Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
1hr ago
I could imagine a cyberpunk future where ultralights are the main form of solo transportation.
The Okavango Delta and central Botswana are pretty much like this, particularly the Okavango. More dieselpunk vibes, though.
Bartender_Venator
1hr ago
The shared reactionary/populist explanation of that is that the people don't want to have no elites, they want to have good elites, and we certainly don't have those. But the idea that abolishing the jury trial is the solution assumes that the fish is not rotting from the head down. South Africa abolished jury trials because even the Apartheid regime realized that the populace were too racially polarized to deliver justice, but they had a judiciary and assessorate genuinely committed to the rule of law and to public order, whereas many of our judiciary and many more of our professors of law are less committed to that than the man on the street.
Bartender_Venator
1hr ago
This is the Moldbug thesis: everything that actually works is a vertical command structure restrained/guided by price mechanisms. With, uh, certain fluctuations, because the price mechanism is a cruel mistress.
Bartender_Venator
1hr ago
Nobody hates shoplifters like a low-wage clerk who has to watch it every day and isn't allowed/able to do anything. One time in Chicago I thought the kid at the counter was about to launch into that one Chris Rock bit.
Bartender_Venator
1hr ago
Yeah, poor kids in the Bronx don't have those sort of preferences, or if they do they get beat with the cooking spoon till they don't.
Bartender_Venator
1hr ago
That article does not support the claim you're using it to make.
Bartender_Venator
1hr ago
It's hard and expensive to take cases to court and potentially all the way through trial with what I guess would be a DC jury (I don't know the nuances of how the system works with regard to the severity of the offence and the parks jurisdiction). To be fair to libertarians, I'm sure that Binion would also complain about people being charged and successfully plead out for much less serious stuff from the other side, but to be fair to everybody else I'll also point out that the balance of these sorts of cases is not exactly equal, in terms of who gets charged and whose charges make it to sentencing. Of course, a more efficient justice system would just summarily deal out minor punishments to people who commit obviously intentional vandalism on camera, but that's a regime-complete problem. The "shoddy contracting work" point has been hashed out elsewhere so I have no need to address it.
Bartender_Venator
13hr ago
Good and interesting point.
It actually reminds me somewhat of the role of moderation in Socratic philosophy. The first precept of philosophy is moderation; the ability to make any progress in philosophy whatsover is contingent on the student's practice of moderation in respect to worldly things and appetites. However, it's not-very-Straussianly-hidden in Plato and particularly Xenophon that Socrates himself is wildly immoderate with respect to wisdom and to the love of the Good - that is, with respect to those things in which, pursued properly, there is no need for or value in moderation, because they are purely good. If the natural slave is one who cannot moderate his appetites, then one could read Socratic philosophy as recognizing that one is in a sense never entirely leaves that state, but becomes a slave of that to which it is appropriate for a man to be enslaved. Aristotle denies this because he's writing in the Politics, not the Metaphysics, and so is concerned with man as he contributes to the polis, but there are some hints of that elsewhere in Aristotle too, once we're no longer speaking of practical wisdom.
Bartender_Venator
13hr ago
Ah yes, I tend to forget the remake exists. Testament to the uglification of modern animation.
Bartender_Venator
22hr ago
Glad to see Reason is still in business; I wasn't aware. Of course, this fellow did, by all the eyewitness accounts, reach into the reflecting pool and start pulling the lining up, to the point where the park police noticed and demanded he stop, but maybe, given his background, he's just a pool lining autist, and also a true libertarian who believes that every citizen has a right to audit the structural integrity of the pool without state coercion interfering.
Bartender_Venator
22hr ago
This originates, in the modern tradition, from Hobbes - he argued that no man knows another's business so well that he can claim to rule over another through virtue of superior intellect (obviously, an idea murdered and buried by modern states). But, in that framework, it's also perfectly compatible with absolute monarchy, so long as something occupies the position of sovereign-but-not-master. Lewis, in that Anglo-Christian inheritance, can only agree that no man can be master based on contingent facts about the world, as you point out. A man, or artificial man, fit to be master cannot exist, because we are fallen and the science to create artificial men (including the body politic) is also fallen.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I think in order to do real damage with your bare hands it has to be at least a bit fucked up already. Interesting that they don't seem to have attempted to bring charges against the other people who were apparently apprehended by the park service, but this guy seems to have really tried to get it - pulled up a lot more than either of the two women and then started beefing with the cops.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Honestly don't have an obvious candidate to mind, it's not the sort of fiction/movies I go for. The South African novel series Spud would be a good example, though it's aimed at kids of that age and very much not high art - Spud suffers through all the angst and pimples, but he ends up in a loving relationship and on course to as normal a life as one can live in SA. Generally the sort of people who do more artsy things tend to be older, and more focused on the negative, or at least the aporeic aspects of the psyche.
Stephen King is one of the absolute last people I'd go to for an accurate portrayal of that kind of interiority. I think insofar as a man can write this, the obvious go-to is Twin Peaks - except that Laura Palmer has to be this cipher, that we only learn about from others, precisely because Lynch can't be in that part of her head (note the extremely strong parallels between the EoE hospital scene and the scene of Laura putting on her stockings in FWWM, both beating you around the head with "I KNOW YOU'RE TURNED ON BY THIS CHARACTER AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD ABOUT IT").
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
With the Romans we knew that they explicitly sorted soldiers based on experience. The Triarii were probably generally in their thirties, and while they were spared some of the scut-work they were kept in reserve precisely because their experience was valuable and potentially decisive.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Not really "about the horrible inner experience of [female] teenage sexuality", except, uh, maybe some true crime narratives I'd prefer not to read. Given the general higher cultural discomfort involved (as I typed that sentence with male/female I half-expected some jackass will call me a creep just for that), I'm guessing not a show, but a book by a woman author, maybe an Anna Kavan type. Maybe an arthouse film.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Legend of the Galactic Heroes, besides being the greatest anime ever made, is explicitly about conservative-inflected questions of political philosophy. If you like Death Note and Jojo the space battles (plenty of just as keikaku) should entice you enough to fall in love with the rest of it.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Yeah, Evangelion is in part a story about the horrible inner experience of male teenage sexuality - it's unsurprising that a woman viewing it either wouldn't notice it at all and just see fanservice, or be disgusted enough to just look away and not think about it.
I suspect a show with an equivalent treatment of female sexuality would disgust most men, probably far more so given that they don't have "ugh, men" as an easily available response. Which makes me wonder, now that I think about it, because I can't think of a work like that (to be fair, my reading list is pretty male and not very teenage). If we were to do a 2x2, where you have Evangelion as male/negative and, say, Twilight as female/positive, what's the female/negative?
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
When you are using an assumed name and trying not to get found out, it's good practice to pick something phonetically close to your original one - "Matt" becomes "Mike", etc. - so that you react more naturally when you hear people use it. Not sure you need that level of obfuscation, though.
I would also say try to steer clear of the most extreme names. You don't want to do the cowboy equivalent of naming yourself "Lilith"; it's not good for the soul.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
There are guys in the various successors to DOGE working on, shall we say, more prosocial variations of this. The red-teaming is definitely going to happen in the legal field, but it's not going to work unless you have hard-nosed legal realists actually taking those arguments before a court (i.e. deciding which arguments will actually work and which courts will be friendly to them).
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Every time I meet an intelligent person who cares deeply about a particular policy area, I tell them the same thing: go to the right and become their guy. The left (and the GOPe/Tories/etc.) are just not interested - $bad_policy is that way for a reason and many people's jobs depend on it staying that way - but the populist right probably has no idea what they want in $policy_area, and if you can come in, be the man with a plan on $policy_area, and be a team player otherwise, you have a chance utterly unprecedented in living memory to make a change actually happen.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
If you see me at Butterworth's wearing the secret Mottizen symbol, tap me on the shoulder and I'll get you a drink.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Google needs to keep acquiring hungry talent and keep it away from the warm, suffocating embrace of their internal bureaucracy - not an easy problem to solve. Cash and compute are the table stakes to compete, but they don't win you the competition.
I have been banging this drum for a long, long time, and have only got more cynical about the possibility of putting together a Republican policy apparatus that is able to fight the left on scale (what hani calls "incompetence"). But there's more than one way to skin a cat. Every month since Trump came back into power, I'm seeing smart guys I'm in groupchats with go to Washington - sometimes to take a job, sometimes just to talk to someone - and taking meaningful Ws that don't make it into the press, the exact sort of thing that the OP describes. The future of the right may not be building a vast apparatus of company men, but tightening the OODA loop, getting faster and leaner, and doing more with fewer people. As such, the real question is less "how long did it take the Admin to roll back some crazy trucking regulatory rule" and more "how long did it take between some anon in the industry noticing this crazy rule and the Admin acting."
Edit: as if to reward me for making this poast, this just crossed my feed - tl;dr the Admin changed the definition of "harm" in the Endangered Species Act such that you're allowed to build things even if it might disturb some rare fruitbat or gecko.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Google having more money than God is part of their problem. It's like asking why a fat old guy is losing a footrace.
It would greatly reduce confusion if in future mods drop a modhat comment saying "banned and removed for ban evasion".
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