domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
14m ago
Is England a better place where nobody cares about the Legend of King Arthur anymore?
Better? I don't know about that. But worse? Almost certainly not.
If the very idea of "King Arthur" somehow fell out of the collective consciousness, then as far as I can tell, nobody would really notice or care. Maybe we might see an improvement in GDP figures when fewer awful movies come out every few years and then bomb at the box office.
Now, the current state of England, or the UK as a whole, leaves much to be desired, but I can recall no point in history, even at its absolute prime, when success or governmental continuity was load-bearing on watery tarts handing out swords. And even back then, people treated it as a nice story, rather than historical fact or the basis for their identity.
On a more general level, I fail to see your case, or at least I don't think there's a reason to choose false stories or myths over ideas that are true, or at least not accurately described as either.
The French made liberty, equality and fraternity their rallying cry to great effect. I do not think any 3 of those concepts are falsifiable, but they still accurately capture values and goals.
FtSoA
17m ago
Every year, technically, agencies have to justify their budgets. Any given agency could be eliminated by Congress at nearly any time, if they so chose. The USAID demolition for example is a problem procedurally because Trump is trying to use the executive branch to effectively nullify what the legislative has done in creating and funding it. If you think a weak legislative branch and a lack of separation of powers is a big problem, this is not a positive development overall.
Sunset clauses always sound better in theory than they work in practice as an accountability mechanism. (Just ask the haters of FISA 702 about that.)
Nothing but mandated fiscal responsibility solves the overall problem of government spending growth. Regulatory growth is a harder nut to crack, since no budget is necessarily required. Perhaps law sunsets could help there because they would at least force a review, but that also generates a lot of work that itself could be a pretty big drag.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
27m ago
basically everyone here was really a progressive?
And my extension to that is that everyone here is a traditionalist, and the only real difference between traditionalists and progressives (in terms of moral foundations and what otherwise motivates them to hold those views) to someone who is neither of those things is "about 50 years". Yes, progressives seem iconoclastic and style themselves on hatred of traditionalists, but in reality they converge on the same solutions via different ideological lenses.
(For example, traditionalists would have seduction punished because it devalues the father's property, progressives would have seduction punished because it devalues the mother [and her ability to attract men]- both see this as bad, both have the same motivations, it's just that one couches it through androsupremacy and the other through gynosupremacy).
The death of the word 'liberal' as a meaningful term had consequences.
FtSoA
27m ago
In general, yes.
But consider that the State Department has continued to use a very selective hiring process, starting with an exam, this whole time and was corrupted by other forces.
This is not really true.
Wilson's Bureaucracy does a good job of showing empirical cases where agencies resisted growth and scope creep, but it was hoisted upon them.
Public choice theory is great overall, but Wilson pointed out where it got a little overdone in some respects.
Oh, and it's true because the bureaucracy grew a ton starting in the 30s, but in terms of government civilians it's been flat (and therefore proportionately lower) for some decades now. Of course, spending and regulation has gone up, overall including spending on contractors and NGOs.
There should always be the countermeasure of "can we afford this?"
Deficit spending outside defined emergency conditions ought to be unpermitted.
wayfarer
30m ago
Note that it is about small subset of "aliens". It is supposed to be:
- aliens capable of Weird Stuff
- detected by USA military
- coverup done by US military for long time
- not detected by others or they joined coverup
- all released evidence is clearly faked, unconvincing or dubious
- and so on
If FTL is possible then I expect to aliens be undetectable or just trample over us.
Not fit in weird area required for stories by UFO enthusiasts to be true at all.
I entirely believe in existence of elephants. But if my aunt starts claiming that he has herd of twenty elephants in her house, then last thing I would expect to be there is herd of living elephants.
FtSoA
30m ago
Oh I completely agree. The theory was something like: "The sniper was shooting around Trump, not at Trump, and Trump had a blood capsule to burst on his ear." People had to die to really sell it.
Nothing here makes sense in terms of risk/reward. And there's objective evidence to disprove it.
And yet.
I'm honestly surprised the shooter was just good enough to narrowly miss a headshot, but then couldn't even get a body shot for his follow ups. He got off at least three controlled shots before Trump ducked down.
(But we do have a number of people on this very forum that apply roughly the same level of credulity to Ghislaine Maxwell having a longstanding poweruser Reddit account, clearly authored by a Malaysian man, for actually not even a coherent motive. People want to believe.)
wayfarer
36m ago
As to why the DoD/USG decided to plant misinformation in a subset of the troops and release them in to the general population to spread their stories, this was never clear.
as a joke?
Either it was entirely deliberate to end with them confused and sincerely believing aliens.
Or more likely someone was too nosy, got "I research aliens, now fuck off" as a joke and has not realized that it was a joke.
Hieronymus
36m ago
UTF-16 and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. But having typographically correct characters and the ability to casually mix languages are very nice.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
37m ago
grunge gets coopted by corporate and refined and streamlined until we get Creed, who look soulless in comparison to The Strokes
What a weird description of Creed, of all the bands you could have picked. Their lyrics are very sincere (if not especially subtle) expressions of Scott Stapp’s Christian faith. They’re far more “soulful”, in terms of heartfelt expression of their true beliefs and emotions, than nearly any other band within their same broad genre. There are plenty of reasons not to like Creed (although I’m certainly a Creed fan), but lack of soulfulness is an inapt one.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
38m ago
I think honestly any future government would do well to have an automatic sunset to the creation of new agencies. Once a generation we really need to look into whether or not the laws, mandates, regulations, and agencies we built for the crisis of the moment even make sense generations later. It would also prevent those agencies from deciding on their own to do things that harm the country. If you know that in five years your environmental agency will be called to defend its right to exist, you might well think twice before regulating carbon and other common chemicals, or at least keep the regulatory regime as light as possible.
wayfarer
48m ago
Maybe I am not a human, but I dropped it as not worth watching quite soon. By first or second episode?
I watched "Your Name" and it was pretty but pity that all this animation effort has not went toward something more worth it. Maybe modern audience does not care about plot at all, but I am not obligated to spend time on stuff like that.
Corvos
50m ago
Yeah, I know. But I didn't feel like events had been treated with enough gravity, either. What just happened was really, really grim and I feel like the narrative needed to slow down and find some way to acknowledge that. As it was, I got the same sense I tend to get from Neal Stephenson: that the author is observing human emotion from the outside as a sort of interesting plot mechanism, and my desire to read further just evaporated.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
57m ago
One thing to remember that the professions with the sorts of people who keep the UFO racket going - aviators, intelligence types, journalists, politicians etc. - probably contain a fair amount of people for whom "finding out the truth about the UFOs" has actually been a major motivator, or at least a motivator, for selecting the said field, and who are thus primed towards interpreting any potential evidence indicating likewise to that direction.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
See that 123 symbol in the left corner? Then you'll see the - button in the middle of the keyboard, long press it and the em-dash is right in the middle. It's got 3 options ¯ — -, or as I like to call it, the stroke emoticon.
zeke5123a
1hr ago
Organisms attempt to grow. Unless there is a countermeasure, they will grow. There was for a long time no countermeasure to bureaucracy and therefore it grew.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1hr ago
Your semi-trolly comment is based on the shared cultural assumptions that housework = drudgery and art = purpose. We can automate processes, but not purpose, so on the path to eliminating the drudgery of housework, we eliminate the drudgery of soulless art. But people want to do art - not corporate memphis prints of mixed families at a picnic, they want to express themselves. So even while corporations all converge on an art style specifically designed to be 'inoffensive' and mass produced, even as ai makes it trivial to 'bring your imagination to life' and ghiblify your photos, people wistfully dream of the day they can stop working and make art. IGOR beat Father of Asahd in every conceivable metric. We might not notice authenticity, but our brains do.
On a similar note, if you pick a career as an artist to make money, you should get the paint in your house tested for lead. You pick a career as an artist because you want to express yourself more than you want to make money - stupid maybe, but it's true. Sometimes you have to make money anyway though. Does that make your expression inauthentic? No, because it's still driven by purpose. And necessity is the mother of invention. Simply by choosing a life of squalor so you don't have to work 9 to 5 (what a way to make a livin! (fuck that's what I'm singing for the rest of the day now)) positions you to make authentic art. Does that mean you will make authentic art? No, you can still make slop for a paycheck, and that slop might even be popular if you put your soul into it. I don't think anyone would disagree that The Boondock Saints was slop, an attempt to cash in on the Tarantino bubble of 90s movies about hitmen. It is also earnest as fuck and people love it for that.
Artistry is at all times a battle between those who wish to express themselves and those who wish to turn that expression into money. Sometimes and in some places it leans one way, while in other times and places it leans the other. Hair metal and bands like Poison look soulless in comparison to Nirvana and Hair Metal dies, then grunge gets coopted by corporate and refined and streamlined until we get Creed, who look soulless in comparison to The Strokes, and so on, same as it ever was (in case you don't like Dolly).
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
Rabbi Balkany, the leading lobbyist for Haredi Jewry in DC, married into one of most important Haredi dynasties, did not blackmail billionaire Steve Cohen in order to reap a meager 180k salary from his school. However, as you note, this is my fault, for not providing the abundant evidence necessary to persuade an unfamiliar and perhaps somewhat naive reader who cannot make the natural extrapolation that a highly influential DC fixer for decades is not blackmailing Steve fucking Cohen just to receive a tiny salary from his Jewish day school.
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His salary was 180k, while his revenue stream from his small business Rite Care was 450k
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One of the two requested subjects of donation was a different Haredi school that he was not involved in, which he had no way of financially benefitting from
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He was involved in “expediting” Jewish school funding through DC connections as early as 1987
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“In 1994, Milton Balkany, a conservative Republican active in political fundraising,[22] tried to have Luchins excommunicated by a Jewish religious court,[13] blaming him for having "caused yeshivas in the land of Israel to lose money",[23] after Luchins had complained about Balkany's efforts to compel Israeli government officials to use U.S. aid money for projects Balkany favored in Israel.[24]”. This is not someone who is in it for greed! He is more like the sacrificing commander of a foreign army. He is in it for his tribe, giving them money and funds. Trying to have another Jew excommunicated because he didn’t want American aid going for Yeshiva funding. This is a very loyal lieutenant of the Jewish cause.
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He helped Jewish funding as far away as Russia
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He worked to ensure orthodox Jews got half of NYC’s school vouchers
This is not a guy who does things for personal benefit. In typical fashion, I imagine he would have pocketed some of Cohen’s money, or sent some of it to another Jewish endeavor. But the overarching real reason behind doing this was to fund the Jewish schools. Haredi corruption is like this. The Cars4Kids, the 1bil in nyc public funds, etc.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I mean again, you’re still stuck with having a guy point a real gun at a person’s head with a real bullet in it and really pulling the trigger. It’s a thing you can’t just gloss over. If Trump decided to fake it, he’s either stupid or crazy because if even the slightest thing goes wrong. He moves tge wrong way suddenly, the wind changes, the sun pops out from behind a cloud, tge scope is a few millimeters off, the shooter gets nervous, or he for some reason has to rush tge shot, there’s no way to be sure that this very real bullet fired from a very real gun doesn’t end up in Trump’s very real brain. We know it was a real bullet fired because it hit people in the crowd behind him. And all of this assumes it’s not at 19 year old dietary aide and community college graduate using a rifle he shoots paper targets at in a gun club once a week. A professional sniper wouldn’t dare try it, an amateur would undoubtedly kill his client trying something like this even at close range, let alone off the top of a building several hundred yards away. If you had a top sniper at gun range distance try to graze the ear of a baliastics gel head that’s randomly moving without hitting the rest of the head, I’d be shocked if anyone could do it even 1/20 times.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1hr ago
−10,000 social-credit points for hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.
erwgv3g34
1hr ago
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
Great work! I've included some real lightweight shit in there this year so it's been easy.
SkoomaDentist
2hr ago
Now let’s not be hasty. Surely you have some less evil alternatives such as a high ranking Scientology cult operative, North Korean prison camp guard or perhaps a mass murderer?
My father was a career NCO in the USMC, retired in the early 90s. Apparently the military is, or at least was, ripe with various theories and conjectures. His take on UFOs/UAP was that someone(s), somewhere made a decision to deliberately trick a small number of the most gormless, credulous service members in all the branches into having sort of staged experiences to leave them with the impression that there actually was knowledge of UFOs in the USG somewhere, its generally well covered up, but somehow a steady trickle of corporals and specialists were leaving the service absolutely convinced that they saw something they weren't supposed to see or otherwise experienced direct evidence of aliens. I've met a few of these intrepid veterans myself over the years and they really did seem absolutely convinced, though they were quite poor at actually communicating their experiences of describing the 'evidence' they witnessed. As to why the DoD/USG decided to plant misinformation in a subset of the troops and release them in to the general population to spread their stories, this was never clear.
The most common story I heard was usually about them witnessing some technology or phenomena that obviously could only have been reverse engineered from, or made out of, salvaged alien technology. A few attributed nuclear power/weapons generally to this.
If you have a selective exam but don't get enough applicants because e.g. the wages are not that attractive anymore, or the institution has a bad smell, you're not going to get as good a selection.
e.g.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/U-S-Department-of-State-Foreign-Service-Officer-Salaries-E32768_D_KO24,47.htm?experienceLevel=FOUR_TO_SIX&location=
96-140k. 140K after six years isn't going to get you top talent these days.
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