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DuplexFields

Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.

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joined 2022 September 05 05:51:34 UTC
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DuplexFields


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.

				
				
				

				

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thanks! Clarification: …but I will be disgusted by the depths of the evil they chose and agree they deserve their fate, a fate I would have shared were it not for grace.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Whenever reviewing the stats on Trump’s first term, I haven’t seen much disambiguating between BC and DC - Before Covid and During Covid. Consequently, both sides can point to the term and say they were right about Trump.


    

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    BC stocks soared, DC they plummeted.
    

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    BC employment hit record highs, DC it tanked.
    

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    BC a rising tide floated all boats, DC the megacorps were the sole allowed source for America’s goods and services.
    

    • 



So, what evidence are you citing for the very general statement “If you want to punish generic "people in power", the evidence suggests that electing Trump seems like a bad idea.”?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But I know that he doesn't have the ability to implement it. Consider that in the first part of his presidency they had both parts of the legislature and executive. He got nothing done with all that!




Paul Ryan and John McCain and the rest of the neocon Nevertrumpers stymied him from the beginning, all the  way to the vote to cancel Obamacare and the McCain “FU I’m dead anyway” move. The wall was getting built, and until COVID, all of the economic indicators were nice.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The goal of a functional Republican Party is to ensure we indeed have a republic, wherein no sector of society, public or private, can easily run the lives or abuse the rights of any other sector. That takes the identification of power and the disarming of it.


Since Reagan left office, that has meant the centrist wing abusing the business community through tax subsidies and breaks and strategic regulation to mold it into the picture of bad-faith capitalism while the right wing focuses on trying to ensure good-faith government.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I have yet to meet a practicing Christian who expressed strong beliefs in the supernatural elements of Jesus's story.




Although you were talking about meeting such people IRL in coastal cities, I figured I’d introduce myself. Hi, I’m DuplexFields, young-Earth Creationist and Evangelical/Pentecostal Christian. Also a libertarian/Objectivist registered Republican and unabashed Trump voter/fan.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.”)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Cool rhetorical trick, calling poor Black boys raised by single mothers “socially deprived.” I’d argue these kids are the most socialized by their peers, who pass down toxic masculinity through their culture of guns, gangs, grifting, and seeing the police as just a gang keeping the wypeepo’s stuff safe.


Bill Cosby tried to change the culture, but the people who overlook the sex crimes of Roman Polanski, Kevin Spacey, Woody Allen, and Bill Clinton decided that this comedian would be the one they’d ruin.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If we agree annexation by force to be bad, how do we feel about annexation by secession? By treaty? By demographic shifts due to birth rates and/or migration? By cultural invasion?


Once all the borders on Earth are set in stone as far as war is concerned, Power will find another way to get the territory it wants. It skirts legibility if all methods legible to the law are blocked. It fights unseen wars through peacemongering. It still consumes all as fuel, as rust is slow fire.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				I feel that people often praise movies that call out or subvert expectations of their genre solely because they do that, even if execution of the subversion itself is not good.
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Icons are a prerequisite for iconoclasm. Once the great idols of gods are torn down, the statues of great men are next, and then the statues of ordinary men. When only the memory of statues remain, they must rail against and try to tear down memories too, to remain iconoclasts.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It’s true I did believe he would increase my fortunes when I voted for him, because I believed he was a selfish man who would increase the ability of businessmen like himself to profit. His tax cuts validated my choice. Why I liked him was his enthusiasm for America, his wholehearted dismissal of the woke nonsense as foolishness and tripe, and his awareness of the games being played by those in power.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for May 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


once you cripple that industry and make it illegal, why wouldn't you prosecute them?




At that point, I’d consider it, because at that point, it’s legally considered murder with conspiracy to murder, and they’d know it without excuse. I’d gladly go after PP for RICO today and the abortion providers for conspiracy to murder right now, with impeachment for any legislator voting down a single-issue “born-alive” bill.


I’ve met two women who murdered their child in the womb far past the “kid has an active brain” stage, one a wife on reddit for economic reasons and one a single IRL for emotional reasons (her ex was revealed to be a jerk and she wasn’t ready for single motherhood). Neither considered the child a real person yet. Would I treat them like baby stranglers at worst or concentration camp guards at Nuremberg at best? The first, yes, the second, no. The cognitive dissonance would be too shattering for her and send her to suicide.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So it’s aiming for the Kevin Costner’s Yellowstone viewership. Got it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for July 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
High quality and recent: Rick McGough’s Faith & Reason Made Simple (Rationally Defend What You Believe In A Culture of Skepticism) is from 2018, and is quite comprehensive. Here’s a sermon from the author of the book. Message starts around 42:40.


Here’s a link to recordings of a 60-hour church apologetics class on the book with the teacher citing additional material when appropriate. Each video is around an hour, and the media library is arranged recent-first.


And yes, I’d be interested.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Ever since hearing that the word “politics” is best understood as “power”, I’ve been watching ridiculous and insane policies asking, “who benefits?” Since 2015, I’ve included what is and isn’t covered on the news. Layoffs might just be economically-forced layoffs, or a consolidation of something of value: indirect coordination of the like-minded/agreeable (power), programming and/or management competence, tribe/class membership, and so forth. I can no longer afford to not be cynical.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Reminder: the 30% is adjusted out of the initial price by law during the transition year. Since companies will no longer pay employees the amount which goes to FICA and employment taxes, they’re expected to drop baseline prices and then add the tax back in. The resulting prices are equivalent, and anyone caught gouging will be fined harshly.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				USA Election Day 2022 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
They don’t “speculate” in the sense of disclosing uncertainty, they outright state they have the data. The book actually lays out that data.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I had a comment with numbers and info in it, but I cannot paste on iPhone (fix plz @ZorbaTHut ASAP), and so it is lost. Suffice it to say that, had I simply kept my IRA out of the market when I was laid off in Dec 2020 (EDIT: 2021) and just let it bear interest, I would have 150% of my life’s savings in that account.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for March 7, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
(I wrote a better version of this answer, but the web ate it when I accidentally reloaded the page. Oof.)


I saw what I now call Triessentialism first in a passage which many scholars say was not in the original manuscript but was added by a later hand due to tradition: the doxology of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6.




For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.




I had been pondering the make-up of man, what the heck the "spirit" and the "soul" are and how they're differentiated, and "where" they are in relation to each other in the body in a Christian ontology. I'd also been thinking the idea that emotion and logic are as fundamentally different from each other as are the material world and the immutable laws of logic. (You can't hold a "two" in your hand, nor burn a "deduction" to release warmth.)


It was while pondering the differences between the three ontological categories that I realized this distinction was also present in the doxology. My reasoning?


    

  • We see the power of God mostly in the Old Testament where God the Father acted with great power on behalf of His chosen people
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  • The word "spirit" is usually used for emotions instead of supernatural beings in everyday life ("the spirit of Christmas" and such) and glory is about our emotions when beholding God
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  • The best king would be someone omniscient: infinitely intelligent, infinitely wise, and who knows everything.
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So I identified the power as belonging to God the Father, the glory to the Holy Spirit, and the kingdom to the Son. (Of course, all three Persons have power and glory, and God is rightfully sovereign over everything, so it's not a "this Person of the Godhead doesn't have X" heresy.)


Once I'd seen this pattern there, I started seeing it throughout Scripture. (I don't have the Bible where I highlighted them (highlit?) with me at the moment, and Google is being unhelpful as usual nowadays.)


So do I have more reason to identify Jesus the Son with logic, and not the Father or Spirit? Quite a lot. John described Jesus as both "the Logos"/"The Word" and "the Light." Jesus called Himself "The Way, the Truth, and the Light."


Early Christians said they were followers of "The Way," a word that means both paths and processes. Paths lead the sojourner from the origin to the destination. Processes turn intention into action. Logic is about processes and algorithms as much as it is about interactions of the descriptions of things.


In Chinese, "Tao" means "The Way" and implies "The Right Way". Logos was a Greek concept akin to the Tao: an inherent order and regulation underlying the universe. Heraclitus pioneered the concept and wrote about it in various ways, non-systematically and sometimes contradictorily as a universal consciousness or the mind of a supreme Being, but usually as a receptacle of truth. Other writers picked it up before John, but John identified the Logos as co-equal with God the Father.


Light has taken on a more fascinating meaning to me ever since I pondered waveforms as a carrier of the information of what impacted the wave's medium and holograms as a capture of that waveform. The unknown writer of the Letter to the Hebrews has some of the highest quality Greek prose in the New Testament, speaking with the precision of a programmer and the expression of a poet.




hos ōn apaugasma tēs doxēs kai charaktēr tēs hypostaseōs




"He is the radiance (apaugasma) of the glory (doxa) of God and the exact imprint (charakter) of His nature (hypostasis)..." - English Standard Version


"He is the emittance of His majesty and the hologram of His person..." - my gloss


To perfectly describe God the infinite Being would take an infinitely precise Likeness, as flawless and divine as He. To measure God would take a standard as perfect and infinite as He.


In a way, the logical measurement is the "son" of that physical thing which is measured, existing with it even if the measurement has not been read out or recorded.


The Muslim writers sometimes speak of the Quran ("The Recitation") as God's uncreated word, not something created by humankind, the ultimate revelation, existing eternally with God.




Gödel's incompleteness theorems were among the first of several closely related theorems on the limitations of formal systems. They were followed by Tarski's undefinability theorem on the formal undefinability of truth, Church's proof that Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem is unsolvable, and Turing's theorem that there is no algorithm to solve the halting problem. - Wikipedia




Here, then, is that perfect formal logic which describes God: Jesus of Nazareth, who told the religious elites to love, and was killed for it. His resurrection is the proof of His correctness and their corruption.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There's no fundamental difference between taxes and theft, unless it’s designed from the ground up not to be theft. And that’s what the FairTax proposal would do: remove the famous libertarian / anarchist-capitalist moral complaint against taxes. Don’t want to pay taxes? Don’t be a business owner in the great market of America.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
He also had four years of control of America’s executive branch and armed forces, at the time an exclusive club of 45 men throughout history. A quarter of Americans would willingly fight and die to return him to that control, were cheating provable. That’s riches.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don’t know of any atheists out there saying a Mormon state is the end-goal of American Christianity, which is what would garner the equivalent response, “The Church of Mormon is a conspiracy theory.”


It would be easy, actually, to point out how the LDS church is a major driver of conservative culture, trying to match the Roman Catholic Church in cultural power through new media (Angel Studios, Glenn Beck, The Blaze, etc.). Now, build up a conspiracy theory of a group of influential and wealthy Mormons trying to bring about the White Horse Prophecy. Then check the funding of conservative candidates and PACs by Mormons, and you’ll see “evidence” for the theory everywhere you look. Easily disproved, of course, but now you’ve got the mind-worm whispering to you every time you see a Mormon involved in the culture war. (It works because of the successful othering of Mormons since their beginning, the American equivalent of the perpetually-othered Ashkenazi Jews of Europe complete with pogroms.)


But all that aside, the reason “Cultural Marxism” is denied is because most people have no clue what actual Cultural Marxism was/is. The progressive movement’s economic policy wing is rolling along on the momentum of bog-standard envy-driven collectivism, same as it ever was, grabbing and using new terminology by opportunity, not by design.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As long as the magical wish could also prevent any government agent from having a successful shooting of an innocent, that might work. Of course, it would also lead to police just “firing” into crowds and whoever’s not “innocent” gets shot. All sorts of dystopia come into play there.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				The Philosophy of Triessentialism: An Ontology Of Values
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Problems can be classified on this four-axis model by how much or little they remove these four qualities of value from anything of value, or introduce the negative values. This is a step toward the creation of my universal problem-solving project.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for May 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah, yeah, but it does take a while to work out which estimations of one’s worth and abilities are just delusions and which ones model reality.


The mind can be as hallucinatory as an LLM on the small details, especially since, as an autistic person, my learned understanding of emotions is basically prosthetic for my missing emotional instincts.