DradisPing
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User ID: 1102
DradisPing
2yr ago
This is basically the equivalent of Starbucks putting Andrew Tate's photo on their pumpkin spice lattes. Worse because Bud Light has been losing market share and isn't well respected by beer drinkers.
Blue collar people see this as "I've been loyal to your mediocre product and you make an effort to insult me".
I see Mulvaney as someone who's addicted to attention, not some multilayered performance artist.
Kid Rock is just having some fun and showing loyalty to his fans.
Conservative commentators are jumping on this because Bud Light is a fun target to mock, and most of the jokes have already been written.
Anheuser-Busch can't back down because it will hurt their ESG rating. There's a specific LBGTQ rating that may be separate from ESG, I'm not sure how it works.
DradisPing
1yr ago
Anderson was rushed because removing Trump from the ballot during primary season was an irremediable injury. Other states would have have tried to do the same thing and clearing up the issue needed to be done.
United States v. Trump is different because the prosecution's demands for a speedy trial aren't well grounded in any legitimate need. Courts often move slow, 2-4 years wouldn't be unusual given the number of documents and unique legal issues.
Skipping the appeals courts would have been strange. SCOTUS will typically let the appeals courts have their say so they can take those arguments into consideration. Jack Smith tried to time things so he could get a DC conviction before the election and appeals courts wouldn't be able to weigh in until after the election. SCOTUS didn't see any reason to help him do that.
DradisPing
1yr ago
But back to the topic at hand; it's unclear what Abbott's actual game is; he's an accomplished constitutional lawyer(literally; that's how he became governor) and knows he's going to lose at court. He's also never been the reckless type and so it's unlikely he did this without thinking it through. Angling for a Trump cabinet seat, maybe? It also surprises me that he did this now; primaries are coming up in March, and Abbott endorsed a relatively wide array of candidates to try to shift the house in a more partisan republican direction; taking a political risk like this one is unlike him.
His problem was that he had to be seen as doing something. His credibility was low with the right.
He's been off side with the base regarding some recent legal issues. Alex Jones was getting railroaded by a far left judge in Austin and Abbott didn't even make a token comment about due process. A bunch of Bushies were upset about Ken Paxton beating George P Bush and teamed up with the Dems to impeach him in a process that abused the rules. After Paxton won Abbott sent out a press release congratulating him on winning a fair trail instead of admitting the problems with the process.
So Abbott needs to shore up his credibility with the right.
Picking a fight over the border is attractive for a number of reasons.
- Biden's border policies are extremely unpopular, to the point that his administration wants to avoid delineating them. Forcing Garland to take them to court likely means forcing the Biden admin
- Under Trump the legal left took the position that States had a number of rights to defy federal immigration law and enforcement. This puts them in a position where they need to oppose their own legal briefs from five years ago.
- Any legal fight will take years and keep illegal immigration in the news for that time. If Biden tries to do something extreme it more of an opportunity for Abbott.
DradisPing
1yr ago
It's pretty well documented that university leftists will aggressively block hires and promotions for purely ideological reasons. They gang up on the farthest right person, get rid of them, then move on to the next farthest right.
Also many on the left, even the more moderate, have a "no enemies to the left" frame of view where they see anyone farther to the left as a harmless idealist who won't be dangerous if you don't aggravate them.
DradisPing
2yr ago
It's not really bizarre. One of the arguments for Brexit was that the EU had to approve all new trade deals and it wasn't approving any new trade deals.
So Britain ended up being stuck in trade policies designed to protect things like farming in French Overseas Territories.
I don't know any of the specifics of what the TPP includes, but trade without Eurocrats micromanaging every shop in Britain was the point.
DradisPing
1mo ago
A lot of departments want courses in the core curriculum because it guarantees jobs lecturing. They don't particularly care if the students learn anything or if it provides any value. Forcing students to write papers on indigenous studies is just the easiest path to getting paid to write their own papers on indigenous studies.
So basically everyone involved is a fraud, and it goes forward because we've let colleges control credentialing.
The students just want the credential. The lecturers just want their money.
DradisPing
1yr ago
Competence porn as mentioned in another post. But another part is they introduce interesting characters and locations without diving too deep or the author expecting you to get invested in them.
The Brits have a phrase, “overly personal” for getting too deep in someone else life story. Sometimes I want to enjoy a colorful cast without a therapeutic analysis.
DradisPing
2yr ago
Part of the issue is that Shakespeare is public domain so anyone can do whatever they want with it.
Tolkien products are all licensed. These race swapped cards mean that fans will never get a card game with a book accurate Aragorn.
Additionally activists tend to see these swaps as permanent and will demand black Aragorn in all future adaptations.
DradisPing
2yr ago
What's historically unprecedented is that so much of culture is owned.
It's natural and even desirable for writers to reuse existing characters. The audience doesn't need to be introduced to them and you can get on with the story.
Traditionally writers used gods, demigods, saints, historic figures, etc.
Nowadays everyone is locked down by copyright and trademarks. Studios like that. Re-using old characters is also good for keeping out foreign competition.
It's hard to imagine a new Star Wars (the original) or anything like it coming out today - a big, bold, truly original vision with a budget.
The original Star Wars had a relatively low budge for the time. No one else was pushing VFX at the time so Lucas could recruit top talent cheaply. Also he understood the technology and built his script around cool shots that were possible.
DradisPing
2yr ago
So specifically about 9/11:
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The US had a bunch of wargames planned that day. Including NORAD simulated hijackings. They weren't a secret and Saudi fighter pilots are trained at US airbases. So it's likely that the hijackers knew about the wargames and scheduled to take advantage of them.
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There were 19 hijackers and 4 planes involved. They recovered 4 passports and 1 blackbox. The blackbox and two of the passports were from United-93. The other two were from the pentagon crash. My takeaway is that the United-93 crash wasn't as bad and the pentagon had a good fire suppression system that saved two of the passports.
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The twin towers were especially vulnerable to fire. They were pure steel towers (no concrete) designed to use asbestos for fire protection. Asbestos was banned right after construction started. To complete the project the builders got a special fire retardant insulation approved for use in it's construction. It was never used elsewhere and it didn't work.
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WTC 7 wasn't just on fire. Huge chunks of steel from the twin tower collapse did massive damage to the building and shattered the diesel tanks WTC 7 used for its back up generator. The damage occurred on the side facing the towers, so it isn't obvious on the recordings which were taken away from the site with a zoom lens.
DradisPing
2yr ago
From what I gather the issue is that the show notes that a lot of cultures have stories about wise men from the sea coming and bringing them things like agricultures and laws. eg Quetzalcoatl, Osiris. Graham theorizes that these may be memories of real events.
They are calling the implication that these societies didn't learn these things on their own racist.
The "white supremacist" charge seems like a real stretch because there's not even a hint that anyone involved was white.
I'm heard about the bias towards pacifism in "Before the Dawn" by Nicholas Wade. It's a great book, but it came out in 2007 so it might be dated about the state of the field. Also his 2014 book "A Troublesome Inheritance".
Articles like this made me think there's still some of it around: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/science/iberia-prehistory-dna.html
But skeletal DNA from that period is striking and puzzling. Over all, Bronze Age Iberians traced 40 percent of their ancestry to the newcomers.
DNA from the men, however, all traced back to the steppes. The Y chromosomes from the male farmers disappeared from the gene pool.
To archaeologists, the shift is a puzzle.
“I cannot say what it is,” said Roberto Risch, an archaeologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who was not involved in the new studies. But he ruled out wars or massacres as the cause. “It’s not a particularly violent time,” he said.
Instead, Dr. Risch suspects “a political process” is the explanation. In their archaeological digs, Dr. Risch and his colleagues have found that Iberian farmers originally lived in egalitarian societies, storing their wealth together and burying their dead in group graves.
Oh and I got the names mixed up. The claim I read was that "Battle-Axe Culture" name used to be more common than "Corded Ware culture". Looks like it's still used in some cases.
DradisPing
3d 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
I don't think he's actually particularly pissed at Harvard specifically. It's really the combination of a few things.
- It's the most sacred institution to DC people.
- If anti-Trumpism has a Westpoint, it's Harvard Kennedy School
- Harvard administrators are unbelievably arrogant and will be unable to present a sympathetic defence in public
- The Trump base has zero sympathy for Harvard and love to see them get put in place
- Harvard isn't what it used to be at the administrative level. Claudine Gay isn't up to the standards of Harvard 30 years ago
- Harvard admin doesn't seem to grasp that a lot of their behaviour over the past few decades is explicitly illegal and they only got away with it because the feds were on side. There's no case law protecting them.
- As the most prestigious school they make an obvious target for all of Trumpism's issues with academia.
DradisPing
1yr ago
Making heroes fight each other for questionable reasons with no lasting consequences is a proud comics tradition. Seeing them fight each other is fun, and that's what Marvel wanted on screen.
DradisPing
1yr ago
First, from what I understand, the final payment number came from Alex Jones not being willing to disclose his net worth, which allowed to the plaintiffs to imagine an infinite net worth if they wanted to.
Not really. It was more that the Judge and the plaintiffs refused to accept his financial statements and insisted he had secret money. It was a mix of hating Alex Jones and leftists needing to believe that Jones was a grifter in it for the money. Accepting that there wasn't much money would have damaged their world view.
The plaintiff's lawyers refused settle and now the plaintiffs won't get much of anything.
Infowars has creditors who have priority in the bankruptcy. The talent doesn't have exclusive contracts. The studio can only be sold for pennies on the dollar. Infowars generates no income if it's off the air.
Texas has fairly generous bankruptcy protections. Jones will get to keep his home, his retirement savings, and a vehicle for each adult in his home. He'll be able to start up a new video stream hauking supplements fairly easy. Production values will be lower at first.
Obviously it's a huge blow but it won't destroy him.
Yes, he went on for too long with this charade and should had never started it in the first place, not to mention that his claims didn't went against the NWO or the globalist elites that he despises, but against parents of dead children, claiming that the most emotionally painful thing that had ever befallen them was something they were lying about on TV.
One of the reasons that the Judge needed to do a default judgement is that Jones isn't nearly as guilty as people think. People mentally lump him together with "Alex Jones types" but he wasn't the primary driver of the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories. The defence was doing mock trials and found that some of the time they could win, even with an Austin jury.
DradisPing
1yr ago
I'll be honest about my feelings towards unions: I don't get it at all, and I think I'm missing something.
There's a lot of history there and a lot of competing interests. It's probably worth reading this: http://www.paulgraham.com/unions.html
I think you'd be insane to not just fire anybody who joins a union on the spot. I don't get how places can "vote to unionize". Why does the employer not simply fire the people doing the organizing?
There are explicit laws against that. Unions in general have a lot of laws to protect them. Read up on Pinkerton strike breaking.
The owner of the "Giant Tiger" chain of stores in Canada likes to joke that "you don't get unions unless you deserve them". I don't think that's entirely true, but early unions were created in response to genuinely horrible treatment.
Are the people running factory machines inside of Ford and GM (or starbucks, or a hollywood writers room) really that highly skilled?
More or less yes. Starbucks isn't terribly high skilled, but a key part of the atmosphere is the preppy gayish vibes they curate in their employees. They needed to do a lot of careful hiring and firing to get that while staying within the bounds of the law.
Hollywood is actually a case of very functional unions. Each production is a new company, so everyone is fired afterwards. The union can't force anyone to employ low performing employees. So standards are enforced by constantly having to be rehired and treatment is enforced by the union. Writers getting royalties makes a lot of sense. Without them writers would save all of their best ideas for a time when they were co-producers and could share in the profits that way.
Skilled autoworkers do deserve decent pay and are difficult to replace. One issue is that the janitorial staff will often get better contract than they deserved, and the union representing them is stuck fighting for raises on top of an already overpriced salary.
Autoworkers and old industry are very interesting. Their golden age has passed, but a lot of unions still expect generous contracts.
Unions are often overly adversarial in the US. I have a controversial explanation for this -- the culture was strongly influenced by soviet spies who wanted to sabotage US industry. The KGB was certainly trying, and had a lot of connections on the left. I admit I can't prove they succeeded.
But countries closer to the iron curtain tended to have more reasonable unions. Germany has national unions based on job type instead of local unions for each company. That makes them more accepting of contracts that are in line with industry standards even if they don't offer big raises.
American unions will bankrupt a company then shrug and say they were just representing their workers, who are now all unemployed.
Unions in the US (and Canada) also like to start taking over management roles, which creates conflicts of interest. Controlling shifts and vacation dates. Sometimes people need a way to protect themselves from an abusive union rep. As far as I know no one has managed to organize a sub-union to curtail union abuses, but I think it could happen.
DradisPing
2yr ago
But I would expect people on the right - and I mean all those talking heads, think tanks and high-flying politicians - be interested in figuring out whether DIE actually makes the army stronger - and if not, pushing that fact hard. I don't think I am seeing this.
One of Biden's first orders was to implement political purges in the military to establish firm left wing control. So the right isn't so keen on having a functional military at the moment.
The red tribe has been refusing to sign up since that announcement was made.
The right already lost much easier cases. Women in combat. Women on ships. Trans soldiers on hormone treatments know to cause suicidal thoughts. Female soldiers don't have to meet the strength standards men do and have to find men to help them move heavy equipment. I've heard of navy ships crippled from having to send home large numbers of pregnant women.
It's forbidden for officers to have sex with women under their command, but pregnancy tests are never done.
The immigration fast track for services isn't obviously terrible, so the right has no chance of winning the fight.
Also I believe it's actually an expanded version of an already existing program. I remember hearing about it circa 2012 or so. It's possible it was just being proposed.
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
4mo ago
The random jihadi style attacks are less ideological than people assume.
Islam liberalized a lot of social policies, but also froze them. One of the problematic rules was that low level officials had unlimited tax power over their regions. These could be enforced on a small level.
One of the things that travellers between Christiandom and Islamdom often commented on was that in the Christian lands peasants often had carts. Under Islam they did not.
A cart was too much of a visible investment and could be sized by the local lord (not sure about the correct title) at any time.
How does a family protect it's wealth under those circumstances? One strategy it to convince everyone your family is too dangerous to mess with. The local lord or his relatives are frequently vulnerable to a mob of people with knives, they can't be hyper aware and guarded all the time.
However committing suicide makes you, and thus your family look weak. And therefore vulnerable to exploitation.
So you have things like "Running amok" where a brooding person suddenly lashes out in random violence.
So the attacks are often closer to "death by cop" than some deep ideological motivation.
You could probably eliminate a lot of it if there was some way for men who feel they've failed at life to die gloriously. But that's a big step for society to take.
Perhaps we could just start off by sending them on "the Hock".
DradisPing
1yr ago
E Jean Carroll's account is inherintly less beliveable because she has no evidence of contact. It's just a claim that a random celebrity raped her in a store fitting room years ago.
Tara Reade at least had verifiable professional contact with Biden.
I have a problem with both accounts. Carroll comes off as a nutter. Reade looks like she's coming forward because of some other grevances. I think Reade could be exagerating.
DradisPing
1yr ago
Dems in safe seats (Biden+30) in congress are all ideologically on side with the base. The ones who make cross floor deals are in more marginal seats that they are afraid to lose.
The Reps in congress are very different. A lot of them in safe seats try to keep their public profile low and vote to keep the Rep DC power brokers happy in the hopes of lining up a lucrative job post office.
They form a decent chunk of the R congressional congress but their views have no electoral support. They lie at election time and they'll lose if they are exposed. However they are used to running things in DC (on the R side) without any questions from the base and expect that arrangement to continue.
So this is a precursor to cleaning up the house caucus. Ken Buck has upset local supporters so much that he lost his sweetheart deal for his congressional office and is being evicted.
I'm not particularly concerned about congress being locked up. When it's "functional" it's just going to dump billions into things I don't want it to while performing pantomime investigations so they can claim they are holding Biden accountable.
DradisPing
1yr ago
SF voted to ban homeless tents on streets years ago, a judge stepped in and forced them to allow it.
These sort of things aren't decided democratically in California. The bill will fail but then a left wing group will get a friendly judge to mandate it's major points.
DradisPing
22d ago
Natalie looked hesitant. “Yes,” she said. “The conservative media shilling for Russia unnecessarily is sort of a symptom of the Covid backlash. Because we don’t trust the authority on that, we’re going to not take their words on anything. Do I think Putin’s a great guy? No.”
This stands out particularly as a straight up fantasy take.
The MAGA base doesn't see it a "shilling for Russia". They just stopped having a problem with Russia when communism ended and see the policies popular in DC as incredibly antagonistic for no reason.
DradisPing
1yr ago
I think Moldbug nailed it with his analysis. Researchers want to work on the most important problems in their fields. In viral research it's deadly airborne diseases. There's a shortage of deadly pandemic viruses to study, so they create them. That way they have something to write papers on.
AGP transwomen tend to be good at math and low in agreeableness. It makes sense that a lot of them are in tech.
There are also career advantages. HR women find them kind of ick as cis men, but love them as transwomen. Building a name for themselves by blogging opens up diversity spots speaking at conferences. That helps their careers.
In contrast cis men are judged more by what they've accomplished for their employers. It's difficult to get a conference speaking spot if you haven't already made a name for yourself. A blog or open source contributions don't have the same value for effort ratio.
Cis women have access to the diversity spots at conferences, but putting their names out their risks a lot of negative attention. Given the relative scarcity of women who can code, they can get high good jobs without needing to market themselves with blogs or conference spots.
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