domain:ymeskhout.substack.com
nomenym
4m ago
I would rather a politician tell me something true but incomplete/misleading, rather than tell me something false but directionally correct.
Yes, and I am saying that for a lot of Trump supporters it's the other way around. They feel like the former too often ends up going in the wrong direction altogether.
yofuckreddit
7m ago
The Reddit admins were in contact with the mods, consistently threatening them.
Nobody wanted to move here man lol. We lost a solid chunk of the community and now Zorba has to maintain the site.
So there's an official in ancient Japan, sharp as a tack, a real up-and-comer. He's rapidly making his way up the imperial bureaucracy, and his rivals decide they need to nip him in the bud. The capitol is overrun with pickpockets, has been forever; the crimes are too trivial for serious punishments, and yet no lesser punishments seem to dissuade the criminals. So they decide the thing to do is to give him the job of cleaning up the pickpocket problem, and then when he fails to do so, they can quash his career.
He accepts the job, thinks it over, and issues a new imperial statute: pickpocketing is now legal, provided the pickpockets obtain and carry an official license from the government while plying their vocation. This license is a large placard, five feet tall and two wide, with the word "pickpocket" written on it in large letters visible at a considerable distance. Pickpocketing without a license is now not just pickpocketing, but violation of the imperial law, a crime punishable by death.
The pickpockets examine their options, up-stakes and relocate elsewhere. The official's career proceeds unimpeded.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16m ago
Christianity and wokeness are both puritanical religions
I'd say some sects of Christianity are puritanical ... like the Puritans.
Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity generally teach that being free of sin while on Earth is impossible, but you do your best nonetheless and confess your sins when they do occur. There's humility in this - while I strive to avoid sin, it's an impossible task, so I can't cast the first stone at others.
I think Wokeness is better compared to fundamentalists across Abrahamic religions, wherein the outward performance of piety goes a long way, as opposed to a more restrained daily personal adhere. Like all other fundamentalist organizations, this is a death spiral. People simply try to continually out do one another in demonstrating how "down for the cause" they are until it turns into a circular firing squad.
A common critique of most online Radical Tradtionalist Catholics is that they're trying to be more Catholic than the Pope. This is a way of saying, "you're being too performative and dramatic in how pious you are and, in so doing, are being vainglorious and conceited." It would do the Wokes well if they could have a similar intragroup discussion.
SlowBoy
17m ago
And the people who install or maintain those machines would have access to all that information. A very small conspiracy could hijack voting machines. Slip in a USB, run a program, and it's done. Machines have to be updated and maintained all the time anyways. And it's totally feasible to write a program that infects other USBs plugged into the device: Infect one machine, and then some third unknowing party who maintains the machines ends up infecting more.
It would be very easy to do! How do we know that this isn't being done? We would need a thorough audit of machine votes and record systems, and that's a right-wing Republican dangerous conspiracy that undermines trust in our sacred democracy.
TequilaMockingbird
18m ago
she’s also abrasive and loud.
And Harris isn't?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
21m ago
Okay but if an average politician makes a specific claim, I can at least assess whether I find that claim persuasive. When they quote a figure at me, or speak about some specific action that was taken, I can easily cross-reference that information to discover the context of what’s being discussed; normal politicians rarely just make up figures, or say things happened when in fact they didn’t happen at all. They might not be giving me the whole story, but I can generally be confident that they’re not telling me a made-up story. At worst they are omitting important context and/or alternate interpretations of the facts they’re discussing. They’re not just making up names, dates, events, etc.
Trump, in contrast, sometimes speaks in such an elliptical and non-specific way that it can be impossible to determine what specific event he’s referring to, or what specific claim he’s actually making. The details he brings up might be half-remembered, or mistaken, or he might be conflating two different things. This is tolerable if it’s some personal anecdote, but if he’s discussing an important matter of political fact, it’s actually really important for him to get all the details right, so that his constituents know what he’s actually talking about. I would rather a politician tell me something true but incomplete/misleading, rather than tell me something false but directionally correct.
You are correct, but it doesn't really change my point very much (ironically).
nomenym
37m ago
Absolutely, but there are also failure modes to other ways of communicating. Almost all Western politicians are comfortable speaking in lawyerly abstractions, but do you trust them? No, you don't, but you're used to reverse-engineering their words, because you know the word game they're playing. If you're smart, then you can even beat them at this game by twisting their words back on them or holding them to an unintended meaning (e.g. malicious compliance). There is no doubt that Trump's communication style can be exploited to mislead people, but that does not make it unique. I think most ordinary people find Trump's style easier to "reverse-engineer", and so they perceive him as being less misleading than the politician who speaks in technically true abstractions.
-_-_-_-_-
38m ago
Yeah all of them announced completion of their vaccine literally the day after the election.
I've been given links about the controversy of the data collection period.
Not really. Depends on the discount rate and the cheapness of various solutions. Basically do the geo-engineering when it makes sense from a cost benefit perspective.
A stitch in time saves nine - does anyone here know of models of what geo-engineering would be needed at different points in time?
aqouta
41m ago
I would really, strongly, urge you not too try to extrapolate how a home computer bios configuration works to voting machines. It's bad whenever there is a leak of any kind of course but this is like if there was a leak of the physical key design to the entrance of the polling location that still has armed guards stations 24/7. To make use of these you'd need to know which keys correspond to which machine, have prolonged physical access to the machines, plug a keyboard or some peripheral device into them and then maybe you'd be able to do something unclear.
-_-_-_-_-
42m ago
Assume that it works, why would it?
If there were no consequences of climate change until a known point in time and geo-engineering would be an immediate success, there would be no advantage to implementing geo-engineering prior to the known point in time at which consequences would occur. Do you expect geo-engineering to be an immediate success?
KMC
42m ago
but rather he makes that idea concrete by describing her being fearful in front of a firing squad
He did no such thing.
Here's what he said:
She's a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let's see how she feels about it when the guns are trained on her face.
Nobody gives the condemned a rifle. Ergo, he was not describing a firing squad.
He was describing her alone and outnumbered in the face of the enemy. Not a firing squad, which is for executions.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
45m ago
Yarvin writes under his own name now, and has for years. BAP’s identity was leaked fairly recently, but he still does not use that name in the context of being a public figure.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
48m ago
I can recall the following instances from high school where I was either aware of or partially complicit in theft:
Sounds to me like you just hung out with a particularly bad crowd. Nobody I knew growing up was anything like this (and I come from a rather poor background, probably much lower class than yours).
Plural of anecdote is not data, personal experience not necessarily representative, etc.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
49m ago
Because it's boring and cheap.
Calling for it is definitely boring and cheap. An actual collapse of civil order would be a lot of things, but "boring" and "cheap" are not among them. If you think that our current order would obviously have survived Trump catching the Butler bullet with his brainstem, you are much more of an optimist than I. I believe that a lot of Americans were genuinely disappointed that the bullets only killed and wounded his supporters and not Trump himself. Would you disagree?
The taboo on organized political violence has been steadily degrading for at least the last decade. We've had multiple presidential and federal assassination attempts within the last few years, numerous politically-motivated shootings, and at least one politically-motivated spree-killing of children. This would be catastrophic if the capacity for organized violence were a constant in the equation, and only the willingness were increasing. And in fact, the commenter above fervently believes this, as do most people, and so is actively working to maximize the willingness variable. And on the flipside, most people discounting the possibility of a serious collapse are likewise assuming capacity as a constant and reasoning from there.
He and all others who share this perspective are deceived. Not only is capacity a variable, it is a variable that is freighted by a massive overhang of untapped potential energy. The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for the best ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. The further the culture war escalates, the more motivated the search. If nothing changes, that search is very likely to, within the next few years, return results that are unsurvivable for our present society.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
49m ago
I don't think for a moment she is trying to be manipulative or deceitful
I mean, she is literally financially incentivized to lie and embellish. I understand why you would give her the benefit of the doubt because you know her and you respect her motives. But a person like this is inherently impossible to fully trust, because one can never be sure which components of a statement she makes are true, embellished, misremembered, or outright intentionally fabricated. This might be an endearing personality type to have a conversation with, but can you understand why this is a very dangerous personality type to entrust with significant power?
jkf
50m ago
Treating petty offenses (at the discretion of the prosecuter I suppose) more as administrative violations would probably work -- lower the burden of proof (as with traffic tickets), then you can slap tickets on the prolific offenders and jail them when they don't pay up.
Not that anyone in a position to do this would want to, but it would be way cheaper than your idea.
justmotteingaround
56m ago
Thanks! That fleshes out my memory, but I'm still lost as to what the mods knew regarding the need to move. Was it "safteyism"? Did they say 'we wont elaborate further at this time' or am I hallucinating that?
I'm interested in that because at the time I thought the move could be plausible, but was leaning paranoic. However, there is a lot I didn't know as a casual reader. I'm trying to put context around OPs claim that JD Vance allusion to a Scott Alexander article threatens the motte. Is this a pattern of persecutorial complexion, or am I off my rocker.
One of the things that alienates educated Westerners from Trump is the way that he talks. He hardly ever talks in abstract terms. He doesn't qualify or hedge; everything is direct and concrete. Rather than say that he was on one of the later episodes of Oprah's show when they were coming to an end, he will say he was on the last episode. He won't just say that one of Lincoln's sons died, but instead he will name that son Tad. He's always including specific details that he misremembers or aren't all that important. He can't just say that people like Liz Cheney send people into warzones but will never face any real danger themselves, but rather he makes that idea concrete by describing [EDITED] her being pushed onto the frontlines to face death against an overwhelming force. One of the worst parts of his interview with Rogan was when he forgot the name of a boxer in his story. Usually, he would just throw in some name that sounded about right and run with it. However, this time, he didn't, and he tried to talk about "the guy" and the whole story fell to pieces in a mess of vague referents.
I think this is why Trump actually has a lot of cross-cultural appeal, because it's the educated Westerners who are strange. Most people aren't very good at thinking and talking in lawyerly abstractions, studiously avoiding any implication that might not hold up in court. For most of human history, people have used stories about specific people, in specific places, and about specific events to communicate general ideas about society, politics, morality, and even science. Most people aren't good at remembering abstract statements about general categories. However, give them a story fleshed out with questionable details, and they'll remember the gist even after they've forgotten most everything else. Educated Westerners are very good at communicating in abstractions, and they expect their audience to infer details from context. For many people, this kind of speaking might as well be in some kind of secret code language.
One of the most charismatic storytellers I know is an old Christian missionary women who would abhor the thought of voting for Trump, but she is very much like him in personality. She has made her entire life out of convincing people to fund her charitable missionary work. She has an incredible capacity to reach across national, ethnic, and cultural boundaries and communicate with so many different types of people, and she talks just like Trump. Her stories are all too good to be true, and that's because they're not, at least not literally. She didn't really escape from a country descending into civil war on the very last flight out of the airport. The miracles and coincidences in her stories were not really quite so serendipitous or unexpected as she makes them sound. She always embellishes with details that are often lazily misremembered or partially fabricated because they make for a better story. I don't think for a moment she is trying to be manipulative or deceitful, because she implicitly expects her audience to extract the general meaning from the particulars. The specific names, times, and places are used as placeholders, either approximately true or for illustrative purposes. She does not seem to know how to communicate in any other way.
What's interesting about Trump is that he can't turn this off either. He can't code switch between the two different ways of communicating, and it continually suprises him when he is misinterpreted. This is, I think, one of the reasons he comes across as stupid to educated Westerners, because to them this kind of communication is associated with stupid people. And they're not wrong--this is how stupid people communicate abstract ideas. However, not everyone who commicates like this is stupid, and perhaps most people in the world prefer this way.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
The psalms(psalm 95/96 depending on whether you use protestant or Catholic numbering)
Are you talking about this one? Because with the exception of the Wycliffe Bible that doesn't sound very demonic, just impotent.
St Paul repeats this condemnation in his epistles.
I found this, which kinda fits (though note the translation differences); are there others?
Ok, but how does this relate to the OP? This is true whether or not there's a leak of some specific passwords in a publicly accessible excel document. Somebody has to have access to maintain voting machines and by the nature of maintenance would be able to compromise the thing they're maintaining.
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