DBDr
1yr ago
As a woke leftist myself:
You can't, because you are wrong.
But for real: You still can't, because this is a scissor-ish style of statement that has too much cultural impetus behind it for any counterargument that can be delivered in anything less than 1500 pages to be convincing.
Eg, you can be as rational and as reasonable as you like, but all it takes is ONE (1) clip from fox news about current culture war issue, or someone reminding them about whichever black guy most recently got executed by the cops on the street, or just remembering that a defacto legal racial caste system existed in the US until 1964, and they will instantly revert to priors: that is, you are either a bigot, or politically motivated to believe things that are demonstrably untrue.
Don't give up, live your truth and etcetera, but understand that for every "affirmative action is a prejudicial concept that infantilizes racial minorities unjustly and unfairly", there is a "there are millions of people alive today that were forbidden from owning high value property because they were not white".
DBDr
1yr ago
I fantasize about taking people I don't like outside and beating the shit out of them; and yet somehow it has never happened!
Almost as if there is a difference between imagination and reality.
DBDr
8mo ago
The diversity of human experience, right?
It let me stop being a human beast of burden and get on the social capital accruing section of the ladder.
Truly proves meritocracy is a myth: no covid, I work for wages until I'm dead. Yes covid: I get a degree, and now I own a house and have a funded retirement and all sorts of shit; where as you (maybe?) get absolutely fucked by the thing that helped me immensely trough no fault of your own and with no way to stop it (I assume).
DBDr
5mo ago
Coming from the opposite place (a socialist with a history in the shovel swinging strata):
You've really nicely explained to things I've always just taken for granted in here.
A: there is an such a thing as elite capture, but there is also such a thing as "Dude, nobody fucking likes you". The level of authentic dislike or lack of interest in conservatives and conservative politics people have is wildly underestimated in places like this; right down to me polling my crew of redneck proll tradies over lunch about the transes and the SJWs and the majority answer being a combination of "I don't care" or "What the fuck is that?"
B: So, in an attempt to solve A we switch to a more salient message: these groups are attacking you, destroying your "way of life", the fact that your life is worse than your dads or your granpappys is because of THIS! And that might work in the short run. It will work in the short run, even. But dudes I used to work with and still talk to who fully bought in to Trump style messaging are getting woke to the fact that nothing in their lives improved even with a three branch R sweep; that their boss still buys a new corvette every other year but their kid had to move back in 8 months after moving out or they would end up homeless.
The current problems politicos need to solve are the (1)disintegration of community sentiment and the (2)disintegration of the economic middle; and the strategies of the parties have been to say "Just hold hands and thing happy thoughts and we'll slap a few bandages on it and if you complain about (1) in the wrong tone you have 5 cousin fucking teeth you pathetic FUCK" from the dems, and "(2) is good actually you comunit bitch but actually both are because of immigrants(brown) and the gays but we won't actually do anything about either".
Both major parties aren't attacking the root of the problem, but people notice that the D's attack the symptoms and the R's at least will sympathies with your grievances. Both parties are fucked in the long run if nothing changes, but the R's are fucked sooner because they keep not even pretending to do anything with the policy goals of the bottom of of the top bottom alliance. (except abortion, and look how that's turning out.)
DBDr
10mo ago
ANNECDOTE TIME!
As someone who has actually done it; it certainly effected my crops negatively in zones 9 and 13 (beans, avocados, stone fruit, nightshades, corn, rice, etc etc)
Corn has done fine every year; but everything else has had complete failures a couple times due to the seasons becoming unreliable. I've had killing frosts as late as april; when I look at the journals people had before they never went past late feb/early may.
I've also had complete failures of stone fruit due to temps swinging between 60-90 degrees in a couple days; which again was never reported in any of the journals going back 60-80 years.
Also, I've had failures of some squashes and such because the pollinators either swarmed early or late due to the seasons starting early or late; which is annoying as fuck.
Basically; my growing seasons are still perfect but the timing has became unreliable; which sometimes leads to completely unavoidable unpredictable total failures.
You can't put up frost cloth when you have no warning it's gonna sudenly drop below 40 after a 72 degree day.
DBDr
1yr ago
Piracy is ethical in the same way that shoplifting is ethical.
Ie: it isn't. It is stealing plain and simple. There is no ethical justification for piracy, including yours. If you don't like the politics behind a product, simply don't consume it or accept that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
But! You could consider a certain rate of shrink to be a part of the market and write it off.
There are more people that want products than there are people that can afford products, and there are (sometimes!) more products produced than people that can afford to buy them. If that percentage cancels itself out to zero, it is a legit victimless crime.
Once piracy starts cutting into the share of shit that would ACTUALLY get sold, is when there is a problem.
DBDr
1yr ago
What does woke mean to you?
If it means that the the current hegemonic values are indeed hegemonic, it's gonna be that way for a while yet probably.
The majority opinion on all 'woke' subjects is reflected by institutions that have a broad base, or who require support from the cultural or financial elite. This is how it has to be in a market system.
IT's why trans issues are so contentious; they haven't been fully integrated into the hegemon yet.
DBDr
1yr ago
To put in defense nerd terms: If you want to having meaningful and useful capacities for future conflicts, you must generate a robust and threatening opposing force. You have to look at what you have, and commit serios months of planning and pallets of money to asking "How would I destroy my own army as safely as possible?", you need to circulate it and get commentary and run war games and do all sorts of wacky shit, because if you don't the first time you come up against something that you didn't specifically design for, you are fucked.
Hence, this. You can make arguments that it does more harm than good, or is risky. On the other hand, we have seen that just assuming every tomorrow will be like yesterday and things are just gonna be fine tomorrow is fucking stupid.
So, it's down to risk assessment; which is a notoriously easy field that humans are naturally good at.
DBDr
4mo ago
We're entering in to the time of year when I need to diet or exercise and this year I choose exercise.
Right now I'm 220ish; my most fit weight when I was wrestling and competing in martial arts and doing manual labor was 240ish. I'm going to see if I can get at least to 230 in the next couple months without going to the gym at all.
I set up a heavy bag for extra cardio, and I'm going to move a couple tons of sand and gravel by hand over the next while, I'll see if that plus expanding my usual calisthenics will turn enough fat into muscle to get me back up there.
DBDr
11mo ago
As a progressive myself: lol no. Nobody gives a shit about target, except as a target for punishment for defection.
Target is as late capitalistic as any other retailor in the country, and their human rights record is as bad as anybodies.
I speak spanish and I've spent some time in that part of the world, and yo:
There are some fuking WHITE SUPREMACIST latinos out their bro. They are fucking crazy about it.
Probably some left over casta shit, or a weird extrapolation of creole types being wildly racist against natives; as though they aren't all mixed a fuck 600 years into the project.
DBDr
11mo ago
Coming in late, but no.
Fully automated warfare is as of right now science fiction.
A human with a gun is worth WAY more than robo-dog with a gun; the best autonomous platforms in the world are less good than a rando with 3 days training, a shovel, and a WW1 relic bolt action.
The only place where this might change soon is in the sky, where there are less obvious advantages for meat.
And even in the air anything that a drone can do, that same drone managed by a human can do it better.
DBDr
1yr ago
As a lefty: It is a real shooting fish in a barrel type exercise, but it works 95% to score cheap points.
If I get into a "Heated Exchange In The Free Market Of Ideas" and my interlocuter says "woke" or "pronouns" or any other conservative buzz word outside of a conservative safe space, I can make them look real stupid by forcing the conversation to a screeching halt and having them explain it to me.
Either they try in good faith and look stupid, or they blow right through and look disingenuous.
DBDr
1yr ago
Because great power politics is zero sum. There's the best, and there's the rest.
NATO is the best. Russia and China are possible nuclation points for the rest.
So, if russia wants to demonstrate themselves as a decrepit kleptocracy and take themselves out of the running for another 60 years, it's worth a few trillion in funny money bucks.
DBDr
1yr ago
Not helpful in your case exactly; but I did see some study or other that found normal highway patrol and cops would often shoot until the gun went click; hence all the news stories of dudes getting shot 9 more times after the first 4 killed them.
DBDr
5mo ago
The actual young family members I've seen recently all go to CA public schools as we (the extended family diaspora) all firmly believe that private schools are for richie riches or assholes. They are all doing something like whole language learning, and all are way more advanced in all subjects than any of the charter school kids I know (sample size: like 5. Basically worthless).
That said, they share some of my crazed book addict genes so maybe it's a worthless comparison.
That said that said: maybe I'm seeing these shitty results because this is the puritanical version of phonics where you aren't allowed to even look at a complete phrase incase it makes you go into hysterics, where as the public schools in my area are just doing common sense readings of"The Kuh AH TUH in the HUH AH TUH", you know what I mean?
DBDr
5mo ago
You can't. They don't exist. They are like unicorns. You can do 100 jobs with a contractor, and that won't stop them from fucking you on the 101st. Ask me how I know!
For real though: don't trust reviews, and try to either get a personal friend who is a contractor to do it or have the personal friend contractor find you one that he knows to not be a total shit.
For Real For Real: Become your own contractor. Hire tradespeople directly, let them know before they quote you will get the materials they recommend yourself and keep any spares, only pay the full amount on completion, and stand over their shoulders the whole fucking time they are working.
For the REALEST: do what I did and become and omnitradsman, capable of doing everything except sparky shit on your own to a semi-expert level and then suffer eternaly.
DBDr
6mo ago
Pretty much all of them: The service is substantially shittier to use in general; and slightly shittier to use from a technical perspective.
The general shittieness has risen to the point where I actually use it much less.
Bluecheck morons getting top billing instead of whoever has the best one liner has killed my interest in using twitter as twitter; I now only use it to follow specific people for updates on scheduled appearances/articles/ FILTHY FUCKING PORNOGRAPHY.
I'm shocked by what a difference this makes. I went from scrolling for a couple mins. each time i checked my feed for the latest incredibly specific porn / current events in the Palm Oil Killings / when is video game coming out to basically never actually going deeper than the very top level of the thread.
He has turned it into a more expensive rss feed for me.
DBDr
8mo ago
You should look at the correlation between high IQ, liberalism, and pro-socieality at some point.
IE, if you got Einstein, Bohr, Leibnitz, and the whole Nobel price galley together in a room and ran the test the only people who would pick red are the economists; ie the social scientists.
DBDr
11mo ago
Strangling is continuous, choking isn't (from a wrestling perspective).
A choke has a defined end; which is a tap, unconsciousness, or death. A choke leads to unconsciousness somewhere between 5 and 15 seconds (shit is faster than you think; once it is locked in.) and brain damage/ death in 1 - 5 mins. Assuming that this was a shitty armature choke as from a guy that had a couple months of light combatives once; it is still pretty murder-y.
Any choke that is held for more than 10 minutes is as excessive as shooting a dude 7 times that reloading and giving him another 7.
Given that he surrendered himself and doesn't seem to have intended to kill the dude, manslaughter seems about right.
DBDr
1yr ago
The apologia for the richest guy who started rich and picked right twice is funny to me, as always. Dude really is the modern day Timothy Dexter.
YOU are smarter than Elon Musk, he just had money and the blind self confidence to parley his way into a leadership position where his staff carefully wrangles him to making correct decisions sometimes. Testimonials from everyone who has ever touched his technical work are universally negative, strip it down and build it again right style shit.
But! That doesn't matter. HIS JOB ISN'T ENGINEERING, he is the fucking CEO. He can hire 99th percentile STEMlords to do STEM stuff, he needs to do CEO stuff.
The place you can say he is actually a genius: He is a fucking sublime marketing machine. He never turns off, he is 25/8 looking for ways to promote himself and his sources of revenue, both directly and indirectly, both positively and negatively.
He managed to fill the Steve Jobs shaped hole in the zeitgeist, and that is enough to make up for 95% of all boneheaded financial decisions.
DBDr
4mo ago
Then the game board gets flipped and france becomes the seat of the Neo-Caliphate (both lose option); or like every fundamentalist religious group taken out of their milieu, the Muslims get Mellowed over the generations. They go from fire breathing puritans to evangelicals barely holding on to one or two strictures in the style of a cargo cult (capitalist realism option).
I (a leftist) think this is a fundamental mistake:
A will to power is not permitted, it justifies itself.
The current ascendancy of liberalism itself wasn't permitted, it forced itself into existence from the ballot box and the bullet box. Likewise the progress into the future, however slow, will continue to create itself.
What does the right have to compare to the creative urge? 7000 years of people clinging to old, decaying systems being paved over by progress. Conservatives can win temporary victories, they can freeze progress or roll it back for a short time or even a long time; but conservatives can never win.
The future will always come.
This is the attitude of your progressive; which has been enfeebled recently by a 200 year long string of victories. But if those victories end, the progressive spirit won't end with them. If 1000 years of serfdom and empire couldn't do it, nothing can.
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