DradisPing
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User ID: 1102
DradisPing
1yr ago
Do the shoe on other foot test.
Imagine powerful right wingers from around the world, many in government, were attending an annual conference together at an exclusive resort in Montana run by a wealthy conservative with extreme ideas and a Nazi father.
Would blue collar lefties really think it was NBD?
There's a famous quote,
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
In this case it's not raising prices exactly, but various schemes to increase the wealth and power of the attendees.
DradisPing
4mo ago
I'd recommend "The New Right" by Michael Malice, "Ship of Fools" by Tucker Carlson, and "The Case for Trump" by Victor Davis Hanson if you want to understand them.
One of the major issues is that the bureaucratic technocrat class has devoted most of their energy into setting up systems to prevent them from every having to face any serious consequences.
Pete Buttigieg is a great example. His Secretary of Transportation appointment was supposed to be an easy resume builder on his path to his Presidential run. He's been cocking it up, but everyone knows it won't hurt his political ambitions.
California should be the crown jewel example for bureaucratic Dems. But wherever competent management is needed you can see total failure. Electricity has been a disaster for over 20 years. The high speed rail project started planning in 1996 and has been a total failure throughout every step. Water planning is a disaster. Forest management to reduce fires is absent. The homelessness camps are entirely caused by mismanagement.
I could go on and on.
But to make it worse, DC is filled with people who have open contempt for the residents of "flyover states". They devote all of their energy to social signalling and fail at their actual jobs.
DradisPing
1yr ago
Politcio has started off their election day coverage with a tweet that's enraging Republicans....
The 2020 presidential election was rife with allegations of voting machine hacks that were later debunked.
Yet there are real risks that hackers could tunnel into voting equipment and other election infrastructure to try to undermine Tuesday’s vote.
https://twitter.com/politico/status/1589568452699820032
The flip from "election deniers" to "legitimately and patriotically questioning the election" is going to be fun to watch and compare.
DradisPing
11mo ago
I don't see why slavery in the US is at all relevant to the UK in a historical sense.
The international English speaking left is actually extremely Americanized. They will often come off as anti American, but they are really just anti red tribe.
The right tends to be more rural, small town, outdoorsy, and proud of their nation's history. They are often painted as wanting to Americanize their countries but really it's just that they have no particular grievance towards red tribe America and don't see any problem with borrowing ideas that seem to be working.
The left sees itself as part of an international progressive movement to improve the world. The movement is largely centered in the US and had it's greatest victories there. The enemies of that movement must be demonized. Even if they are thousands of miles away.
So the left in the UK will talk about America a lot. The BBC has things like Doctor Who meeting Rosa Parks instead of exploring racism with local history. Obama is extremely beloved and above criticism in a way that he isn't in the US.
I find it a very interesting topic that isn't widely discussed.
DradisPing
3d ago
That's the standard way for organized leftists to 1984 something from Wikipedia. Vote to merge the article in question with another semi-related article. Move over some of the content, redirect old links, delete the original article. Then vote to minimize and delete the moved over content as it doesn't really fit with the new article.
Every step can be argued as neutral, but the end result isn't.
DradisPing
4mo ago
Can you imagine being dumped by a girl because she wants a man old enough to buy her cigarettes? But you're 27?
It'll be interesting to see how the tobacco ban plays out for immigrants. I'm guessing that in 10 years the law just won't be enforced for PoC.
Weirdly, the usual weed legaliser types were in favour of the ban.
That's not surprising, the weed legalizers generally aren't libertarians. They just really really like weed.
DradisPing
11mo ago
I file that under "their own damn fault". For decades they've been demonizing foreign government media funding while responding with a dismissive "totally different" to anyone who points out they get a lot of government funding. The CBC is big enough and powerful enough that it's employees can isolate themselves from criticism they don't want to hear.
DradisPing
1yr ago
It should go without saying that the commission being sent to oversee things is... not exactly non-partisan
It's wrong to expect them to be. Elections are naturally adversarial. All the major candidates should be able to send observers for key moments.
Actually one of the big problems with the American election system is that counties are allowed to manage their own elections, but they have a strong incentive to stuff the ballot boxes. When dealing with elections where the total votes in the state are what matter, the political power of the county is directly proportional to the number of votes cast.
If county overwhelmingly supports one candidate then they have exactly zero incentive to stop ballot box stuffing.
Observers from outside the county who support the other candidate are the only solution.
DradisPing
1yr ago
Johnson is clearly talented as a filmmaker/director, so how can he be so clueless as a writer?
He's a "rule of cool" writer. He writes things that seem fun in the moment but he doesn't do verisimilitude or rich world building. His range is very limited.
Look at Looper. The parts where limbs are cut off in the past and disappear in the future don't make any sense under any consistent time travel rules. It's pure "this is cool, don't think about it".
He's a bad match for Star Wars. It's space opera in a rich exotic universe. Consistent rules and world building are very important for the genre.
His "Star Wars" spin off trilogy was going to have no spaceships, no lightsabers, and no force. Basically it was not Star Wars. He just couldn't get his own trilogy made.
To understand what went wrong, you have to understand who Kathleen Kennedy is.
Yes, she worked with Spielberg and Lucas for years. But she was never a creative. She's an enforcer.
Her job was to manipulate and bully the studio and the press into doing what the creatives needed.
She managed to rise up the chain to be in charge of LucasFilm. But she's still not a creative, and she doesn't even like Star Wars.
She wants to make feminist empowerment movies. She doesn't know what makes a good SW film, but she's sure as hell not going to let some dirty man babies tell her what to do. So she hired directors that had recently done some big sci fi movies (Star Trek and Looper), told them to include feminist empowerment messages, and assumed everything would work out.
The Hilary email server thing is really a special case that usually isn't well explained...
She wanted a separate email system so:
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She and Huma could co-mingle Secretary of State business and Clinton Foundation business. Foreign governments were making requests about official business to the clintonemail.com address, and getting donation requests for the Clinton Foundation from the same email address. There was a pretty strong subtext there.
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Keeping the emails off of government servers kept them out of FOIA requests.
Now what makes it a big scandal is that the bureaucrats in DC were helping her. She was powerful and popular in DC. No one else could have pulled it off.
The email server was discovered when Judicial Watch noticed that they weren't seeing any emails from Hilary's account in their FOIA requests about Benghazi.
The staff in charge of FOIA requests knew all about the separate email server and argued that those records weren't in their possession so they couldn't search them. But responding to the request with "no relevant records found" is dishonest given that they knew they should have had the records.
It came out that it wasn't secured properly and foreign intelligence services were likely reading classified emails there. That defeated the "what's the harm" excuse.
It's not the worst scandal that's ever happened, but it does stand out as unique. Hilary had been so powerful in DC for so long that she knew how to flout the rules. There really isn't anyone else who could have done something similar.
I agree that in general high level officials get sloppy with classified information and do things that an ultra aggressive DOJ could prosecute them for. It seems inevitable given the amount of sensitive information they deal with and the fact it's impossible to live in a SCIF.
DradisPing
1mo ago
2012 - 2016 is when the SF tech industry switched from "free speech and neutrality are critical for our growth" to "kicking around our political enemies is a whole lot of fun". I think Obama's re-election campaign was the turning point.
Ellen Pao was probably always more comfortable with censoring and control. But in her actions she was just following the prevailing winds in SF.
DradisPing
11mo ago
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.
DradisPing
1yr 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
3mo 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
6mo 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
1yr 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
11mo 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
7mo 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
10mo 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.
DradisPing
10mo 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
5mo 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
6mo 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.
"Ancient Apocalypse" on Netflix has been a break out hit. Some of the reactions have been... interesting.
The Guardian declared it the most dangerous show on Netflix.
Boingboing says Archaeologists reveal the white supremacist nonsense behind Netflix's "Ancient Apocalypse"
So what's behind this?
Hitler famously cherry picked some ideas from archeology / anthropology to push his agenda. Post WW2 academics found that it was easy to push out rivals by claiming their ideas could result in a new Hitler.
As a result anthropology is filled with people who think that they have a vital role as guardians of society.
This mostly results in making historical narratives more dishonest and less cool. The Bell Beaker culture is often referred to as the Corded Ware culture. They claim it was spread as a peaceful diffusion of culture. Genetic testing that showed that as the culture expanded neighbouring Y-DNA haplogroups disappeared. This is dismissed as one of those great mysteries.
When a body is found carrying a spear and multiple hand axes, they are ceremonial trade goods instead of weapons. The arrows in the back of the body were presumably his change from the trading. That joke was stolen from an academic I can't track down.
Ancient Apocalypse is really just fun and harmless, but the reactions point to a deeper problem.
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