JTarrou
11B2O/IDPAM/USPSAA/BJJB
User ID: 196
JTarrou
4mo ago
Rationalists have the flaw that they assume anyone will be well-meaning.
Fixed.
There are no well-meaning people, only cynics, liars and the self-deluded. Altruism is the first lie.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Yes, how dare they be free to practice their dumb religion? This is America.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I suspect a large majority asked the same question today would say "yes."
Depends on who you ask. I suspect BIPOC would give very different answers to white people.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Well or poorly for sure, but even at its heights, subversion can never reach greatness. It is only by "subverting" some better work that it exists, after all. Subversion is to story as impressions are to comedy.
JTarrou
1yr ago
"Subversion" is what technically accomplished but deeply uncreative people do. As an act of artistic creation, it is by definition reliant on the creative exercise of countless other artists. The trope must be subverted, but a "trope" is nothing more than a whole lot of individual creative decisions that converged in some sense.
It is witless rebellion for its own sake, and as such, we can look forward to hearing a lot more about it for the next millenium.
JTarrou
11mo ago
Far from it. But "never" is a long way from "always".
We've all had a reason to fight. But not everyone is willing to put everything on the line and seek a decision. Too risky. They might lose an internship, or an eye.
It's a matter ultimately of values. If you value money, career, house, a clean criminal record and the good opinion of other people who value those things, physical risk is crazy.
I find all that utterly worthless. The good opinion of people incapable of risking anything real is meaningless. Money is paper. Careers are bullshit.
I think sacrifice produces value. Things are worth what we gave up to get them. By those lights, I made out like a bandit.
JTarrou
6mo ago
It's not. It controls Gaza, Fatah controls the West Bank.
Yes, this is part of what I'm talking about
Secondly, they froze elections after they came to power.
After they won an election, which is more legitimacy than many real governments can manage.
Can we start bombing them for not actively fighting the government?
Not in my opinion, but we can start bombing military targets without worrying too much about civilian casualties. At Hiroshima, we bombed a military base. The rest of the town was just in the blast radius. Not, perhaps a hugely practical distinction, but one with real bite in the theory of just war. As ever, there's a discussion to be had about proportionality and whether such actions make further conflict more or less likely.
JTarrou
8mo ago
From the subatomic to the international.
Everything is conflict.
Dillard says that death is spinning the globe, but she shaded it. She read Heisenberg. She turned back at the pass.
Math is spinning the globe, and death is just part of it. All values resolve to zero eventually.
JTarrou
1yr ago
And I believe you just haven't found the situation to falsify your "principles" quite yet.
Maybe we're both wrong.
JTarrou
1mo ago
IQ is a proxy of a proxy. At the top end of the scoring distribution, the proxy stops working, because the sort of people so totally maxed-out on one ability are incapable of living normal lives or talking productively to normal people.
Sort of how height is predictive of NBA ability, but the tallest people can't play sports.
JTarrou
1mo ago
I'd settle for a humanity with the ability to tie shoes and sit on a toilet properly. But like God before me, I am doomed to disappointment.
JTarrou
2mo ago
Abbot's fight for vouchers has had the side effect of starving urban school districts, who are unable to raise funding because the state takes the majority of their property tax revenue through the "robin hood" program (and no longer even uses it for education -- now it just goes into the state general fund. It's purely kleptocratic now in a way that I don't believe it always was). My school district is getting rid of librarians and counselors as they can no longer afford them, cutting gifted and talented programs (very much done to piss off the rich -- it's not saving much money but it generates lots of ire), and generally laying off teachers and increasing class sizes.
That sounds awesome. Cutting government funds to religious schools is something I support wholesale.
JTarrou
6mo ago
You need to start hanging out with other people than Nick Fuentes.
Never heard of her.
JTarrou
6mo ago
I don't think any of those are likely to get you to the point of the test, regardless of feasibility.
My (peacetime) military officer father told me that the infantry liked people that came from poor backgrounds because they were more aware of their surroundings and accustomed to discomfort and privation - and that middle class guys were too "soft" to make good infantrymen, at least initially.
The line I heard from more senior NCOs was about age rather than SES, but it was that you could teach an older man to be a soldier, but you'd never teach him to like it. Could work for SES to a degree.
Personally, I doubt that the military has a "type" for infantry, they just take whoever signs up. It's selection effects from the groups that sign up, guys who are willing to undergo the privation to gain the status. If the girls back home don't think your service makes you more attractive than something else you might have reasonably done, not many guys are signing up for that. Within a very narrow stretch of society, having been the "real deal" is a major status boost.
JTarrou
6mo ago
If there were a reliable test for aggression in combat, the country that had it would be unstoppable militarily. The fact that no one on earth administers such a test implies that it is difficult if not impossible with current science. They all rely on a mix of private violence, training and hazing to try to weed out the squeamish, with imperfect results.
Great, perhaps with your reading comprehension, you could go back to my short post and find the term "beer belly".
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