domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
SSCReader
5hr ago
Right, but then we can also make them happy to stay in small towns right? We're already turning them into productive citizens, might as well make them happy where they are productive citizens. The reason why Thanos's plan in killing half the universe is stupid is because he has power over Minds, Reality, Souls , Space and Time. He can create resources, change people to not need so many resources, change people to work together better, create housing and planets, and suns.
If we can turn people into productive citizens then housing is the least of our worries. We'll turn a chunk of them into builders and contractors and miners and some into interior designers and so on. Snap loads of bricks and mortar into existence. Make New York into a TARDIS where Manhattan can have infinite housing in a finite area or whatever. Or make people happy to live 10 a room. Sky is the limit.
Last night I talked to a pretty intelligent female friend of mine about various things, and the subject of how men commit the vast majority of violence came up. She was eager to admit that yes, men do. I pointed out that a subset of men commit the majority of all this violence, and that the men in that subset tend to target men as well as women. She was less eager to admit this, but she went along with it. I then made an analogy to the fact that blacks on average commit more violence than whites do, but it is a subset of blacks who commit the majority of all that violence. She started to question me, wondering whether my evidence such as the FBI crime statistics is trustworthy or not. She's not some naive college student, either. She is over 50 and has been living in the US all her life. But she still has a hard time realizing the to me pretty obvious fact that blacks are on average more violent than whites.
THAT is the power of leftist propaganda.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Trump is a symptom of polarization, not a cause. He suspended his campaign in 2012 when it was clear he wasn’t going to go anywhere, in 2016 he cleared the field and hasn’t had a serious GOP rival since.
Why? Well, I would point to the actions of the center-left establishment as pushing conservatives into hostility. Obviously there’s the just, blatant, lies about everything from the media. But in Obama’s second term you also had fast and furious, you had democrats aggravating racial tensions for shits and giggles, you had the IRS targeting scandal, you had Obama himself moving from a polarizing but broadly popular figure into a progressive ideologue partisan. Then you’ve had the Biden admin targeting conservatives, with EG going after pro-life activists for three-felonies-a-day stuff while ignoring attacks on churches and pregnancy resource centers.
I recall reading a CNN journalist once writing, with great concern, that 40% of Americans think democrats want to take their guns away and force them to let trans in their bathrooms. It didn’t seem to occur to her that this was because democrats keep saying they’re going to do those things.
SSCReader
5hr ago
Sure, but that won't catch people who snap and go on a spree, or accidental deaths, or suicides etc. But it's not like there is any chance of either happening in the US.
SSCReader
5hr ago
Eh, I don't think the US government is likely to slip into tyranny, I'm for big government not against it. Bad cops would still be a problem of course, but overall i think the trade would be worth it. Though see the below discussion there are probably other Thanos snap interventions which would be more useful (if perhaps more immoral, depending on your POV).
I specifically chose species which don’t have others that easily fill the gap.
There aren’t birds that blot out the sky or native parrots or cold water manatee creatures in the US anymore, personally I think that’s something of value that disappeared.
We don’t miss them because of shifting baseline syndrome.
But for example, let’s say I’ve seen the manatees in Florida.. I have, they’re really beautiful. These huge gentle warm water mammals that just float up into the river systems and natural springs. You can be on a paddle board above a group of them and pet them, they just hang out underneath.
It would be sad if we lost these. Wouldn’t you agree?
I find it hard to understand people’s attitudes towards nature sometimes. It’s typically, “sure we could lose that and we’d survive fine!”.
A lot of things could be lost and we’d survive ok. Just pick a dystopia from fiction. 1984, Brave New World, humans survive! We’re doing fine!
Should the response be then “who cares?”, or, are there other things in the world that matter than just human survival?
I agree you can also promote violence against someone by making Hitler comparisons or similar.
it's STILL not dehumanizing them.
What would be required to dehumanize somebody?
I feel that trying to paint someone as a pet snatcher and eater because of their ethnicity is pretty close.
Ken0sis
5hr ago
Increasingly convinced that polar access is going to become a wedge issue for the Russian-Chinese alliance: Russian fisheries practices have generally leaned towards conservation and effective management of existing stocks and I don't particularly get the sense that they're down to let China go scorched-earth in their EEZ or even in international waters where straddling stocks are a problem.
But merely wrapping something in aluminum foil would leave small gaps
I wouldn't worry about small gaps.
aqouta
6hr ago
Of course this is primarily a 2A discussion, there is no new angle on the PvI conflict out of this. We also have plenty of left of center people here, just not lot of progressives. Have you considered that the "pro Palestinian" position just isn't very strong?
TIRM
6hr ago
I get that encasing something in aluminum with no gaps would shield it. Aluminum is the fourth most conducive metal and a good shielding design made out of aluminum would work.
But merely wrapping something in aluminum foil would leave small gaps that I think would defeat the shield. I get that you'd overlap the aluminum layers and not have large gaping holes, but I don't think that's good shielding. I sometimes deal with EMI issues at work and it is much harder than you'd think to shield parts. "Wrap it in foil" is not a clear path to success. I have literally seen parts wrapped in foil in misguided attempts to shield them. They were really quite leaky from an EMI point of view. "Put it in a metal enclosure whose lids or openings are sealed with metal EMI gaskets" is what actually works.
I think if the typical person tried shielding a radio with aluminum foil, they would screw it up.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6hr ago
Sure if we had that power then there are probably other interventions. Instead of snapping them away, why not just "fix" them, so they become contributing citizens.
One possible argument is: We have too many people in this country as it is. We’re overpopulated. Eliminating that chunk of the population frees up housing and space. It staves off the YIMBY-vs.-NIMBY wars by making existing housing cheaper and more available without needing to build another wave of commie-block apartment complexes. It frees up medical resources, school spending, and all of the other financial outlays that would apply to those people even if you magically turned them into productive citizens.
Now, one counter-argument is to say that if we could turn all these people into productive citizens, those people could then go gentrify and revitalize all the myriad small towns in America - places like Springfield, OH - with a population of productive Americans instead of welfare-dependent Haitians. The danger, of course, is that if you turn all the current thugs and junkies in America into middle-class domesticated Americans, they’re going to do the same thing that most middle-class domesticated Americans are currently doing: go to college and move to a major population center to seek white-collar work. This is just going to introduce another population influx into those cities, further constricting the housing and job supply. By eliminating these people entirely, you ease population pressure instead of just turning one type of problem into another type of problem.
MaximumCuddles
6hr ago
My favorite was the “no US soldiers in an active war-zone” lie. Just a few weeks ago some US Soldier got shot by ISIS.
There was a viral video uploaded basically the same day of the debate that ended up getting millions of views of the debate on TV when she said that, and it pans out to like seven soldiers in a forward operating base being like “Wait… then where the fuck are we right now?”
faceh
6hr ago
I mean, El Salvador basically did a small version of that by just rounding up and locking up the most violent people they could find (as judged by gang affiliation) and it worked fabulously. Murder rates plummeting down immediately.
Didn't need to go after every citizen to see if they had guns, just find the dangerous ones. They arrested and imprisoned about 80,000 people, which is not nothing, but much more modest than forcing millions to hand over weapons.
I have many reasons to believe a similar approach would do the same in the U.S.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6hr ago
That's a good way to frame it, thank you.
(I still want to kill the rabbits on my property).
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6hr ago
Thanks. Makes me think I don’t know that much about jurisdiction selection.
I really would be interested in an effort post like that!
laxam
7hr ago
No, I'm saying the moral foundations on which that international order are built are the same as the moral foundations on which a rights based worldview are built. Throwing out the one costs you the other.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7hr ago
every privately owned gun
“Looks like tyranny’s back on the menu, boys!” - American politicians, bad cops, the 80,000 new armed IRS agents, etc.
SSCReader
7hr ago
If we're talking Thanos-snapping, I'd pretty much prefer to Thanos snap any person with a propensity for uncontrolled violence away, I think it'd create more immediate gains, even if there were second-order impacts.
Sure if we had that power then there are probably other interventions. Instead of snapping them away, why not just "fix" them, so they become contributing citizens. Indeed we could fix everyone to be maximally productive and happy.
aardvark2
7hr ago
The dodo, one of the dozens of quite unique Australian animal species which went extinct in the past couple centuries, and which has become synonymous with extinction.
The thylacine, another Australian example. The largest marsupial carnivore on the planet. Not only its species but the entire family it represented is now extinct.
These are due to species from "big land" getting on smaller lands and have very little to do with "ecosystem damage etc." it happens all the time when separated lands get connected
DradisPing
7hr ago
The Steve Bannon prosecution over the build the wall foundation happened in SDNY. The recent "Tenet Media indictment" of two Russians took place in SDNY. No connection to NYC in either of those cases. There are a lot more, I don't have a list handy. Ricky Vaughn was going to be prosecuted there, but they filed in Easter District NY instead because they thought the jury would be better.
Maurene Comey, James Comey's daughter, works there.
When Geoffrey Berman ran SDNY he tried to claim that AG Barr couldn't fire him and tried to continue to serve.
It'll take an effortpost to go into depth.
faceh
7hr ago
Again I'd be curious as to what happens when it becomes known that nobody anywhere is in possession of a gun, whether the incentive shifts would make criminals more bold, or less bold.
If we're talking Thanos-snapping, I'd pretty much prefer to Thanos snap any person with a propensity for uncontrolled violence away, I think it'd create more immediate gains, even if there were second-order impacts.
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 it by state.
There's virtually no correlation within the U.S. between gun ownership rates and crime, or murder rates, on the state level.
Likewise, Switzerland has the highest gun ownership rates in Europe, and is around the lowest for crime and murder too!
Literally, there is no good evidence that guns are the driving factor in crime and death. Likewise, very little evidence that increased gun control drives decreased in crime.
I can't even understate how weak the actual case for gun control as a policy is, compared to various other policies that could be implemented with less expense, less interference with peaceful citizens, and less risk of unrest and resistance in response!
Are you really linking me to a comment recommending only your opponents be disarmed? Come on man.
My request is to disarm those people who assert that disarmament is good! Its about the fairest possible prescription.
If Democrats don't believe in Second Amendment rights, they shouldn't raise much fuss over waiving their said rights.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7hr ago
Cheaper option: try a handheld Uv light? https://nightsea.com/galleries/caterpillar-fluorescence/
I would not expect much thermal signature. Bugs are small and don’t retain much heat. A casual online search suggests using FLIR for finding nests, not individuals.
The teamsters have most of their membership in warehouses IIRC. I think a lot of it is just working class voters favoring Trump even when they’re making good money.
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