domain:npr.org?q=domain:npr.org?page=2?page=2
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
14m ago
While there are still serious concerns about how wishy-washy Trump is on Russia, that's a separate issue from "Russiagate" which was related to specific coordination possibly through blackmail. It might seem like any criticism of Trump's position on Russia is synonymous with "Russiagate", but when properly disambiguated I'd say not many Dems really believe in the crazier takes (e.g. Trump is a KGB plant).
I also think you're not really understanding what I (or the writers I linked) mean by "crank". A crank isn't just anyone who believes in stuff that isn't supported by science or evidence, it's specifically conspiratorial views like QAnon or "Bill Gates is microchipping us through vaccines" or "global elites want open borders to genocide white people". It's distrust of amorphous undefined "elites", who are perceived to have a secret evil agenda. Someone who believes in religion or astrology is wrong, obviously, but I wouldn't call them a crank.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
18m ago
I'm asking you to summarize what the hard-liners who believe in a Jewish ethnostate believe, in terms they would agree with.
"Israel is the exclusive nation-state of the Jewish people. It consists of the lands that God agreed to give us in the torah (or talmud, not up to date on the specifics of jewish religious texts), stretching from the river to the sea. As God's chosen people, we are justified in conquering the lands he promised us."
That isn't what I meant by "stupid grunt shit," and I think you are being disingenuous in claiming that you think that's what I meant. I was thinking more of the videos of them making offensive jokes and raiding Palestinian women's underwear drawers.
Apologies for misunderstanding - there has been a recent (well not terribly recent but the process has stretched on for a long time) high-profile case in my country where someone was prosecuted for "stupid grunt shit" that turned out to actually be warcrimes. This included kicking a man in handcuffs off a cliff and giving the soldier that did it the nickname Leonidas, as well as multiple murders of civilians (look up Ben Roberts-Smith if you want more information) - that's the sort of behavior I assumed you were describing here.
I know that the Palestinians (and our resident Jew-haters) claim that Israelis are sniping Palestinian children for fun, but there's been no substantial evidence of this, and to believe that it's happening at scale requires, again, believing that Israelis are so psychologically different from most people, and so bloodthirsty, that "monsters" would be an appropriate description.
Actually, I don't think that this behavior marks them as being psychologically different from most people. Go back through history and you'll be hard-pressed to find a people that hasn't engaged in these kinds of brutal acts - you don't even need to go that far back at all when you look at Germany. It is eminently human to get caught up by powerful feelings of nationalism, ethnic chauvinism, esprit de corps etc, and take actions that will haunt you for the rest of your life. That is actually one of the pieces of information that went into forming my view on the topic - the (supposed) increased rates of suicide and psychological issues amongst IDF soldiers as a result of what has happened in Gaza. Take this article for instance - https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/21/middleeast/gaza-war-israeli-soldiers-ptsd-suicide-intl/index.html
After Mizrahi took his own life, videos and photos surfaced on social media of the reservist bulldozing homes and buildings in Gaza and posing in front of vandalized structures. Some of the images, which were purportedly posted on his now removed social media accounts, appeared in a documentary that he was interviewed for on Israel’s Channel 13.
Here we have a man who gets radicalised by what happened on October 7, goes to fight in Gaza, commits atrocities and brags about it on social media (I'm sure you can see why my mind went to the place it did when you discussed stuff being posted to social media by Israeli soldiers)... then kills himself because he's unable to live with what he's done. I don't think this man was uniquely evil or some incomprehensible monster with alien psychology, and I can understand why he took the actions he did. But that doesn't excuse the fact that what he did was monstrous, and I'm not going to back down from the description of "blood-drenched" when we have an actual soldier who took part in those deeds repeatedly telling his family that "invisible blood" is coming out of his skin. I like to think that if I was in the same position I'd take a different course of action, but that's very easy to say when it isn't my relatives being kidnapped.
I have never claimed that the Israelis are non-human or otherwise incomprehensible. I believe that deeds like the ones Israel is committing are morally wrong, but also that they have an incredibly negative effect on the people who commit them as well. The stoics and the buddhists both view harming others as an act that harms the self as well, and I'm honestly inclined to agree with them. Bulldozing people alive in great numbers as you demolish their homes leaves a stain on the soul that is impossible to remove - but with that said, I'm going to be largely reserving my empathy for the victims.
Using the "Aparthead state" rhetoric kind of gives the game away,
Is Israel not an apartheid state? If you can provide some evidence that Palestinians and Israelis are treated equally under the law I'd be very happy to be proven wrong. But when I hear about laws that say things like "The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people." I can't help but think of apartheid. I'm not a big fan of Ta-Nehisi Coates, but I think his description was right on the money.
I mean, have you read any other books? I haven't read Righteous Victims but I've read some of the other stuff by Benny Morris and the New Historians, and even they don't tell it that way.
I've read other books, yes. But some of those books are from the Palestinian perspective, and my view is informed by both.
If you think that terrorism and unending warfare is a "political consequence of their continued existence," though, then you apparently share the most pessimistic Israeli view of Palestinians.
I think that terrorism and unending warfare is a political consequence not of their continued existence but rather a reaction to Israeli policy. Change those policies, give them justice and a lot of that terrorism and unending warfare will vanish. I personally support a single-state solution with full franchise for the Palestinians and prosecutions for the minority of Israelis that were actually engaged in planning and carrying out the blood-drenched, bronze-age deeds that have rightfully garnered so much opprobrium from the rest of the world.
On the other hand, we're back to how you characterize "the lengths Israel has gone to."
I feel like I addressed several of the other points here earlier, but I'm basing this off widely accepted and reputable sources. I think the UN and ICC are worth listening to when it comes to questions of genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing, and even pro Israeli sources largely agree that the north of Gaza has been destroyed and the people who lived there displaced in order to let the settlers start moving in as soon as possible. Even if I go solely by the deeds actually announced by Israeli government officials, I still think that "the lengths Israel has gone to." are that bad.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
29m ago
Do you have any evidence that wokeness is still peaking, or has not yet peaked in the short to moderate term? I've gotten a lot of pushback from people on this site claiming how ridiculous it is to think wokeness has peaked... yet they kind of just handwave that as an assumption. By contrast, people like Noah have pretty good evidence in articles like this (non paywalled version available here)
daguerrean
36m ago
Youtube and Facebook and to some extent Instagram are weird that way. Moderation is obviously slightly woke but the commenter base is definitively anti-woke. Places like Reddit, 4chan, X have a more typical convergence of leadership and userbase.
JarJarJedi
39m ago
Second that. It took covid mess for me to realize that if I don't do some shit now, I may not even have a chance to do it at all. So if I think I should do stuff, then I should start doing it and not postpone it to the right time.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
42m ago
That's a very complicated question I've spent a lot of time posting about on here - but luckily, Australia is so comically corrupt that it is a lot simpler down under. Previous government leaders signed ruinously, comically bad deals that fucked over our national economy for personal profit. We're exporting natural gas during a domestic natural gas shortage, because corrupt deals were made that essentially result in us subsidising companies which extract fossil fuels then sell them to Japan at below cost so that Japanese middlemen can profit from the deal. Destroying all of that would actually lower domestic energy prices.
JarJarJedi
43m ago
So when Musk took over Twitter (using the old name since it was the name back then) he famously fired about 3/4 of Twitter employees. Pretty much everybody who knew anything about anything predicted Twitter will fail catastrophically very soon after. Of course, now we know it didn't happen. My question is - does anybody have any evidence of Twitter service becoming worse at all in any way since then? I don't mean worse like "people can now post things I don't like" but objectively worse like site is not loading, or search not working or any of the stuff like that.
Folamh3
45m ago
I think this probably comes back to one of the points Scott made in "Can Things be both Popular and Silenced?". If you're a woke person or a leftist and want to hear woke or left opinions, you have an entire media ecosystem made up of hundreds of thousands of extremely qualified writers, journalists, academics etc. If you have more unorthodox opinions, you are not nearly as well-served, and so the bar is lower for a writer or journalist trying to gain a foothold. A woke person trying to make a living as a blogger or journalist is going up against The New York Times; an anti-woke person trying to make a living is going up against a bunch of other small fries with Substack accounts.
I think this argument is applicable not just to honest people acting in good faith but also to "grifters", broadly defined. If you want to make a living by cynically parroting woke opinions or selling obvious woke-inflected bullshit you don't really believe in, the competition is so stiff that you have to be really good at it to do it at all, so it tends to be a long con (perhaps as much as ten years' training in academia before you set up shop as a "corporate diversity consultant" or whatever). But for anti-woke grifters, the demand for comparable content is just as high but the competition isn't as stiff, so just about any idiot who can string a sentence together can start a podcast and be inundated with Patreon subscriptions within the year. Candace Jones can literally wake up one morning and announce "hi everybody, I'm black and I hate wokeness!" when she was a woke person quite literally the night before. That option is not open to Ibram X. Kendi - he must put in long hard hours in postgraduate degrees and speaking engagements before people are willing to throw money at him for doing nothing.
anti_dan
47m ago
We'll probably move out to the burbs when we have out kid of school age for the better schools, not because we fear the area.
This is exactly the kind of problem Democrats need to solve if they want to win people back. People dont want long commutes and to move out for schools, but the reality is that if a default place requires very close oversight of a 2 year old, its not really fit for humans. If there is glass on the ground or shit, perhaps you have a dog and have had to pull them away in your neighborhood. Kids shouldnt be on leashes, they are humans that need to learn, but learning not to step in the dog shit is not so valuable a lesson for a 2 year old. Particularly when that dog shit is mixed with glass in a kids playground where, in more normal places, you can trust to just let said 2 year old march around while you enjoy a coffee.
Plus the playground bullies are out of control ATM in cities. Many biters. Cops will charge YOU if you discipline or physically separate a kid while defending your own. Particularly if the stack isn't in your favor.
And you know all this. You know "better schools" is a euphemism for better peer students and peer parents. No amount of Stuyvesant and Stevenson teachers would make Haitian kids learn. And I sure as heck know the Stevenson kids dont have any broken glass on their feeder campus.
People who seriously identify as left-wing would often dispute this. Many on the left see the Democrats as a right-wing party, and the mainstream media as centrist, liberal, centre-right, or something else other than left.
This is certainly true, but I think when Democrats are talking about this in the context of losing the election they literally believe that the Democrat-aligned media is lacking, not communist-aligned media. I see this all the time on Reddit.
I believe your average non-communist Democrat sees it this way. Republican-aligned media like Fox puts party support above all else. They put no value on truth, morality or fairness and just spew misinformation 24/7, anything to help Republicans. Meanwhile the NYT is primarily concerned with Truth, Justice and Objectivity. If this shakes out to favoring the Democrats that’s just because “reality has a liberal bias” and “it’s not politics just basic human decency”, the NYT only favors the Democrats by this convergence of their values but they would not lie, cheat or steal if it helped the Democrat cause. So the NYT doesn’t count as Democrat aligned in their mind
I’ve seen many Dems on reddit lamenting the whole “when they go low we go high” strategy and wishing they could fight dirty as they perceive Republicans are.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
58m ago
Ideally energy should be very cheap.
Good thing Australia has a bunch of uranium lying around!
curious_straight_ca
1hr ago
People currently take a variety of things that don't hurt them
They have a lot of comically false beliefs about the benefits of the things they currently take, demonstrating they're not able to correctly identify the effects the supplements have. If unscrupulous firms are allowed to market real drugs in the same way, that market will similarly not be able to discern that the real drugs don't have the claimed effects, and they'll take a lot of the real pills and hurt themselves!
But if that alone were enough, we would surely have a better world than we do now
Society doesn't work in a way which supports human well-being. Advertisement for instance attempts to create a need that it then tries to fulfill. And it's possible that even if we managed to make all of a society enlightened, they would cease to exist in a single generation as they either renounced marriage, or became so uninterested in conflict that another country could easily conquer them. I also believe that Postmodernism has made society worse, even though it has correctly identified that some things are social constructs (and incorrectly made human nature out to be a construct). But yeah, Chesterton's fence applies here. Many bad things have good second-order effects, and maybe good things have bad second-order effects.
Teaching these things is difficult, but only because we're so corrupted by societies teachings. I believe that a child would grasp them more easily.
so nothing mind-blowing
There's a small possibility that we all have weak reality-bending powers in that our subconsciousness can affect the universe, and there's a chance that one can make this power stronger. I once visualized that I got an A in a class that I had barely studies for, and I somehow did. How? My presentation was mediocre at best. The situation with my brother is also not understood by neither science nor old books (except those which cover mind-blowing things).
John Wheeler was an extremely intelligent scientist and won many awards, and he arrived at a "participatory universe theory". And the general ratio of highly intelligent people who believe in strange things is quite high. There's also some research by the CIA like the gateway process: https://www.vice.com/en/article/found-page-25-of-the-cias-gateway-report-on-astral-projection/
And it's possible that beliefs influences reality in a way such that reality is the superimposing of all beliefs, which means that the doubts of many can cancel out the beliefs of few (which may be why many cultures warn that one should not say their wishes out loud). Another theory of mine is that things cannot change state while they're observed (the Quantum Zeno effect?), which means that they need to be unobserved in order to be malleable. Lets again use Tarot cards as an example, but shuffling the cards while you're not observing them, you create unobserved states, and the cards become "undecided". Now, as you observe a card, it's decided, and your subconsciousness (or your past and future trajectory) somehow influences this choice. Some call the set of unobserved/undecided things "Chaos". For chaotic things, very small inputs can result in vastly different outputs, but this means that the energy of the human brain is enough (as the future trajectory of events can be altered by spending a few calories worth of energy). Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kia_(magic)
But isn't it more fun to find these truths yourself? If you figure everything out, you will be bored (this seems a bit like your current problem actually) And if somebody discover a "mind-blowing" secret before us, and gets access to a higher power, we may be in trouble. Especially if some government gets their hand on said knowledge.
There's clearly some rules in effect here
Your quote by Aristotle seems to be the same thing I wrote earlier about there being no true language and no true axiomatic system, but that "You must choose one". It's like when we talk - we have to choose a language in order to talk. Any language will do, but we cannot speak of anything which does not have a word in that language, trapping us.
There's a rule in effect, but it's difficult to construct a rule which explains all examples. I think that submission to a higher power vs making oneself out to be the higher power is the difference between white magic and black magic. There's many warnings that black magic can destroy you or make you go insane. It may just be that being humble has a lot of benefits for the psyche - after all, basically ever culture to ever exist has spoken positively about humility. It's possible that herd morality is to blame for this virtue of humility (an aspect of human nature in normies say "The nail which sticks out gets hammered down") but even non-conformists tend to come up with a saying similar to "Those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted." It's possible that "authorities" just have higher, well, authority over the programming of the mind. After all, most socities have leaders whose words are absolute. Just like humans crave external validation and overestimate the importance of others opinions, our brain may value the worldview of authorities very highly.
A set of rules to perception and feeling that we currently don't know
I know some of them. One is that contradiction works differently than you'd think. Trying to be positive, and trying not to be negative are not the same. You can be positive, but the more you try "not to be negative" the harder you will fail. This is related to "Do or do not, there is no try". Also sometimes communicated like this: "When you try to be happy, you reinforce the idea that you're not already happy, which makes you stuck in the unhappy stage". The Tao Te Ching also has a bunch of rules which are just the opposite of what one would expect.
Could we create a methodology to produce the perfect LSD trip?
I think I've seen something like that over at https://qualiacomputing.com While I don't think you can solve reality or human nature with mathematics, these are the guys who have come the closest to being able to do this so far.
Could we eliminate the dark night of the soul from The Path?
Like the attempt to eliminate evil and the attempt to eliminate suffering, eliminating the dark night of the soul may be naive. The dark night could be an important step in reaching enlightenment, like how getting your pulse up is an important step in lowering your resting heart rate, and kind of like how nihilism can be a transitory state between belief in the external and belief in the self. You can eliminate bad dreams quite easily, but I believe that they're just reflections of your general situation in life, or even important messages from your subconsciousness. Anyway, if you want to eliminate bad dreams, you need to tell yourself that these dreams do you no good, and have conflicting parts of yourself agree with this. Hypnosis should work as well, as long as your subconsciousness perceive the person who hypnotizes you as an authority. But again, even so-called bad things exist for a reason. There's a duality principle here as well. Or perhaps this "bad" thing is a part of something bigger. We don't like having red lights in traffic, but eliminating red lights would be a terrible idea. We only know this because we know why traffic lights exist, but some things seem bad without us knowing why they exist, so getting rid of them is dangerous.
anti_dan
1hr ago
Youtube comments sections have gotten signifigantly further right over the last 3 years. That's basically social media.
You'd still get banned for saying "you cant be a woman and have a penis" so its still far left of the center.
curious_straight_ca
1hr ago
I get printouts of most things because my work space cannot be limited to two screens.
you can, and maybe should, purchase more than two large monitors
anti_dan
1hr ago
The answer for me would be:
- Crime;
- Education;
- Immigration.
Most things that are expensive right now (and even pre-Covid) are not so because the are inherently so. Most cities and areas are not like SF/Silicon Valley. More are like Chicago and DC where a large part of the COL is caused by crime. Your groceries are more expensive because the store has 10% losses via theft and breakage, your commute is 100% longer because close to your work is a bunch of burned out homes from the 1940s occupied by squatters, your house itself is on more land that you need because property values need to be high to keep your kids safe, and because parks can't be kept safe.
Similarly education is expensive. We spend so much for so little, all you can possibly get is a good peer group by, again, paying for it with property values or tuition. And sometimes that doesn't even work (we are having trouble getting our son separated from a problem child despite all this). And that is just standard ed. Higher ed needs to be gutted. People are rightly feeling exploited. People dont understand the loans; or the degrees, and graduate feeling entitled to something they were sold but never actually deserved/earned. The people most affected want a handout, but that will only marginally help them and would make the problem worse. What we need is metaphorical arson.
And last is immigration. It causes problems with the first two, plus social cohesion. The cost of ESL in education and society is enormous. Immigrant populations routinely shelter criminals (very common crime being covered up is sexual exploitation of minors in my experience) and make policing generally more difficult by just committing so much low level crime it cant even be policed (think the 2001 New England Patriots defense, but as a whole community littering, setting garbage fires, having 100 free range cats, etc). There is then the signage, the court and other legal costs they add up.
For part 4) Id just end all transfer payments to people not injured on the job. Of course, that makes 1-3 (already impossible IMO) appear modest. The two biggest problems in the US are Medicaid and Welfare. Social Security and Medicare are a close 3/4. The only reason the feds should be cutting someone a check is if they got a limb blown off in Iraq or cut off while working in a factory. And ideally we restructure the factory portion of that so the factory is paying that shit.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
records of courtiers in some European country.
These guys were probably fat. I can definitely buy a sedentary fat man eating five thousand calories a day.
Trench soldiers
It's pretty believable that trench warfare has higher caloric demands than athletic training. Athletes stop training once they are in danger of overexerting themselves, while the infantry has no such luxury.
That trench soldiers maintained weight on 4600 calories a day should make us extremely skeptical of sedentary, normal BMI people eating 5kcal day in, day out unless they have some kind of metabolic disease, let alone this happening often.
campfire
1hr ago
I remember Aella or other Rationalist-adjacent person on social media sharing a word doc that compiles various controversial opinions and survey questions, anyone remember this and have a link to it?
Corvos
1hr ago
Re: 2, bear in mind that energy underlies everything we do and so energy costs propagate to everything in a way that others don’t. Ideally energy should be very cheap.
It's going to be hard for me to dig that up. It was on X and was based on records of courtiers in some European country.
Not the same, but here's the best I could do with 3 minutes of Perplexity: Trench soldiers eating 4600 kCals per day during WWI. Obviously, they were very active, but also must have weighed an average of like 140 pounds.
Even assuming extreme activity, this should only burn less than 3200 kCals per day: https://tdeecalculator.net/result.php?s=imperial&g=male&age=19&lbs=140&in=69&act=1.9&f=1
I've seen many other records of historical people eating large amounts of calories. Maybe they're dubious, I'm not sure.
MiddleAgedMan
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
1hr ago
People pay an order of magnitude less attention to you than you think. Live your life and don't worry about what other people think.
anti_dan
1hr ago
Are you talking about quantity or reach? Because the lowest quality grifter with the most reach in America is Ibrahim X. Kendi. Next you have the 1619 project, all BLM related orgs, etc. RW orgs with that much reach are people like Daily Wire and Vivek. You might not like their positions on everything, but those aren't grifters. One is a legitimate media business that has really innovated in the space, and the other is a serious politician and thinker, although odd.
jeroboam
1hr ago
There seem to be trade offs involved.
There is a "woo" explanation that goes something like this:
In all plants and animals, there is a thrive/survive dynamic. During times of plenty, the plant will blossom, the animal will expend energy and look to breed. During times of starvation, the plant will go dormant, the animal will hibernate.
But the candle that burns brighter (high metabolism) is extinguished sooner. High metabolism may lead to better health, more energy, and visible abs, but it will also age one more quickly.
This is a universal principle of all life forms.
It's maybe directionally accurate. It's certainly not very well-studied. Maybe I'm just hoping there's an upside to my vampire like pulse rate and body temperature.
When I was younger, my normal body temperature was around 99.7. I ate a terrifying amount of food, yet even without any regular exercise other than walking, I had a BMI that was barely above underweight. I thrived in cold weather, my blood pressure was on the verge of being too low, and my resting heart rate was in the 50s. I’m also fairly tall, and, interestingly, also used to generate a lot more static electricity than most other people I knew (@Gaashk, are you aware of any connection between body temperature/metabolism and static electricity?).
Unfortunately for me, it seems there may be something to your theory. Not only do mice studies present me with a bleak picture of my future, but when I compare myself to my former classmates, I seem to be wrinkling much more rapidly than any of them, even though I generally have a vampiric aversion to the sun, while they spend much more time in it.
Perhaps I should just take this as a hint from the universe to stop procrastinating and do something more with my life before my time is up.
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