domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8m ago
given the fact that humans have been responsible for the extinction of tens of thousands of species, mostly bugs I think I recall, (not to mention introduced lots of invasive species detrimental to various local environments), why the hell haven't we seen catastrophic impacts to our ecology and agriculture?
I think ecosystems are massively overhyped. Most species aren't needed, there are a few which are really important and the rest are basically window dressing. They've managed to survive and that's about it. Closing 10,000 random businesses would not be nearly as disruptive as shutting down Microsoft or TSMC or Saudi Aramco. It's the same with animals, most of them are just there.
ThisIsSin
The boob tube emits harmful XXX-rays
10m ago
What’s something that’s grey on the outside and blue on the inside?
I think that's just called depression.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
16m ago
Except for a quick stop by Reddit...and then let me check the insta...and...
netstack
Texas is freedom land
17m ago
I am perpetually surprised by how many of your animals sound fictional.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18m ago
Cyrus died in battle, is that what you're talking about?
KolmogorovComplicity
19m ago
The mistake Todd makes here is that he seems to recognize the characteristically Trumpian mode of lying — repetition of crude falsities — but not the mode preferred by the progressive establishment — capturing sense-making institutions and turning them toward promoting ideologically-driven narratives. The latter predates Trump, is far more consequential, and is propagated primarily by the likes of the NYT and CNN.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
20m ago
As an Australian, nope. We're already going through a real estate crisis and have a population that's already causing strain on significant water systems - moving Israel there would make those problems substantially worse. But there's actually a better option on the table anyway - the Israelis should just be moved to the American deep south, where they can live with all the evangelicals who love them so much. There's plenty of room, and I'm sure the Israelis would be better migrants than the Haitians - dogs and cats aren't kosher, last I checked.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
24m ago
This is great, I hope it keeps happening and people treat known Hizballah members like lepers.
Do you really think that would actually happen?
Assuming you live in Israel (given your flair), would IDF soldiers randomly exploding due to surreptitiously placed Iranian bombs cause you to start treating known members of the IDF like lepers? I think it would just bolster your determination to fight back against the Iranians rather than treat the soldiers fighting for you like social pariahs. To use a specific example...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/lebanon-funeral-pager-attack.html
I don't think that murdering this 9 year old girl (which I wouldn't really call "great", personally) is making these people support Israel. In fact, from the photos of the funeral, those Hezbollah scarfs look pretty new - and the quotes they give make it sound like this attack was one of Hezbollah's greatest recruitment efforts to date. I know personally that if my 9 year old daughter was murdered by a foreign state I'd be signing up for whatever military organisation wants to fight back against them as soon as they'd have me.
2D3D
26m ago
But I don't think accusing people of eating wildlife and/or pets is dehumanizing them
Ironically I think this defense of potential pet eating is a deflection. Migrants ARE different from locals and from each other, and not always for the better. By emphasizing that Noticing the pet eating is itself a 'dehumanizing' act, all Noticing is thus reflective of the Noticers dehumanizing intent and thus can be categorically dismissed.
This is why the pet thing is so damn stupid. Migrants ARE committing crimes at elevated rates relative to their demographic, violent crimes at that. All the statistics about migrants being good for the economy and good for safety are due to large numbers of women inflating the denominator of crime/migrant ratios. Thanks to this stupid pet thing, the haitian who drove illegally or migrants robbing in NYC or the other instances of actual crimes are dismissed by the polity. Harris absolutely fumbled the border during her time as border czar, and the only reason people don't care right now is because the ones suffering are deep blue sanctuary cities that normies don't particularly like anyways.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
27m ago
Just as “watermelon” has come to refer to politics which wears a green skin to smuggle in red outcomes, I want a word for politics which wears a nonpartisan skin to smuggle in Dem hackery. What’s something that’s grey on the outside and blue on the inside? Something something haemocyanin.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
27m ago
Right. I would never do any of those drugs that you mention in any dosage, but I suppose you have a sense of what you want and can withstand. I do not know of the infamy of your posts, but that's fine, I don't need to.
Just based on your posts today, I might avoid the trap of thinking any sort of sexual interaction seals the deal in terms of affection--it doesn't. In fact it isn't a measure of much at all, in and of itself. The everything that comes before and after are much more relevant.
I've read you using PUA terms and having a very casual terminology regarding women ("oneitis" etc.) and this gives me considerable pause. Women/a woman is not the answer to all of your problems, nor is doing a bunch of drugs. This may already be clear to you, of course.
jeroboam
30m ago
Globalism has clear winners and losers, 20k Haitians get dumped on a rural town of 40k, but two bus loads would overwhelm Martha's Vineyard, etc.
I think this hints at the root cause of our national malaise: pro-fargroup bias.
The Martha's Vineyard types care more about poor undocumented workers than they do about their own countrymen. They see themselves as global citizens with no great connection to a particular place.
The Haitian immigrant is better than the lazy American, why shouldn't we replace one with the other?
The problem with this situation is that it's inherently unstable. It's tough for elites to rule when they despise the people they rule over. And it's tough for working class types to be pro-social when they feel the game is inherently rigged against them.
sun_the_second
38m ago
Again, I'm not recommending puritanical sexual codes for society at large. I'm advocating for the hard re-linking of consequences with sex. You can have lots of sex with many partners if you want, but be aware of and accept the consequences.
There's only one consequence of sex that conservatives seem to actually try to hard re-link to sex, though, that is having the baby. You can't force people to feel proper emotions when having sex, but you sure can deny them abortion and slut-shame them (the "social consequences").
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
39m ago
Maybe this is something that all lithium-ion batteries can do with the right command.
Rednecks blowing up batteries would have discovered it by now.
sansampersamp
40m ago
Somewhat symmetrically, does the WSJ follow-up with woman where she states the cat returned alive and well after this report was made change your view?
sulla
40m ago
I disagree entirely with the premise that political polarization has anything to do with social media or big tech. It is an absurd claim on its face, because human history is littered with countless examples of extreme political polarization long before smartphones or the Internet. It's a waste to even name them, because basically every historical event learned in school would qualify. Relatively speaking, the current period isn't even particularly highly polarized.
The only semi-charitable way to interpret these articles is to interpret them as apologia for why the current regime's systems of control have failed. Before the latest technology wave, the regime had everyone's opinion under control because they could make sure that all three news channels were broadcasting the correct messages. They cannot control social media as a whole, therefore, it must be social media's fault because people are able to exchange information and ideas without their consent.
The article itself is self-contradictory. In one paragraph, it's attacking Fox News for "cherry-picking" quotes from Democrats, and in the next says the only solution is to "stop big tech" from using their current algorithms. I guess it's left as an exercise for the reader how "big tech algorithms" caused Fox News's programming. Yet Fox News's current state could not possibly have been "caused" by social media, because as I recall, Democrats hated and mocked Fox News more in the 2000's than they do now.
The fundamental mistake the article is making is to mistake correlation for causation. While a relative increase in polarization has coincided with the rise of social media, this does not mean that one caused the other. In fact, there is not even a common cause. They are completely unrelated. All civilizations oscillate between periods of division and periods of cohesion. America was in a period of relative cohesion, but it could not last forever.
Like @SubstantialFrivolity, I also asked a lot of girls out in college and was always turned down. I realize this is a "skill issue" sort of a thing, but also I wasn't self-aware enough at the time to realize how I could do better -- I was just warm and outgoing towards people I liked, and hoped it would work to ask them out. It didn't.
My girlfriend is a millennial. That being said, her mom said once that she always worried her daughter would have trouble dating, because she spent so much time with her grandmothers that her personality is like someone much older. She basically owns it, and does things like cook old family recipies as a connection to her heritage. I also was once described as "an old man in a young man's body" by a friend a long time ago. She grew up in a rural community and, like I said, spent a lot of time with her grandparents who grew up in the Depression and who she respected a great deal, and so I believe her upbringing innoculated her against some of the pitfalls of the current culture.
I know I talk about her a lot, but she's truly the most insightful person I've ever known and she loves talking about the culture war, so she often comes up in my thoughts when I'm writing motte posts.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
43m ago
We’ve collectively underreacted — and perhaps there are perfectly reasonable explanations for that.
Yeah, no one got shot, and no one but law enforcement even got shot at. There's nothing strange about a muted reaction to the Secret Service chasing off an assassin.
Instead, the Trump campaign appears to be approaching this apparent assassination attempt as an opportunity rather than as a moment to reflect.
Ah, yes, the Trump campaign. That is, the organization whose raison d'etre is to elect Trump as President. It's hardly surprising they're trying to do so.
Fox News has been especially aggressive in its programming the last few days, going out of its way to find cherry-picked examples of rhetoric from the left that, on its face, can sound like incitement. It's something Fox could have easily done with Trump’s rhetoric but chose not to.
How many attempts have been made on Harris's life, again?
As a native of Miami, I saw firsthand similar attempts to dehumanize and otherize Haitians amid an influx of refugees from the country in the early ’80s.
I don't know what "otherize" is supposed to mean here; I mean, Haitians ARE different in various ways from both Miami natives and other refugrees. But I don't think accusing people of eating wildlife and/or pets is dehumanizing them. It's exactly this sort of overblown meta-rhetoric (and the speech policing which follows from it) that prevents any discussion of this topic across the left-right divide.
And no one has done a more effective job of exploiting this new medium of discourse than Trump.
Looks like someone never heard of the Arab Spring.
I still want to live in a society where “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
The uncharitable take on this would be that the author and his allies have done wrong and now they want to avoid the blowback.
We need leaders who accept that there are major political differences between us and that governing needs to be incremental and not radical.
Trying to get the other side to pre-commit to not actually making major changes in the direction they prefer isn't going to work any more.
Most Americans have an instinct of de-escalation when things get heated
And that instinct has been exploited over and over again. If by getting hot you can get the other side to concede, getting hot makes sense. Trump's habit of getting just as hot if not more instead is why he has taken over the GOP. If Todd doesn't like it... that's tough. The alternative to polarization his side offers is "Do it our way", and that will no be agreed to.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
45m ago
I mean you can look up the stats yourself. Murder and suicide rates in any country banning guns with the same or close GDP of the USA are a tiny fraction of what ours are. Do I think the tradeoff is worth it? Yes. But it is still there and obvious. Are you really linking me to a comment recommending only your opponents be disarmed? Come on man.
You're playing games with statistics here. Based on your hypothesis here, we'd expect Switzerland (which has incredibly liberal gun laws) to be a hotbed of murder and suicide - but it isn't. Venezuela, on the other hand, has extremely tight gun laws, despite formerly being the homicide capital of South America. It isn't the guns that make people kill each other and you're being dishonest when you imply it.
remzem
55m ago
Yea this is a delusion the dems have been trying to sell themselves ever since Trump. They see themselves not as a specific group fighting for it's members interests, like the republicans do, but more like a religion like messianic figures that will bring about utopia if they can just get enough control and "eliminate" the external things dividing us. Reality is that Trump didn't start anything and the divisions had been brewing for a while. The things dividing us are us. Globalism has clear winners and losers, 20k Haitians get dumped on a rural town of 40k, but two bus loads would overwhelm Martha's Vineyard, etc.
Due to this they need a rationalization for why their universalist solutions aren't working or their self conception would break down. Similar to that Muslim meme people always post in regards to Europe where the bureaucrats are desperately asking what the Muslim wants, more healthcare, better housing and the Muslim says they just want Shariah. It's clear what the man in the meme wants, the increasingly desperate questions aren't for his sake. It's funny they made diversity one of the pillars of their ideology when they don't really believe it exists in the first place.
zeke5123a
55m ago
Chuck Todd routinely degraded American politics. Why should I listen to a thing he says unless it starts with “I am a huge part of the problem—I’m sorry.”
ABigGuy4U
56m ago
What worries me is that the explosive compound might not exist at all. Maybe this is something that all lithium-ion batteries can do with the right command.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
58m ago
Potentially.
But an IUD doesn't deal with the social, interpersonal, emotional consequences of sex. One of the big lies of the sexual revolution is that you can divorce sex from emotion. I don't think that's true between healthy and reasonable adults. I think the only way to do that is to dehumanize one or both of the participants. This is what happens with prostitution. Outside of that, both men and women who are really into casual sex often fall into deep existential crises. This is the end to The Game by Neil Strauss, I think it's a subplot of Magic Mike (I've never seen it, but I remember this popping up in conversation when that movie came out).
I would worry that IUDs would function as (literal) talismans in the minds of some women and men. "You have an IUD? Great, sex has no consequences!" Not true on a physical level (STIs/STDs) and not true on the mental/emotional/social level.
Again, I'm not recommending puritanical sexual codes for society at large. I'm advocating for the hard re-linking of consequences with sex. You can have lots of sex with many partners if you want, but be aware of and accept the consequences. If you don't like the sound of those consequences, abstinence is a good option, and shouldn't be pilloried as some sort of "internalized sexual repression."
jeroboam
1hr ago
At the risk of being basic, here's a simple example. Let's say I own a restaurant making chicken sandwiches. I have skin in the game. If I serve bad sandwiches at high prices, I will lose money and then go out of business.
On the other hand, consider the DMV. No one gets promoted or fired based on performance of the DMV. People are required to use their services, and they can't go out of business. No one has any skin in the game.
Chicken sandwich restaurants are generally good. DMV's are generally bad.
I'm not sure what you're saying here.
Are you for slut-shaming? Or are you more pro free love? Genuinely confused.
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