domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
haroldbkny
15m ago
There's a large continuum between those two positions. I probably fall pretty much in the middle, myself. But environmentalists have been banging the "we are going to cause the extinction of the human race any day now" drum for 30 years, and quite frankly I'm sick of it and their dishonesty. I'd rather no manatees die, but that's a far cry from pod living.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
22m ago
What’s causing the divide is the utter failure of the current system of delivering anything the people want from their leaders.
It can’t deliver on economics, in fact the standard of living seems to be getting worse. People are cutting back on things that were once considered normal. The hoops necessary to get to a decent wage and lifestyle are higher every decade. In 1950, a kid could barely graduate high school and still get a pretty decent job at a factory or something similar. He could expect at least a small house, a car, and to be able to support his wife and kids. That same lifestyle in 2024 requires a good college degree from a good university and quite often unpaid internships just to hope that if you and your wife work 40 hours a week, you can maybe have what your grandparents had with one less worker and less education.
It can’t stop crime. The number of anti-crime measures you take without thinking about them is crazy especially once you see how good it is in functioning societies. In Asia, it’s common for stores to leave their deliveries on the streets for hours. In some parts of Europe, people leave babies sleeping in strollers on the streets. In America, it’s common knowledge that you politely leave your car unlocked to prevent would be looters from having to smash windows to get at any valuables in the car. Porch piracy is a known problem. Personal safety often dictates when and where it’s advisable for the good people to go out. And police are basically told they aren’t allowed to stop a crime until it’s too late.
Education? About half of Americans don’t read above a 6th grade level. Many struggle with math more complicated than 10th grade algebra. All we can do with these kids is teach them The Narrative, encourage them to go into massive debt for the job training that K12 can’t give them and hope it turns out okay.
To me, it seems pretty clear that the problem is that what we have isn’t working, and everyone knows it, and so they’re grasping at the straws offered by radical and radically different ideologies to try and find a way to what people actually want — that the median American can live a modest but decent lifestyle in cities where crime is low enough that it doesn’t dictate how you live. They want their kids to have a good education and have the opportunity to be successful and happy. We have none of that, and the oligarchs in charge can’t give us that. So people are looking to other ideas: maybe socialism, maybe Christian theocracy, maybe some form of traditionalist society, maybe fascism, maybe some other idea.
The fact that we’re all so tuned into politics and it’s becoming so central to everything itself is a problem. If things were good, we would not care. People in all societies all over the globe got on very well in functioning societies without even trying to understand world affairs. They didn’t care that much even when given the vote. It was a small part of life, and probably came far behind other concerns like the health and welfare of their own family, sports, religion, and so on. Common people really only get super into politics when they are neither left alone nor helped. And this is where we are. Some 40% of the income earned by Americans goes to the government. And not only do we get what Moldbug calls “bad customer service” (meaning that the government doesn’t improve things for those taxpayers) but spends vast resources on harassing people about what they should think all the time (with their own money of course). Normies getting involved is a reaction, and polarization is the result. I contend that the only solution that will actually turn down the polarization is results.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
25m ago
even though he has since been unbanned.
Oh? He's still in the banned list, but maybe I don't know how to read that. Good summary, btw.
ChickenOverlord
29m ago
Got a link? Is it actually for the same woman?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
34m ago
Creating a fully-automatic helium-powered submachine gun that can push at least one 30-round magazine of 9mm-equivalent-or-better projectiles at lethal speeds is trivial with current materials science
My own experimentation indicates that it's possible to get:
- 32 ~9mm equivalent projectiles travelling at lethal speeds
- With a burst time under 4 seconds
- in a roughly SMG-like form factor
- In a form that is not regulated as a firearm under federal law
- using no commercial ammo
- using no pressure-bearing metal components
- using no advanced tooling
- using no controllable materials
- using a DIY process that the average teenager can easily follow
- for an very conservatively estimated unit cost of $50 per weapon, and likely half that.
- and with a total from-scratch cost for all materials and tooling needed for producing both the weapon and ammo costing less than a poverty pony AR15.
Such a weapon would have a number of tradeoffs, but it illustrates another corner of the possibility space. It's all a question of what you're optimizing for; right now, almost all optimization is happening in a very small area of the possibility space, focused on a very narrow cluster of optimizations, because the gun culture has not generally been sitting down with a piece of paper and a pencil and really thought about the nature of the problem for five minutes. There's low-hanging fruit absolutely everywhere in terms of legal frameworks, capital-intensive manufacturing, DIY, you name it. The fruit isn't being picked because people in the gun culture, generally, aren't looking at things from the correct perspective to make that fruit visible. They're thinking in terms of incremental shifts from what the current state of things, not about desired end-states and the most efficient route to them.
Even this inefficient search method is probably enough to get us where we need to go, but if the perspective shifts, we could get there a hell of a lot faster.
Jesweez
37m ago
I think almost everyone does as well, but when you ask how much relative value nonhuman life has that’s where you get the difference between the “this is something to be concerned about and aim to address” people and the “this doesn’t affect humans so why should I care” people.
practical_romantic
42m ago
The main diety for my clan is a female goddess who is the divine mother.
I never noticed it came off like this, I used to be too much of a wuss so maybe I overcompensated here.
haroldbkny
44m ago
I believe that to some degree. But you have to stack rank. At the end of the day, not everyone can survive, and we're all dead in the end anyway. So I consider human life far above most else.
And so because of that, we’re likely to keep reducing the web of life on the planet.
Yeah, it doesn’t affect you much if the manatee disappears. There may be some complicated knock on effect like more frequent algal blooms that make the beach a shitty place to be and affect the fishing industry. But we’re good at ignoring this type of thing.
Heck even if our cousins the chimpanzees (between 100k - 300k still exist in the wild), or the orangutan (~50,000 are left) disappeared, doesn’t really matter to you.
Ultimately it’s a spiritual principle. Either non human life on earth has value, or only human concerns do.
I have a foundational semi religious belief that the biota of the planet has innate value, so for example, if someone destroyed the rainforests of the planet tomorrow, even if through some magic this was made to have no impact on human wellbeing, I’d be forced to consider it unspeakably tragic.
Apparently not all humans share this belief.
anti_dan
1hr ago
Obama was still pro-Afghanistan when he gave the convention speech and during both 2008 and 2012 campaigns. Their opposition to war has always been more who/whom than the romantics seem to think. Clinton was happily intervening in Bosnia and Rwanda.
anti_dan
1hr ago
Is that why he's favorably citing David Corn?
https://x.com/DavidCornDC/status/1836776564916174907
He's switched many positions and is not coming back (he can't his site is funded to be this way)
PokerPirate
1hr ago
anti_dan
1hr ago
Unions, get captured just like any other org. The people interested in work will work. The people interested in advocacy and slacking off will get involved in the union.
It all comes down to the expectations of both parties.
If there's a street promoter outside of a club trying to convince me to pay a cover fee and go inside he might tell me things like it's the best club, that they have the biggest crowd inside of any bar in the city, everyone's having a great time, probably ever. Yuge night! Maybe they even say that they've heard rumors that there's a movie star who was planning on coming tonight. If I go inside and find it to be not all that, was I decieved? I wouldn't say so, because I was talking to a club promoter; I know what they're like, they know I know what they're like, the expectation was that they would exaggerate everything to try to get me to go inside.
There is a distinction though if they say something like "after you pay the cover fee your first two drinks are free" and it turns out not to be true. Because I don't expect them to be allowed by the bar (to say nothing of the law) to say something like that if it isn't true.
Also, I would consider myself decieved if I (before marriage of course) got in touch with a girl on a dating app and she insisted on meeting me at a club, and I found out after getting there that she was a promoter using the app to bring in clients to the club, even if she never said anything technically untrue. This is the kind of lying I associate in politics with the activists that masquerade as unbiased subject experts.
ThisIsSin
The boob tube emits harmful XXX-rays
1hr ago
the combined rage and innovation of the new “guncels” will come up with a ranged weapon which is deadlier or safer, or both
Air rifles are very under-developed. US federal law has never considered them to be firearms.
Creating a fully-automatic helium-powered submachine gun that can push at least one 30-round magazine of 9mm-equivalent-or-better projectiles at lethal speeds is trivial with current materials science. The last time anyone seriously tried to make a military firearm of this nature was the late 1700s, though there are a few current manufacturers that make manually-repeating hunting rifles based on this concept.
Combining that with electronic controls (and a lack of NFA- so for this application computer-based fire control, full-auto, and integrated suppressors will obviously be standard) provides even more interesting options. Want to fire a non-lethal burst at a target before the next trigger pull fires a burst that's going fast enough to penetrate? That's impossible with a traditional firearm simply due to its nature but eminently practical with an air rifle (liability issues aside).
The only problem here is how you're going to turn that into a handgun, but cartridge-and-captive-piston storage technology might be sufficiently promising in that regard to obviate that concern as well.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
I like the Zeugma. Some of the pronouns were a bit confusing:
a mohawk on long walks with amish girls, scrawny white boy at an all-black dance with a borderline little person, suicidal lesbians, a leather jacket with a married chick at an Ani DiFranco concert
Here I am imagining a Mohawk Indian in flagrante delicto with an Amish girl (girls!), and you having gay sex with a thin Caucasian male whose date is a black midget. Also doing it with an article of clothing. This isn't right, I am sure.
The rest, once cleared of ambiguity, is a compelling introduction--though in a way it might better serve as a blurb or an "About the Author" section. Part of the draw of your other similar posts is the What's this guy's story question that isn't immediately or clearly answered. My suggestion would be, if you do write a book, to start in the middle, maybe in "the ruins of what was once Babylon" (a great line) but really anywhere. Don't be bound by a linear structure.
Have you ever read Paul Theroux's My Secret History? It's got its share of critics and most of them are right, but that doesn't mean it isn't an imminently readable book. I don't mean that you should copy it, as such (It could be titled "Me and all the various women I've had sex with"), and it's very different from this, but I feel as if I'm supposed to recommend it here.
As a writer certainly you know to ignore most of the feedback I'm giving you and go your own way anyway. And I am all for that. I encourage you to keep getting it out.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
I want to hear about how you broke up a guild by banging the main healer. But perhaps that's my ex-WoW addict self talking.
haroldbkny
1hr ago
There a very big gap between an existence without manatees that a few people ever see on a recreational voyage, and living in a pod devoid of sunlight and subsisting on nutrient paste, or whatever other dystopia you might want to bring up.
There is nobody who can pull off bragging about their interesting life on the internet (arguably even in print) without coming across as a little annoying. That never (or maybe only rarely) detracts from the interesting parts.
Her: Ooo which church I would love to go if that’s okay?
Me: Sure, I was looking at [nearby church] — it's a bit nontraditional (rather, they say they follow a non-mainstream tradition, Theosophy) of course, as I said, I haven't actually been there yet so don't judge me if they turn out to be 100% crazy 🙈
Saturday morning
Her: I’ll look into! It might be interesting
To be specific, this is probably where you lost her. It went from her inviting herself to, looking into it as a soft exit. You tricked her with the church thing.
Looking up Theosophy, is that it looks odd, and makes you look out there. Likely - She's a Christian and thought you were going to Christian church, then pointed her to an odd pagan church with Nazi-esque logos, and she got spooked out by that. Culturally Christian people don't mind going to a nondenomination christian church to meet a stranger. It would code as a safe place. Rightly or wrongly, going to a non-christian esoteric religious meeting would code as dangerous and weird.
The wikipedia page has a logo at the top with a snake and a swastika thing.
"any of a number of philosophies maintaining that a knowledge of God may be achieved through spiritual ecstasy, direct intuition, or special individual relations, especially the movement founded in 1875 as the Theosophical Society by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907)."
jkf
1hr ago
The pagers take normal AAA batteries -- terrorists can go to the drugstore and get them like anyone else.
TIRM
1hr ago
The security guards at my work all carry walkie talkies. I can't badge past a door without someone with a walkie talkie strapped to their belt watching me. I see walkie talkies a hundred times a day.
Supah_Schmendrick
1hr ago
Yo I forgot Lou and he did that!!! Thank you for reminding me; one more reason the Hoovers are among my personal heroes.
This is a good take. I never even thought to look that up and now that I have yeah, it doesn't scan well.
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