DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
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User ID: 460
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11mo ago
Crooks got off three shots, then five shots were heard in rapid succession, then one shot from the Secret Service sniper ended Crooks.
It was a Trump rally, and there were spectators on the grassy field next to the sniper’s perch, not inside the event grounds and thus not searched by security, who could see and film him on the roof. I wouldn’t be surprised if a Trump enthusiast pulled his own pistol and sent five rounds toward Crooks. Though if that had happened, I’d expect someone to have reported it by now.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1yr ago
What was your first computer?
Mine was a Commodore 64. I remember going to Sears with my dad to pick up the disk drive; finally we wouldn’t have to wait for a tape drive to load a program. It lasted us a good ten years, from Tooth Invaders and Frogger in elementary school to GeoWorks word processing in high school.
Our second computer was a 486-33 DLC: the math coprocessor was not integrated like an Intel 486-DX but was added to the motherboard. It had a Turtle Island sound card I ruined by running a text file through the DOS MIDI player.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
Yet another reason the FairTax would be fairer. As only businesses would pay taxes, consumer-laborers would be freed from fear of the taxman, and used goods such as thrift store clothes, used cars, and pre-owned houses would be completely tax-free.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
I believe the mechanism underlying that generalization was that people trend leftward who haven’t had to work for a living yet (in school on loans) or whose only jobs have been entry-level jobs where they’re treated as fungible, replaceable components. When someone has to actually interact with the economy with agency, or find people relying on them to be responsible, they end up conservative because they have things at stake and have to game out their future choices in the world they find themselves in.
This theory suggests that something is massively altering the employment landscape, keeping Millennials in entry-level or fungible job positions longer than previous generations, or otherwise keeping them from being economically agentic.
I believe the silent killer of conservatism is young people not moving out of their parents’ homes. Taking out a mortgage on a home was considered a turning point in the American Dream, and even moving in with roommates to share costs was a Big Deal.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
If it were up me to update the calendar for the next century, I would put us on 13 months of 28 days each, and make the Saturdays of every month line up with the moon phases; full, half, and new moons would all be on Saturdays.
There would be only one leftover day in three out of four years, and two leftover days in the leap years. I would put the annual leftover day on the winter solstice, and call it New Year’s Day, the day without a month, and I would put the leap day between October and November, and call it Election Day.
The 13th month would be between May and June and it would be called “Leftober”.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1yr ago
I’ve seen it. The first half felt, I kid you not, just like watching the local college women’s basketball team.
My family loves the Lobos of the University of New Mexico. I’ve gone to many games at The Pit, our basketball arena, and watched both men and women play. With the men, it’s about the almost martial precision as they dribble, shoot, pass, and execute plays. With the women, it’s about watching them put in the effort and the emotion, feeling their drama as they play.
The Marvels is a superheroine movie, a different beast than its spear counterparts. The emotions are more important than the scenarios; issues of identity, status, duty, wants and fears are what matter. Kamala is a teenager worried about her family, Carol is an unaging guilt-ridden mess, and Monica is an orphaned grownup working through her grief. Their punches and zaps don’t hit as hard, though that may be the directors’ fault. They want to convince, not to fight, but their appeals aren’t to logic, they’re pleas of emotion.
They’re, quite simply, beta Avengers in a made-for-TV movie trying to be postmodern and flailing back into modernity for money shots.
It’s worth sitting through the first half to get to the second half. Ironically, it’s when they get to the Bollywood planet that things come together. Once that fight finishes, however, the movie seems to delight in swapping them into other scenarios where their swift action is necessary, making the point that women’s lives are all about multitasking. Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury stuck in Earth orbit but available by ear comms makes the whole thing Charlie’s Avengers.
(Culture war angle: the villain looks uncannily like VP Kamala Harris.)
All in all, I watched it for the Marvel continuity, and enjoyed it, but I was moved more by the movie I watched directly afterward: Five Nights At Freddy’s.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
If tomatoes were called nightshades, the standard hamburger toppings would be abbreviable as KLMMNOP.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
8mo ago
How to fix the Ivy Leagues: require every student to have held a non-intern job earning no more than 2x minimum wage for their locale for no less than six months.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
Sterilize any other group to prevent them having children, it’s genocide. Refuse to sterilize trans people, and they call it genocide. …Not because genes won’t be passed on, but because presumably they’ll commit suicide. but the pithy observation stands for a different reason.
Today I learned two new words:
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memocide: the deliberate and/or systematic elimination of an idea (a memetic unit).
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memorcide: the elimination of a people’s history or the memory of a people, often a part of ethnic cleansing.
The culture war is a memocidal total war between modernism (the gaining and use of objective knowledge, the rights of individuals, the identification and shunning of bias, and the creation of a unified narrative) and postmodernism (the rejection of objectivity, universalism, and individualism).
The culture war has seen the weaponization of narratives, knowledge, pseudo-knowledge, anti-knowledge, bias, anti-bias, and pseudo-bias. (The latter includes objective observations about statistics which resemble bias.) This is one of the reasons Alex Jones called his show InfoWars.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
Notes from Trump-land: the cognitive dissonance of the Trump fandom being against the Trump vaccines is resolved in pre-pandemic reports that Trump is a germophobe, that he’s a man who trusts the American medical establishment including big pharma. It’s only natural that one man (no matter how smart and big-league clever) couldn’t be absolutely right on everything.
Also, he had Mike Pence (out of the fandom’s good graces since saying he wouldn’t halt or delay the tally on 1/6) run the Federal task force on the coronavirus. So, if fans can’t swallow the idea that Trump was fooled by Big Pharma, at least they can find solace in swamp Pence being in with the conspiracy. (“We should have trusted the fly all along.”)
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1yr ago
From an old Reddit post: When you use the words “I should”, you’re silently finishing the sentence with “…in order to be worthy of love and respect.”
Spot on! Also, “I should [verb]” is a comparison of my choices with a standard I got from someone else if I can’t truthfully say “I want to…” or “I need to…” in its place. If that replacement doesn’t help, I can try replacing it with “I could…” or “I can…” to replace obligation with opportunity and maybe even place it in my Next Actions queue, pre-choosing it in a way.
There’s also “I should be able to…” which is a similar dynamic relating ability to worth.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
I just got a real keyboard for my iPhone, and boy is it weird. I have yet to see all of its fun features, but for now, I’ll just enjoy using it to Mottepost.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
I’ve just noticed that when the red tribe wants to rename something, it’s treated as pointless signaling or laughably poor gamesmanship, but when the blue tribe wants to rename something, all of the institutions of American public life get behind them. This asymmetry is one more reason Chthulu swims leftward.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
Malfoy’s mates Crabbe and Goyle - lower class or lower middle class? Servants of House Malfoy? As an American, all I can tell is they’re somewhere between soccer hooligans and Alfred Pennyworth.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
Let's suppose I provided counseling services for unhappy people. And I define an "unhappy person" as anyone who feels he is unhappy.
Pedantic reply:
Since you have no first-hand knowledge of their unhappiness, you are smuggling into your definition “anyone who communicates he feels he is unhappy”.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
· Edited 2yr ago
And there it is. The deaths of people who have been injected with the vaccine, but who are not yet immunized to Covid, have a huge death rate.
Calling people within that fourteen day window “unvaccinated” is blatantly disingenuous. Playing with words for political reasons is dangerous. Sticking with the moneyed narrative in a time of total narrative collapse can be deadly.
Those of us who were paying attention to the biology of the effects of SARS-CoV-2 were screaming to high heaven that vaccinating humans to replicate the spike protein was a Bad Fucking Idea. But since we were red-tribe coded, our words fell on stone-deaf ears.
How can we do better as a civilization next time (assuming for the sake of discussion Global Pandemic II won’t be deliberate)?
EDIT: Spike protein mechanism for causing myocarditis detailed in my reply here, for those who think I’m just being a reactionary.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
I do find myself occasionally wondering if the local abandoned Walmart (shoplifting killed it) might be a fine place for a novel nonprofit to set up an indoor tent city for the local homeless, with security guards and nurses on staff, a doctor dropping by every day for prescriptions, and the in-store pharmacy restored to full functionality. The big outdoor parking lot might be additional space for the hardier hobos willing to rough it.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
10mo ago
If it is true that “God makes no mistakes” he has some very serious explaining to do in regards to why he engineers certain pregnancies to result in a fetus with half a brain, or with no lungs.
Creationists say there would be no such mistakes were Adam not to have eaten a specific delicious fruit. There would be no mutations, humans would live a thousand years even without eating the fruit of the tree of life, and T-Rexes would still be vegan to this day.
Christian evolutionists have a much simpler answer: God used the death-churn of evolution to make us, so we should have no complaints about the problem of evil/suffering.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
I am sufficiently fixed in my views that engagement with you would likely only produce heat. Nonetheless, I dislike you calling me sad for sticking with my man.
He was the only President in my working life whose administration produced an economy sufficient for me to earn money for a retirement account, which is now down to 60% of what it was when he left office. Tangible personal results like that are memorable and anecdotal by their very nature, and thus unfalsifiable, so no data-based argument would sway me.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1yr ago
I don’t see why a verbal referral, possibly made sarcastically to a “squeaky wheel”, would have been recorded.
This is one of the reasons American conservatives don’t trust a large, central, bureaucratic government: “The part of the government which oversees the government states they couldn’t find anything in the files of the part of the government which works with citizens who served the government in fighting another government to indicate there was a referral to the part of the government which kills its own citizens to prevent them using excess government resources which could be used for more productive citizens.”
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
Russians might or might not manage to keep Donbas and/or the Crimea but the rest of Ukraine has remained an independent country and that is not going to change.
When Putin said all he wanted was Crimea and the Donbas, people called him a liar, an imperialist, and a murdering conqueror. If the bear stands down and leaves Ukraine alone once it’s finished biting off those two chunks, as he stated, I won’t be surprised.
If Belarus is next for a weird contested election, I expect to see a repeat of wars and rumors of wars.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
I was thinking about AIs as a specific category of maximization agent, a purposeful being or entity which has a primary purpose of maximizing a thing, or a category of things, or a diverse group of things, with the existential risk of minimizing (not seeking, actively denying, killing those who seek) any purpose which might reduce its maximization efforts.
Other examples include corporations as profit/product movement/market share maximization agents, and authors as entertainment/drama/comedy maximization agents. From inside the fictional DC universe, for example, the editors and authors are the cause of all of Batman’s suffering. The Deadpools of the Marvel multiverses are occasionally fourth wall aware (though canonically they’re usually just insane/deluded in-universe), and “know” his authors want him to suffer, to sell drama. Some of Heinlein’s creations know they’re in stories because every ficton (fictional universe) is reachable via multiversal travel. Rick Sanchez of Rick and Morty is quite aware he’s a fictional character, but doesn’t bother with metafiction (unless forced to) because it’s the least escapable or controllable (and most boring) aspect of his existence.
In my philosophy, Triessentialism, I posit that all purposes an agent can seek must aim toward at least one of three goals: experiences, utility, and/or esteem. The fourth primary goal, phrased variously as “freedom”, “more choice”, “control”, “decision-making”, “spontaneity”, etc., is a construction of the other three, but is so central to the human experience that I afford it a place alongside the others.
In this context, would it be rational and/or useful to treat each political party / egregore as a maximization entity? Arnold Kling states in The Three Languages of Politics that he believes the three main political philosophies seek to reduce class oppression (left), barbarism (right), and coercive tyranny (libertarian). The alignment problem of AI also exists, in my opinion, for any maximization agent, and we should constantly be aware of what each party (including our own) is willing to break to achieve its maximum expression.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1yr ago
So, why does the Western multi-national coalition want al-Assad dead or dethroned? Since the WMD narrative fell apart for Iraq and I believe the chemical attack narrative was a false flag by rebels, there has to be something more. But I never see these rationalist or rat-adjacent spaces talking about it.
It’s accepted truthiness among the alt-right and conspiracy spaces that Gaddafi was killed for trying to make a pan-African state backed by a gold Dinar. Is it something like that?
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
After Tucker Carlson’s exit from Rupert Murdoch and Paul Ryan’s Fox News, the “persuasively” part is rapidly diminishing.
With “the death of the author” attitudes among lifelong fandoms, and corporate franchise owners/milkers calling them “toxic fandoms,” we’re reaching a point where the storytellers are caught between their audiences and their patrons. The Matrix subthreads in particular reminded me of this.
So, for a fun fandom kerfuffle, I’d like to know, what stories and characters do you believe you know better than their (current) authors/production team?
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