should invest more effort into recruiting candidates from outside politics who excude confidence and come with good long built-in relationships to the general public. The tricky part is finding ones who actuality want the job and are willing to endure the campaign. Democrats have a huge supply of sympathetic actors, though, so they should probably recruit there. Big problem is this would be extremely unpopular among the career politicians that run the parties, as they feel they have earned the right to run for the top position.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
This is the wages of identity politics, unfortunately.
pusher_robot
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1mo ago
I was wondering about Calibri and Candara Counties
pusher_robot
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1mo ago
This website hardly qualifies as "big tech" sufficient to be dunking on Coil
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
Why get caught up playing the game of "that's misinformation! Well, maybe it's true but it's still malinformation! and anyway you're banned for Hate Speech, read the room." You can see all the moves coming 20 steps ahead, being right in retrospect doesn't matter because you still lost the social power game, and the only winning move is not to
I've been feeling this too, but contemplating that it may just be a side effect of getting old and having done all this before.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
Friday night fish fry in a north woods supper club
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
So if I'm cynically running a left-wing organization in order to crush the right-wing, then I'm going to want to populate it with at least enough right-wingers that we can learn from.
Sure, but there's two things working against you. First is the reason that many people who genuinely want to be thin are nevertheless fat: lack of will power to not do what feels good in the moment. You may recognize fully that you need some conservatives on staff, and go out and recruit them, and nonetheless find that you simply don't have the will power to stand up for them when they (and you by proxy) are attacked by your allies, or even to grant them with a similar level of respect and authority that you would give to your allies. So, they end up leaving for less hostile environments, as would be totally expected.
The other is the principal-agent problem. You may want conservative on your staff, you may even be a conservative yourself, but if enough of your staff are willing to actually torpedo your organization and are credibly able to do so, you may find that your hand is forced and that your only options are a completely left organization or none at all. In this sense, the left engages in some union-adjacent workplace activity to effectively force a closed shop. Once you're in this situation, it's going to be very difficult to get out without replacing almost your entire staff and also countering their efforts at sabotage in the process, a difficult task even before we consider the effects of solidarity from other left media institutions.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
Seems like it might be, if the blood transfusions were for treating a psychological condition, and the supporting science was sketchy at best.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
It's a (former?) sometimes poster on this forum, which is why I tagged that user. However, I saw much the same sentiment among more prominent supporters, e.g., Matt Walsh.
I also don't think poor people rejoice in McDonald's anymore - we used to with 29 cent burgers and 39 cent cheese burgers twice a week
Clearly, lots of people are eating there, and I don't think it's the upper middle class.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
Cause or effect? Are these Democrats investigated because they have been declared PNG by the party? Or are they out with the party because they were investigated (or for the underlying reasons)?
pusher_robot
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1mo ago
It's not gourmet coffee, but it's approximately diner-quality, and is fast and cheap. It's definitely superior to the coffee at many other fast food places, not to mention gas stations and truck stops.
EDIT: Is this a Euro thing about not liking drip coffee?
pusher_robot
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1mo ago
Which is why, for instance, one of the tests for Fair Use in the US is whether or not the derivative work competes against the original work. In the case of AI art and other generative AI tools, there's a good argument to be made that the tools do compete with the original works. As such, regardless of the technical issues involved, this does reduce the incentives of illustrators by reducing their ability to monetize their illustrations.
Yes, but AI art does not rely on fair use. The argument that the copyright issue is nonsense is that in almost no other circumstances, except where a EULA is enforced, does copyright limit the way someone can use a work. It only means they can't copy it. But the case against AI art would have to extend the concept of copying a work beyond any reasonable point in order for those restrictions to apply. You can't copyright concepts or styles for this reason, only specific works. Obtaining legitimate copies of works and assimilating them for novel synthesis has never implicated copyright before.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
Maybe if you get the mocha/lattes you'd be pushing 1400 but their coffee (that is not actually offered in the US locations, so maybe it doesn't apply as much) is good enough there's no reason to bother.
What? US McDonald's definitely serves filter coffee. It's very popular and there was even a notable lawsuit over it.
pusher_robot
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2mo ago
If they were truly valuable, they would be working in private schools where the school itself must generate revenue by performing valuable functions, not simply awarded money by the state which is extracted from captive taxpayers. Thus, they are not valuable, and are instead parasitic.
This is highly confounded by the fact that public spending has greatly crowded out the private school market. If your option is a public school which costs (after taxes and fees) nothing vs. a private school of about the same quality and costs thousands of dollars a semester, it would be irrational to take the latter option. If public schools didn't exist at all, there would undoubtedly be more private schools, needing to hire more teachers.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2mo ago
It is, you just have to use the app.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2mo ago
The amount of energy being expended over Trump's recent visit to a McDonald's is kind of interesting to me. It seems to have generated an extraordinary amount of media and online attention. On the supporter side, they are hailing it as a brilliant and deeply meaningful activity, simultaneously trolling Harris and celebrating the dignity of unskilled labor, and generating deeply Americana visuals. On the detractor side, they decry it an illogical and bizarre stunt, that it was fake because the store was not actually open, and compared it to Dukakis in the tank. Some have even doxxed the owner who wrote to the state to complain about labor regulations.
Meanwhile, McDonald's corporate HQ sent what I think is a very good memo to franchisees explaining the value of their goal of political inclusivity and how that manifests as allowing visits from anyone who asks and being proud of being important to American culture.
I think this is interesting because symbolically, it's something that cleaves much more at the red tribe/blue tribe dichotomy than the Democrat/Republican one. I think a lot of blue-tribers disdain McDonalds and consider it trashy, but can't really say so too loudly because the poorer members of their political coalition enjoy it. Trump has been mocked in the past for having the poor taste of actually liking McDonald's food as well as catering a White House dinner with it, widely seen as trashy and disrespectful. The imagery of Trump looking for all the world like a store manager from 3 decades ago I think also triggered some nostalgia - or perhaps post-traumatic stress - about the current state of customer service.
I don't have too much more to say and offer no predictions. It just seemed interesting as one of those things that seemed to trigger something unexpected in people for reasons that go way beyond the substance of the actual event, and figuring out what's resonating with people in either a positive or negative way, and possibly why, seems like a good path towards predicting future trends.
Isn't the through-line that connects these things together just good, old-fashioned Gnosticism? The religious view that the material world is evil and that the subjective relgious experience is primary is all that is needed for to connect propensity to suicide, disgust with the material world, obsession with purity and disease, and antinatalism.
There might be some psychological root to that as well, given that it seems to pop up many times through history, or some kind of philosophical prion that warps the perception of reality of anyone who comprehends it.
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