domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
3m ago
Did you know that, roughly speaking, Lebanon has 3 major ethnic/religious groups that aren’t super-friendly with each other?
Yes. I just don't believe that will convince any Lebanese people who aren't already Israel supporters that the dying children are to blame rather than the nation which is currently bombing them as we speak.
Did western media not show you the Syrian opposition groups giving out candy in the streets after the pager attacks? Where do you think that comes from? Or did you not hear of the Sabra and Shatila massacre- blamed on Israel, but perpetrated by Lebanese?
I don't recall ever claiming that Lebanon was some kind of land of milk and honey where all men lived together in harmony, but I don't see how this really matters. If those distinct subpopulations were already murdering and massacring each other, it isn't like being targeted by Israel is going to change that all that much.
quiet_NaN
10m ago
There is a case to be made that few if any people treat anything Trump says as being on simulacrum level 1. This may be the typical mind fallacy, but if Trump makes noises which sound like a factual statement of the world (i.e. level 1, 'Haitians are eating our pets'), I just don't parse it that way. Likely it is not even level 2 ('I want you to believe that they are eating pets (irrespective if it is true) so that you will vote for me') because that would assume that a significant fraction of listeners will mistake it for a level 1 statement. It is either level 3 ('I am anti-immigrant. Nobody is as anti-immigrant as me!') or level 4 ('I make sounds which I think will help me get elected').
If I am running through the streets saying "The sky is green, plants are orange, Elvis is alive, I am Elvis, 4 is prime, ...", then I an telling a lot of lies, but I will not deceive anyone, because most people will conclude 'based on past statements, that person is so unreliable a source of information that I should not update on their claims'.
MaximumCuddles
16m ago
Weren’t they also responsible for translating and publish “Always With Honor” in the west?
One of my favorite books. A short memoir of Pyotyr Wrangel, the most famous and successful general in the white army during the Russian civil war.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
20m ago
I am thinking of Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman. I never read it, but I have heard perhaps 50% of it. None of the anecdotes start with Mr Feynman trying to make an elevator pitch, "I am an interesting character, you should read this book about my super interesting adventures". Like JTarrou's comments, they get to point right in the beginning.
My recommendation: red-team the sales strategy.
Mewis
23m ago
I think an in-depth examination of this topic would demand its own thread. But to surmise, I believe the left is the political expression of intellectualism, and this is a secular pattern, not limited to any particular culture or nation.
Supah_Schmendrick
26m ago
One might even say the dogma lives loudly in them.
Supah_Schmendrick
27m ago
One of the early motives / aspirations of the printing press, for example, was framed not in terms of 'think of what it could do for newspapers' but 'think of how many more Bibles the world could had.'
This thought had extremely different valences depending on your opinion of the commonfolk; the Church hierarchy was corrupt, yes. But they were also right that proliferation of the sacred text in the vernacular would cause an absolute riot of absolutely uncontrollable radicalism, with not-infrequently horrifying consequences.
OneTimesOneIsTwo
29m ago
Deep Rock Galactic might be up your alley. It's a 4 player class-based PvE game (horde shooter?) where you play as a dwarf and you kill bugs and mine minerals on The Most Dangerous Planet In The Galaxy.
It's mission based. Missions have a primary objective that must be completed, no timer. They take roughly 20-40 minutes on average, but difficulty level and teammates and the specific mission push it lower or higher.
Man all this sounds dry as hell. The game is fun. Shooting bugs, working with your team, navigating the caves. The caves are procedurally generated, which works well due to each class' traversal tool. The driller can drill through anything at walking speed, the gunner can place ziplines, the engineer can place platforms, and all of these synergize and help the team. A mineral deposit high on a sheer wall is no issue, even with randoms, because of the pinging system.
It might have the best pinging system in any game. You hold a button to pull up your laser pointer. It has a little screen that tells you what you're looking at (mineral type, generic Common Rock, name of the bug chasing you, etc.). Press another button and you ping what you're looking at. Other dwarves can see both the ping (through walls) and the laser pointer. It's brilliant, and I think it's a big piece of why the game works so well even when you play with randoms.
Amadan
You are capable of doing better, more often, and I wish you would.
35m ago
Probably. That was the problem. She could be a good contributor, but she could not control her temper and she thought being offended was a license to shit on people.
Many such cases.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
40m ago
I wish she were still around to react to being called "that one catholic girl."
I wish she were still around too, but I feel, if you observe this comment of yours carefully, you'll realize that if she were around her resultant comment would probably again get her a mod warning, or worse. This is just my observation.
Amadan
You are capable of doing better, more often, and I wish you would.
41m ago
I did unban him. Now that I recall, I think that happened just before the glitch that forced @ZorbaTHut to roll back the site a week. So apparently he was un-unbanned.
Okay, @SkookumTree (if you're still around), you are unbanned. Post about something other than how a goddamn doctor can't do better than a 500-pound meth addict.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
42m ago
As long as the magical wish could also prevent any government agent from having a successful shooting of an innocent, that might work. Of course, it would also lead to police just “firing” into crowds and whoever’s not “innocent” gets shot. All sorts of dystopia come into play there.
SSCReader
44m ago
Let's say that reference to "the Cathedral" or "the Elites" is not a good way to approach this conversation. What would be a better approach? Reference to Blue Tribe?
Blue Tribe is probably even worse, because almost certainly the vast majority of the Blue Tribe didn't have anything to do with journalist or tech company decisions and the like. Elites is at least a bit more specified, but there are non-Blue elites. As our own statement above says, we should try to be as specific as possible, so maybe Blue Tribe Elites would be better. But even then almost certainly not all Blue Tribe elites were doing X or Y. But every level of specification takes work, it would be crazy to expect you to find the exact people who did x or y. We'd never be able to carry out a conversation. So perhaps settling for some Blue Tribe Elites did X or Y is the balance. It indicates allegiance and position and that it is not all of the group.
Mind you, I'm as guilty as anyone of just saying Red or Blue, when I know it wasn't all of Red or Blue. Trade offs between saving time and mental effort with short-hand and generalizations vs accuracy is a real thing.
Joyful
45m ago
There are some people who get to enjoy the company of various women in a short duration of time in their youth and I wish to be one of them. If I meet a girl who I find attractive and wish to engage with
That sounds like sex with euphemisms.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
45m ago
I remember an episode of CSI where someone mounted an ammo box’s worth of rounds to a plastic printed sheet on a wood board, connected all the rounds to electric triggers, and used these ammo-board guns to turn people into goop in a single moment. Still using existing ammo but it opened my eyes to what makes a “gun”.
SophisticatedHillbilly
54m ago
What are they, if you don’t mind sharing?
Rov_Scam
58m ago
Not unless you allowed unlimited scoring per possession, i.e. the scoring team gets to receive the ensuing kickoff and possession doesn't change unless the defense makes a stop. Otherwise it would be like baseball if teams were limited to one run per inning. One side effect of this is that there would be a lot less going for it on 4th when in field goal range, since 3 points and maintaining possession is worth more than the risk of turning the ball over on downs. The real reason this would never happen, though, is that it would lead to longer games, and the accompanying injury risk. Instead of teams running out the clock you'd have teams putting scrubs in to manage their starters, which I doubt would make for entertaining football.
SSCReader
59m ago
Though note, we're not talking about a ban, we're talking about Thanos snapping away every gun and every future gun in private hands, depending on how you word your "wish" that might include anything that acts like a gun. This is magic (of a sort) not law.
SSCReader
1hr ago
Sure, that's what allying with people you disagree with means. It doesn't mean he has all of a sudden become a Democrat, after 40 some years. I think it's kind of odd that people talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome, but don't seem to want to see that it affected some Republicans too.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1hr ago
I'm totally fine with adopting that as a metric - you just have to include all the calories that go into refining the fuel, building the plant, etc.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
Would looking at statistics of which party the journalists employed at the networks donate to make it less nebulous?
Let's say that reference to "the Cathedral" or "the Elites" is not a good way to approach this conversation. What would be a better approach? Reference to Blue Tribe?
The post two levels up adds the word "forcefully" to a description of such a coalition that did not previously contain it. How did that insertion add to the conversation?
It seems to me that @sulla's critique is on point and @MotteInTheEye's point is likewise a reasonable attempt at communication. I don't have nearly as much time as I used to for reasoned argumentation, but if you or @mdurak think the thinking here really is fuzzy, I can at least attempt to throw my hat in the ring as an interlocuter.
TequilaMockingbird
1hr ago
Nevermind Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, and both world wars.
God. I hate that. I can't function in the presence of promoters like that. I think it's fairly obvious that many people can't. If the advertiser is succeeding at getting people to go inside who otherwise wouldn't, and those people end up disappointed, then he's committing attention fraud against those people. Maybe that's fine and marginal for most people. But williams syndrome-adj ADHDs like moi don't have the spoons or filters to cope with this.
We've taken to yelling "Consume product!" every time an advertisement comes on TV in my household to counteract the damage it does to our brains. It's awful.
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