DradisPing
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User ID: 1102
DradisPing
10d ago
I think you'll enjoy John Derbyshire's take: https://www.nationalreview.com/2002/05/why-dont-i-care-about-palestinians-john-derbyshire/
DradisPing
10d ago
But these politicians like Cruz also say 'god commands us to support Israel'. Why disbelieve them?
People are frequently dishonest about their motivations. Often they don't even understand them.
You'll never hear a politician say "I don't really care enough about X to have an opinion, but I think position Y is what voters want." People don't want that kind of honesty.
"god commands us to support Israel" is rhetorically useful because it ends the conversation.
DradisPing
12d ago
Partially speculation, partially extrapolation from what I've seen in Canada.
Really what I've seen is more organic than how I've presented it... Pro-Israel Jews make it a point to get their kids to volunteer on campaigns or get summer jobs in politics. Some of people they meet end up as future candidates. If they become lawyers then they end up getting phone calls to help out because people know them.
I was trying to give a framework for understanding influence and glossing over some of the details.
People on the Republican judge track don't get involved with small legal troubles of senate nominations or congressional campaigns. The disputes are too small and they don't want to make enemies in the party.
Getting on the bad side of a Republican patronage network (https://scholars-stage.org/patronage-vs-constituent-parties-or-why-republican-party-leaders-matter-more-than-democratic-ones/) can tank any future nomination.
edit:
Also I have the sense that it's more acceptable for a lawyer at a prestigious largely Jewish firm to do pro bono work for a pro Israel Republican than it would be for a lawyer at a prestigious non Jewish firm to help a pro life republican.
DradisPing
12d ago
So there's generally a lot of questions about why R politicians such as Ted Cruz are so pro Israel.
There are a lot of theories about AIPAC, money, and Evangelical beliefs about judgement day.
But from what I've seen the truth is that it's about staff. More specifically, lawyers.
To start off with a bit of preamble, it's more common to get screwed in the legal system than a lot of people think.
While the ideals of the practice of law talk about the zealous representation of clients, in reality lawyers have their own careers to worry about. Judges hold grudges. Other potential clients hold grudges.
Most of the time things work out because in a typical criminal or civil dispute the judge is genuinely disinterested. There are a lot of business lawsuits, there are a lot of criminal prosecutions. The one before them isn't special.
However there are a lot of legal issues around political campaigns and judges definitely have opinions about which party they'd like to see win.
Election law is a legal specialization. There are also relatively few clients since lawyers typically only work for either the Rs or Ds.
So for a local lawyer going against party brass in court because their client is getting screwed in the nomination is a potentially career limiting move. They may get cut off from representing other candidates in the future.
There's a similar problem with judges. In theory if a judge is being biased the lawyer should call him out and aggressively go after him in the appeals court. But if the lawyer expects to have twenty more cases before that judge, is it really a good idea to do that? Letting your client get screwed is just so much easier.
In theory the bar association should step in when something like that happens, but they really don't. They tend to defend their own, especially if the client who got screwed is someone they don't like.
Remember it was easier to throw Michael Avenatti in prison than to disbar him.
So where do the pro-Israel Jewish organizations come in?
Simple, they know a lot of lawyers with experience on election issues. They can fly someone in, pair them with local counsel, aggressively defend their client, then fly home and go back to their normal practice.
They are unconcerned with local patronage networks or pissing off local judges, within reason.
It's just incredibly beneficial to Republican politicians to stay friendly with the pro-Israel Jews.
DradisPing
12d ago
At this moment in the US there are far more people with obesity than with cancer.
DradisPing
12d ago
What drives such a belief? Do you think that drugs care about the moral pulchritude of those taking them?
There's a common religious belief that suffering is holy and morally required. You see this a lot with Catholics in particular. They will lecture people with claims like "quitting smoking using nicotine lozenges isn't really quitting smoking". Somehow results don't count, it's the suffering that's important.
Also in modern society the left expresses purity through diet.
Additionally believing that fat people are gross because they are sick and unhealthy doesn't jive with a lot of modern views. You aren't supposed to be weirded out by people's medical conditions.
So the view that obesity is a moral failing is popular. This has the added effect of letting healthy weight people feel morally superior.
The idea that a medication can safely reduce appetite is jarring. That implies that their feelings of moral superiority were unjustified and kind of immoral.
DradisPing
20d ago
He knows how to write a compelling screenplay which he can then direct. Most directors can't even do that, so it seems a bit unfair to call out James Cameron specifically.
Avatar would have more of a cultural impact if he worked with some good sci fi writers to do some spinoff novels to expand the world. Unfortunately he wants to do it all himself between his submarine adventures so it's a little more simplistic than is ideal.
DradisPing
22d ago
America has traditions built around the one drop rule. Spanish has more descriptive terms like octaroon, but they are frowned upon in the US.
DradisPing
25d ago
Still working on my Minecraft API with MCP for AI integration. I got Dockerization working so I can theoretically deploy it somewhere easily. It's not really ready for that as I haven't bothered adding any security to the API yet.
Previous comments here taught me that I can use different LLMs from VSCode, so I've been having some fun with that.
Going forward I really want to let the AI do building construction, so I've been planning out a component system where it can pass component names, options, and bounding boxes and subcomponents will handle the internal details.
I want it to be similar enough to React that it'll be able to transfer over some of that training. Curious to see if I'll run into limits with the context side.
DradisPing
25d ago
The Dubai zoo may end up winning all categories.
DradisPing
29d ago
Don't know your familiarity with coding, but Java isn't a good place to start.
Ok so coding is the part of this project I know, I'm just not super familiar with all of the Java tooling. Unfortunately Java is a necessity for Minecraft mods. The MCP interface stuff is in Python.
Getting a jar file with dependencies into a working Docker container was more of an adventure than I expected.
Do you mean Claude Code ?
Nope, Claude desktop is a thing with MCP support: https://claude.ai/download
Using an IDE with an open project to do things unrelated to that project seemed peculiar so I didn't go down that path. I tried out using the MCP in VSCode and it worked well, although the agent did try to re-write my MCP code when it couldn't initially connect. The downside to Claude desktop was that it didn't let me try other llms.
I wasn't aware of the VSCode support, so that's neat.
DradisPing
1mo ago
So in an effort to update my skills and move in on the AI hype I've been doing a MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration project.
I couldn't think of a useful and functional project to do, so I'm building an api into Minecraft and integrating it with Claude Desktop.
So far it's pretty fun. The limits of Claude have been interesting.
There must of have been a huge amount of work fine tuning models to get them to work with images.
I assumed it would be able to complex shape generation by reading a region into a 3d array and modifying it. Claude seems to have a lot of problems manipulating a big chunk of json data like that.
I asked it to generate a small house in front of me, and this is what it gave me: https://imgur.com/a/CDNKm7K
Also it was behind me. It seems to have a lot of trouble understanding the direction I'm facing. There might be a problem with the data I'm sending.
It seems to handle the more simple tasks I built primitives for well. Creating cuboids of a block type, messaging players, finding players, spawning creatures.
Lately I've been trying to Dockerize it for easy deploy. I'm not all that experienced with Java so it's been an adventure. Or Docker really, there must be easier ways to debug Docker failures than what I've been doing.
I'm looking forward to doing a deploy and terrorizing my friends with AI commands. I see potential for it in twitch streams.
Longer term I'd like to introduce some features for better building generation. I kind of assumed that the currently available tools would be more advanced given how fast everything else seems to move. But after reading up on Model Synthesis and Wave Function Collapse it seems like it'll be a ton of work to get anything working.
I can probably get it to spawn in things from .structure files, but that's much more limited than what I was hoping for.
DradisPing
1mo ago
It is 100% true that Mozart wrote a song entitled "Lick me in the arse" (Leck mich im Arsch).
I like to bring that up in discussions of high culture. I no longer get invited to classy parties.
DradisPing
1mo ago
People online also say that Bohemian Rhapsody is about AIDS. There are just a lot of people really into analysis of lyrics who don't do a lot of research.
Dave Grohl had a great quote about people overanalyzing Nirvana lyrics that went something like "Sometimes Kurt just made up lyrics on the spot to fit the music. I watched him do it."
There's so much nonsense in analyzing fiction / lyrics / poetry, but people are having fun. It just gets annoying when they start lecturing you about media literacy.
DradisPing
1mo ago
I'm looking to read:
"America's Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights Hardcover – Nov. 23 2020 by Bertram Levine (Author), Grande Lum (Author)"
The DOJ CRS was created by the civil rights act back in the 60s and by statute is immune to most FOIA requests. This is one of the first insights into the organization.
I'd also be interested if anyone has a detailed review or analysis, because I don't think I'll have the time to read it properly.
DradisPing
1mo ago
There is no evidence that Epstein ever met Robert Maxwell beyond hearsay by anonymous callers into a popular Epstein grifter podcast that they 'supposedly' met in London in the late 1980s.
"According to Hoffenberg, it was Robert Maxwell who first introduced his daughter to Epstein in the late 1980s."
It's hard to establish exact dates for things this far out, but at a minimum we know that Epstein was dating Robert Maxwell's daughter Ghislaine around the time of his death. It's more likely than not that they knew each other.
It's also notable that the headmaster at the Dalton School while Epstein worked there was Donald Barr. Barr worked for the OSS (CIA precursor) during WWII and was also former AG Bill Barr's father.
DradisPing
1mo ago
So it's the intersection of a few things.
The first major one is overspecialization in our society.
The typical person writing modern movies was super into pop culture in high school. Then they went to film school and studied screenwriting. Then they tried to break into the industry.
As a result they have very little life experience outside of school and Hollywood. They haven't even read a lot of fiction recreationally. There's a joke that comic book movies got so popular because nobody in Hollywood will read anything without pictures.
With significantly older generations it was common to go into the military for a couple of years either due to the draft or get your draft obligation out of the way. Then they'd try to be a real novelist. After failing at that they'd go into screenwriting. Those people are all long retired.
As a metaphor lets talk about being a commercial illustrator at an ad agency. It's a perfectly good career, but anyone talented should really dream of being a fine artist when applying to schools as a HS grad. Some people have even made the jump from commercial illustrator to fine artist, like Banksy. Similarly going straight into screenwriting shows a lack of love for the best examples of writing.
The next problem is the schools themselves. They have the same problem as architecture schools, where what the schools teach students to value isn't popular with the general public.
Basically all screenwriting grads want to write Barry. A fine show, but it's not for everyone.
Next by their nature a large production is a mix of interest and opinions. Disney makes a lot of their money off of merchandising. They care more about toy sales than having a plot that makes sense. Additionally people at the studio like to get their ideas in for ego reasons.
Mufasa specifically was probably seen as a cash grab movie. The writers and the studio just wanted to get it out and get their money.
DC movies are interesting because the live action movies are just seen as cash grabs for Warner Bros. They want merch money to spend on the movies they care about.
The DC animated movies are different. For western animators who want to do action adventure movies they are some of the most exciting jobs to work on. So they attract top talent who want to make them good.
There's also just a highly chaotic aspect to making a live action movie. Things like casting affect the script but are entirely out of the writers control, so there are always last minute rewrites, then the director shoots what he thinks he needs, then they have to edit together a movie out of whatever was shot.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Even by 2000 if you dove in to the numbers it was obvious in the band of countries running from Hungry to Estonia that things had dramatically improved. A lot of people hadn't updated their priors about how bad things there were in the 80s, we only started to get the real numbers in the 90s.
Certainly in right wing circles it was well known.
The former Yugoslavia was seen as it's own weird thing with a lot of ethic tensions we didn't understand.
Part of the problem was that the left was too successful in casting things like HBD and culture being deep as unthinkably racist. They were extremely taboo on the mainstream right.
To put things in perspective, ousting the Soviets from Eastern Europe was largely successful. It was still highly taboo to talk about the problems in places like Zimbabwe and South Africa.
As a result it was impossible for anyone on the right to assemble an argument about how removing Saddam wouldn't result in a democratic revolution.
You'd sound too racist to be on TV.
Liberals from a more cosmopolitan background often have the attitude of "everybody knows X, it's just not polite to say it". But Republicans from small white towns frequently don't know it. They're going to go along with poor decisions if you don't let anyone tell them.
Edit:
I seem to be having some communications difficulties with this post. Back in 2009 or so HBD blogs were the only places having discussions about things like cousin marriage in Arab cultures leading to clannishness which caused problems when trying to impose individualist democracy on them.
I'm not even endorsing any particular theory. I'm just saying that the limits on public conversation made it difficult to fight a bad idea.
DradisPing
1mo ago
I've been musing an effortpost about this, but I think that law and order has been an incredibly negative influence. It completely messes with peoples sense of how common things are in society and what the problems are with the justice system.
A crime and law drama that conformed better with the realities on the ground would be a good thing.
DradisPing
1mo ago
I mean you should keep that in mind. Getting called into a meeting with your manager because GenericUserIsRetardedError showed up in a stack trace for an end user isn't fun.
DradisPing
1mo ago
I see it more as a rejection of Cuomo than any great socialist uprising.
My takeaway is that it's just over for white boomer Democrats. They can keep their current jobs but won't be able to win nominations for any new office.
Ezra Klein had some good articles talking about the progressive theory of power and how it causes problems for city administration.
These are more for background than supporting my argument.
Basically the problem is that progressives are completely dedicated to the idea that billionaires and greedy corporations are the ones causing all of the problems.
However at the city level the problems tend to stem from:
-
Disorderly elements. eg low level criminals like shoplifters, people with sever substance abuse problems, or severe mental illness.
-
Left wing organizations trying to tack on fees to everything to get paid.
Progressives are completely unable to acknowledge that either of those groups cause problems. The idea that left wing groups are just being greedy rent seekers goes against their whole world view.
So you get ideas like government owned grocery stores. During a past attempt to tackle "food deserts", in I think Detroit, a grocery store complained that shoplifting was putting them out of business. A city councillor told them that lossage was just part of the price of doing business in Detroit. So the grocery store shut down the location.
I don't think the solution is really any fundamental social change. The issue is that people on the center left like to play defence for the farther left and hide the crazier elements of their philosophy from the general public. The progressives think that the media hides their beliefs out of some conspiracy against them instead of an attempt to protect them.
There needs to be a documentary series on a major streaming service that, as fairly and calmly as possible, shows what progressive populists believe and what the problems with it are. Right now it's being taught in colleges as the absolute truth with no analysis.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Huma Abedin is a very different case. It's pretty obvious that she was raised to be a sort of foreign agent -- her parents are Muslim Brotherhood activists and they moved to Saudi Arabia to raise her right after she was born in the US.
Most women chasing after Alexander Soros are in it for the money. She was in a better position because she wanted access to power and thus could easily pass all tests about being in it for the money.
I don't think it's fair to call it a conspiracy theory.
I see it as more of an important life lesson. If you want people to care about what you want you'd better make yourself useful first.
Sure, there's a lot more to it. But I don't think anyone really wants to hear me recount USSR geopolitical strategies in the Middle East lead to the Palestinian activist networks in the west.
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