Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer
User ID: 2666
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1d ago
What's stopping him from letting his kids be free range ?
Busybody neighbors who call CFS to report "neglect" the moment they see anyone under eighteen out without an adult hovering over them "helicopter parent"-style?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1d ago
easier to fill up (you do it at home overnight)
What about when you have to make a six hour (or longer) drive out into a rural area, where almost all of the roadway there are "off the grid" and have no electricity at all — then drive back the same way a day or two later? You know, like we'd do every summer weekend growing up, heading to our cabin in rural Alaska?
Outside of Anchorage, and maybe Juneau or Fairbanks, electric cars simply don't make sense here in Alaska.
I remember pointing this out to a bunch of electric-car enthusiasts at Caltech, back in the early 2000s, several times. I'd explain in detail the geographic and infrastructural realities of life in rural Alaska — the lack of electrical grid, hundreds of miles of wilderness between bits of civilization, Arctic conditions…
The ones who were engineering students working on developing electric cars were the more reasonable ones, mostly responding that, okay, sure, you guys will have to keep using gas cars a lot longer than everyone else, until the technology is someday good enough. Those who were "for the environment"-type boosters? They're the ones who would sneeringly reply about how nobody should be living in Alaska in the first place, and all those hicks will obviously be forced to move south to some big city, as they should be. (Bringing up the Natives got some interesting responses.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1d ago
This sort of detailed commentary is one of the reasons I come to this place. Thanks.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1d ago
With some creativity you should be able to look at some wide categories like physical infrastructure and cyber security and come up with some ways, some of which a single person could implement. Mass general economic disruption with or without loss of life would be even easier.
People say things like this, but I don't see it. Our critical infrastructure looks pretty robust and defended to me.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2d ago
So, I was thinking about a brief exchange I had a little while ago with @gattsuru, as well as an earlier thread on the arrest of the guy who started the Palisades fire (plus perhaps some other comments here and there about how mass shooters and such tend to have poor target selection, as is entirely understandable with their being of generally unsound mind), I find myself asking: setting aside very-low-probability scenarios, how much damage could a reasonably-competent solitary actor — “a lone man with a grudge against the world,” to quote @Edawayac_Tosscount — pull off in a single “attack”?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2d ago
I am curious: Trump campaigned on being anti-war, and has attempted to brand himself as a peacemaker this past year. Will starting a war be what drives his supporters away from him? Or will this be considered largely justified?
As the Dreaded Jim said in response to a commenter snarking about how "your neocon “peace president” commited yet another act of aggression":
You seem to have confused “Peace President” with falafel eating surrender monkey.
If this operation is successful Trump is a peace president. If unsuccessful, he will retreat. Either way, a peace president.
Si vis pacem, para bellum. There's a difference between being pro-peace, in that you're against large-scale wars — and the kind of "foreign entanglements" that result in your country getting dragged into one — such that you're willing to use smaller, more precise applications of force to help ensure the prevention of bigger conflicts; and being the sort of "principled pacifist" who's against any use of force, no matter the consequences. A difference between preferring not to fight, but being willing to do so just as much as needed; and being unwilling to fight.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4d ago
I can't tell whether you're joking.
No, I'm genuinely outraged by @ABigGuy4U's apparent baseless, unprovoked attacks.
Baneposting
I don't follow. Are you saying these are quotes, then? Well, first, there was nothing to indicate they were such. Is everyone just supposed to recognize them? What ever happened to "make your point reasonably clear and plain" and "write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included" then? Second, how are they relevant, or an argument?
So, instead of an attack aimed at me, this is, what? Low-effort "chan behavior," not making a clear point, not writing for everyone, and not in keeping with the standards of the Motte, then?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4d ago
Low effort. And you're supposed to actually make a reply, not post a link to an unknown video, without even a mention of what it is or why it's relevant?
Because I'm not going to just click some video link.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4d ago
So because I responded with a bit of a temper to your baseless accusations, I'm a "hothead" and you're calling the mods to ban me?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5d ago
Who the [censored] do you think you are, calling me a "hired gun"!? Who am I supposed to be a "hired gun" for, in this baseless accusation of yours. Who am I supposedly displaying "a lotta loyalty" for, by daring to explain what BAME stands for?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5d ago
It's evidence for the "the internet has just been devastating for Protestantism" part, perhaps, but it's also evidence against the "there aren't any “serious” Protestants left" part.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
9d ago
Tell me about Bame! Why is it a protected class?
AIUI, "BAME" stands for "Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic," and is the UK term for non-whites, originally for statistical and data collection purposes, later for the various "diversity" programs.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
9d ago
I think the internet has just been devastating for Protestantism. I don’t really think there are any “serious” Protestants left.
The Mennonites don't count? I mean, Anabaptists are very much Protestant (a product of the "Radical Reformation"), and they seem rather "serious" about it to me.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
17d ago
You can make a pretty big impact without a "plan".
You can if you you have the tacit, hidden backing of a vast, powerful, organized apparatus behind you. If you don't have that, though…
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
17d ago
I’m sorry, but I can’t help but think this is over-optimistic nonsense.
I don't think you can avoid plans happening, as people get radicalized, as someone who has even an inkling of what that could looks like, and very many good reasons to wish it wouldn't happen.
“Plans” will happen, sure. Lots of stupid, counterproductive “plans” by idiotic “lone-wolf” actors — a large fraction probably egged on and guided by undercover Feds into the least effective courses possible.
More seriously, there's a lot of options radicals have, many of which do not require vast planning or coordination, only common knowledge.
Not effective ones. This is an illusion created by the apparent effectiveness of left-wing supposed “lone-wolf” radicals. who are really just the visible end of a vast, less visible organized apparatus — read David Hines, or Curtis Yarvin.
Some of those options aren't bad. If, as a completely random example, the left will be murdering political enemies with impunity or the police and prosecutors will just look the other way when someone on the right gets his or her face punched in... well, I was on team Pink Pistols when gay guys getting bashed was a non-zero risk. I'm not abandoning that because some people insist it'd be better if I were beaten than their brownshits shot, and if they've never said the name "Paul Kessler", I'm not going to even care.
Sure, you can say “better to be judged by twelve that carried by six” or such, but when the choices are:
-
Take a beating from the “brownshirts,” and maybe get crippled or killed, or
-
Shoot one or more of them… and get tried in Federal court for murder and “hate crimes,” inevitably convicted and sent to Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for, if not life, then decades; where the guards, having been informed that you’re an evil racist homophobic transphobic white supremacist Nazi Klansman who should die behind bars, pass this on to every non-white gang in the prison, at which point you eventually end up getting shanked to death if you’re lucky, but more likely cornered, repeatedly violated, and then beaten to death (just like you were trying to avoid to begin with); all while the guards look the other way.
How many people do you think will really pick option 2?
But the majority of options are bad, and they're still going to happen.
Mostly when the state allows them to happen, because it’s convenient to let them happen as an excuse to crack down further.
There's some subtle stuff, like what happens when we it becomes common knowledge the Civil Rights Act doesn't and hasn't realled since its inception, and every jury the least competent lawyer in a red or purple state can manage will nullo your prosecutions, and any lawyer slightly above that Platkins out any attempt to Uno Reverso by getting jurisdiction in a blue state first.
This is unintelligible. Beyond the grammar errors — “when we it becomes”? — I have no idea what this means.
Today, there is basically nothing the nuBundies could say that would cost them political support
And that “political support” is useless.
they'd still have behaved better than anti-ICE groups. That includes literally dropping heavy rocks onto the front windshields of fast-moving cars and people, or running for a national office with a nazi tattoo.
It doesn’t matter how much right-wing radicals have “behaved better than” various leftist groups, because what decides punishment is not the level of “bad behavior,” but “who, whom?” Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi, as the Romans said.
Left-wingers can drop rocks. Red-tribers can’t and won’t, not because it’s “a fancy-boy edujumacated physics problem,” but because they’ll be destroyed if they try. They won’t get away with it like the other side does. Anyone on the right who so much as tries will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Their “associates” — their friends and family — could be prosecuted too; or failing that, cancelled, fired, blacklisted, debanked, attacked by “brownshirts,” burned out of their homes, etc.
If your “people doing work requiring hands-on expertise” try anything, they’ll be caught by the omnipresent surveillance we live under, and completely crushed by the invincible Leviathan of the state.
Remember some of the California trans sanctuary laws? What do you think happens when the mainstream news reports a father just now kidnapping his son, the federal marshals heroically rip a long-pregnant early teenager from their parent's arms the next week, and no one can talk about what the kid's current gender presentation or who assaulted him to start with?
I’m not clear on the scenario you’re vaguely gesturing toward here, but the answer to “what do you think happens?” is “nothing,” because nothing ever happens. Red tribes grumble, and mutter “somebody aught to…” and “next time, we’ll…” and then roll over and take it. I’ve watched my parents, my friends, my neighbors do exactly this my entire life.
Do you think there's anyone who can argue Loudon County a success case for gradual stepwise moderation? Do you think people need a medical doctorate to notice the difference between a week and twenty-one weeks? A historian's degree find every single person with their name on public record for those orders?
What difference does any of this make?
But think for five minutes, hard, about what thirty unrelated bad actors might individually want to do, just repeating the greatest hits of the last five years.
First, there’s what these bad actors might want to do, and then there’s the separate question of whether they’ll actually try to do it. Very unlikely, I say. Too comfortable, too much to lose — and smart enough to see that their odds of getting away with it are too low. Then, even if they try, there’s the odds they get away with it. Which, again, one can see are abysmally low.
It’s not “right-wingers are too stupid and lack the edujumacation and proper cred-en-tials to strike back” — it’s that we’re too weak and disorganized, and the enemy too strong and organized, for any of this sort of thing to ever work (that is, at anything but being counterproductive).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
21d ago
I once got lectured by a Jewish person that "lizard people" (i.e., the myth about secret aliens controlling the world) is an antisemitic meme. And I'm like... do you really want to insist on that association?
Yeah, the tendency to reflexively react to criticism of "elites" — open, secret, or alien — controlling the world with "You mean the Jews, right? You're totally talking about us Jews!" isn't a good look. When you can watch someone put a standard lefty "eat the rich" rant on Tumblr, and immediately get piled on as a "Nazi" who wants to genocide all Jews because, between ranting about Musk, Bezos, and Klaus Schwab, they dared bring up George Soros; because the only reason anyone would ever mention Soros in a negative context is entirely because Soros is Jewish and they hate him because he's Jewish, because they must be an antisemite who hates all Jews — well, it's hard not to think this probably fuels at least a little antisemitism.
And back on the earlier point, it's not just goblins and reptilian aliens, either. How about the claim that the tengu of Japanese folklore are an antisemitic caricature? I mean, just look at those noses. I, mean, sure, the conventional explanation is as a more humanized form of their older depiction as bird-men:
The tengu in art appears in a variety of shapes. It usually falls somewhere in between a large, monstrous bird and a wholly anthropomorphized being, often with a red face or an unusually large or long nose. Early depictions of tengu show them as kite-like beings who can take a human-like form, often retaining avian wings, heads, or beaks. The tengu's long nose seems to have been conceived in the 14th century, likely as a humanization of the original bird's bill.
But, no, that doesn't stop people from claiming, like on Twitter here: https://nitter.poast.org/nerdtechgasm/status/1931926279106036079 that "it's not a theory" at all that the tengu are antisemitic depictions of a group of Jews who arrived in Japan in the 3rd Century and became the Hata clan.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
21d ago
Or are you going to adopt the leftist frame that akshually, goblins were metaphors for Jews even in the Dark Ages?
I've seen someone unironically assert this on Tumblr, in the context of calling the anime Goblin Slayer antisemitic. Because goblins are always and everywhere an antisemitic caricature, a deliberate stand-in for Jews, and always have been, thus anyone who uses goblins as an antagonist element is a deliberate antisemite.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
21d ago
disparaging misspellings of opponents' arguments
That's not the part I was calling uncharitable. I'm referring to @Amadan dragging @SecureSignals into this — without even having the decency to @ him — to put words into his mouth.
I mean, if in the middle of making some right-leaning argument, I were to drop a parenthetical about how "magicalkittycat will now come along to rant about how un-ironic literal Nazis are everywhere, the GOP will probably declare the Fourth Reich in 2028...", or something like that, I would not at all be surprised to get a mod warning at the least — and deservedly so.
I thought we're supposed to engage with the arguments people actually make, not the arguments we preemptively imagine them making.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
25d ago
If I say "Hey, it looks pretty stormy out there - there's a very high chance of rain, so you should take an umbrella" I'm not actually saying "Rain is morally good and I support the rain falling on you and getting your clothes wet".
And when an Italian gentleman with a crooked nose says "nice business you've got here; it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it," he's just paying your shop a complement, and then making a true observation about an entirely hypothetical situation.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
25d ago
The same norm preventing this is the norm that prevents, say, the father of someone screwed up (by the father's lights) by trans ideology and surgery from going and vigilante-ing intellectuals like Judith Butler who are, in some diffuse but obvious sense, clearly culpable for the ideology and thus its downstream material effects. Lode bearing norm etc - this gets fully general in a hurry in a society with meaningful liberal pluralism, because it means everyone is tolerating other people who are (by their lights) behaving like moral monsters.
Spending time on Tumblr as I do, the argument seems to be that we don't need "the norm" to prevent this father from "going and vigilante-ing," because the force of the state will do that. One side gets to attack the other for "behaving like moral monsters," and the state will mostly let them get away with it, and the other doesn't get to attack back, because the cops and courts will come down on them like a hammer.
To provide further example in a different context — the murder of Iryna Zarutska — someone made a comment about how, if our legal system keeps letting out people like Decarlos Brown Jr. to reoffend again and again, then eventually people will start resorting to vigilantism. The immediate reply was that, no, such people would be stopped immediately, because we've had laws put in place since the Civil Rights era to prevent such "vigilantism" — or, to call it by it's proper name, lynching — and the cops and courts all know how to properly deal with any such person, even if they decide this time to leave their pointy white hood at home.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
25d ago
SS will now come along to rant about how inserting a sympathetic Jewish character in a book is part of the Joo-spiracy, Anthony Trollope was probably ZOGed....)
C'mon, this is uncharitable, isn't it? Shouldn't you know better?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
25d ago
Why not? There's nothing pejorative about an asylum institution, unless you're trying to smuggle in the connotation of an insane asylum in particular.
I was riffing on the classic metaphorical statement "the inmates are running the asylum" where the context is indeed an insane asylum. Thus, I didn't think it needed said explicitly
But if you have to have insane inmates as analogous to the citizenry of a country for that analogy to hold as a pejorative, it can be trivially dismissed as a false analogy
And if I say, no it can't? If I say that just like children, the senile, and the insane, the common masses don't know what's good for them, and that they need wiser heads ruling over them, what then?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
26d ago
Hobbes talks about this, and it's one of the basic foundations of Enlightenment republican thought
Where does Rousseau, and his distinction between the "general will" and the "popular will" fit into "Enlightenment republican thought"? Because I generally see people class him as a major figure of the "Enlightenment" alongside Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu; and because I've read an argument about how that concept means that real democracy is when a self-selected vanguard party of intellectual elites take uncontested charge of the state, and that giving the voters what they vote for is instead "populism," which is the greatest threat to Our Democracy.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
26d ago
Government should be run by the people it governs
Should an asylum be run by its inmates?
As so many Boomer Republicans (still) like to say, "we don't live in a 'democracy,' we live in a representative republic." (Setting aside the quibble about how they here define "democracy…) Well, what does it mean to be a good "representative"?
How does a parent or guardian properly "represent" a small child?
How does someone with power of attorney "represent" a senile elder?
How does a relative "represent" a hospitalized schizophrenia patient who keeps trying to cut himself open to remove the chip the CIA implanted to control him?
Perhaps, but you still knew which "large chunks of text" to copy-paste, and where to find them. You still had the expertise to know how to track down these citations and share this information with us, and then put in the effort to do so. Which, "copy-pasting" or not, still puts it ahead of the average comment this far down a reply chain on the Motte — it's definitely better than most of what I post on here. So, even if "detailed commentary" is the wrong phrase to describe it, it's still appreciated.
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