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DuplexFields

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

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DuplexFields

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

0 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 05 05:51:34 UTC

					

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User ID: 460

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I had a dream once which was inspired by the writings of Corey Doctorow.

I dreamed that every city block in Albuquerque had a uniformly built apartment complex ten stories tall, each with an open but narrow courtyard. Their names were just the dictionary because 1) there were so many and 2) they were built by China: The An Apartments, The And Apartments, The Any Apartments, and so on. The ground floor of each had businesses and schoolrooms, and a power plant, like a bargain basement Archology.

My family was being forced by economics to move into one instead of our house. We each got a 3-ring binder with a cheap plastic cell phone. My dad warned me not to use it because they’d be listening. We ate our first meal there in pensive silence, aware of the growing dystopia.

Reading the OP reminded me of that dream.

You’ve just given me another thing to keep in mind next time I reread Cerebus The Aardvark.

In my Triessentialism, I identify four sources of value, attributes about things which give them worth to humans and other mammals:

  1. Utility - can it bring me closer to a goal?
  2. Experiences - can it make me feel something I want to feel?
  3. Status - can it improve my esteem among those I want to impress?
  4. Agency - can it make me feel like I can make a choice that matters?

C++ had all four for me when I was in high school, and I don’t see that changing.

I’ve given a basic outline in a reply to my OP. It’s the philosophy she believed western enlightenment thought was based on, before she discovered Kantianism had infected America like the USSR.

Codependency is a word with a misleading etymology (like schizophrenia meaning “split mind” and being confused with dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly multiple personality disorder). It comes from the discovery that most people in relationships with substance dependents (the less judgmental term for drug addicts and alcoholics) tend to have some personal issues and patterns of behavior of their own keeping them in the relationship. It was later discovered to be the same thought patterns and patterns of behavior of serial divorcees, serial victims of abuse, people with chronic loneliness, and other people with constant relationship troubles. It tends to run generationally in families with issues of abuse, divorce, and substance use. For every visible relationship addict or drama addict, there’s a dozen functional codependents struggling through their day-to-day life. It is a known failure mode of human socialization.

At its core, much of codependency is boundary issues: the inability to separate one’s thoughts and feelings from one’s perception of what others think, feel, or opine. Actively codependent relationships tend to be characterized by enmeshment, where one partner/friend is trying to run or fix some part of the other’s life, and the other is letting them, each for their own reasons. Not all toxic relationships are codependent, but most codependent relationships are at least somewhat toxic. Most codependents feel hollow or empty, and use other people, or attempts to help someone live their life, to try to fill the void.

Ayn Rand was a Russian Jew born in 1905. Her family lost their small business under Lenin’s rule, and her family lost their lives under Stalin. She hated Communism more than most people will ever hate anything in their lives, and made it her life’s ambition to eradicate socialism through art and philosophy.

She traced the philosophical roots of socialism to two concepts: collectivism and altruism. Collectivism is the belief/worldview/way of setting up societies in which groups are treated more important than individuals and their rights. Altruism proper is the belief that a person’s life is only worthwhile if it is lived for others (not the mere belief or value judgment that helping other people is a good and worthwhile thing to do). She made it clear that these stand in contrast to individualism, the belief that individuals have rights that no group can take away justly, and egoism, the belief that a person’s life is rightly to be lived for their own values, happiness, and worth.

Objectivism, her philosophy, is based on the belief that humans are the most amazing and glorious creatures to walk the Earth, when driven by objective values and living through reason, rational self-interest in the short and long term, and the most suffering or cruel creatures on Earth when they are not. (This is a very brief and extremely reductive description of Objectivism. The real thing is best absorbed through her essay anthology The Virtue of Selfishness.)

Her former disciple Nathaniel Branden (from whom she was estranged over specific relationship issues, ironically) wrote extensively on the psychological roots of what would come to be known as codependency. Some have called him the father of the self-esteem movement. Here’s a list of some of his best insight porn.. His well-known Six Pillars of Self-Esteem are useful reading for anyone with codependency:

  • The Practice of Living Consciously
  • The Practice of Self-Acceptance
  • The Practice of Self-Responsibility
  • The Practice of Self-Assertiveness
  • The Practice of Living Purposefully
  • The Practice of Personal Integrity

From Branden’s introduction:

I was acutely conscious of the pressures to “adapt” and to absorb the values of the “tribe” — family, community, and culture. It seemed to me that what was asked was the surrender of my judgment and also my conviction that my life and what I made of it was of the highest possible value. I saw my contemporaries surrendering and losing their fire — and, sometimes in painful, lonely bewilderment, I wanted to understand why.

(Tagging @comicsansstein @non_radical_centrist @George_E_Hale and @cjet79 instead of individual replies.)

What have you heard about codependency in popular culture or your circles, what have you heard about Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, and do you know why I’m asking about both together?

I’ll post more on this after church this morning, whether this gets any replies or not.

As Ayn Rand points out, collectivism will always seek to override the individual choices of a person to fulfill their own happiness. Whether that be building a skyscraper or turning a child into a civilized adult, a woman’s agency is just as valuable when deliberately chosen, not coerced or bullied. In any collectivist system, right or left, the able bodies and capable minds of those able to work are coerced into working for the collective instead of working for their own happiness.

Science has moved past your statements. We now know many genetic variations which lead to testably differing neurologies and predictable personality traits. The baseline differences between male and female result in different behaviors stemming from the shared differences from neurotypical neurology.

Caprica did it first.

But but we'll be doing things like Brave New World! We don't want Brave New World ranked humanity! (Never mind the 1984 memory holes around every media corner...)

My suggestion is to bring back high school — heck, bring back middle school. With a decent curriculum and the right method of teaching, kids could be leaving middle school with entry level admin assistant skills, and high school with business-building skills.

There’s a style of teaching which people deride as “rote,” and study after study shows it gets better grades immediately with better long-term retention. I, being a product of Albuquerque Public Schools, have of course forgotten the name.

Microsoft changed it, now it sucks

I need to document this somewhere quickly, and this is where I can do it without having to create a new account or review subreddit rules. I’ll repost on someplace more visible later.

In the latest feature update (service pack), Windows 11 23H2, Microsoft has changed a piece of syntax in how batch files work in the venerable old Windows NT command line interpreter, CMD.EXE, successor to MS-DOS’ COMMAND.COM and my custom batch files are breaking.

Setup:

  1. In Program Files, in a certain folder, is a batch file designed by someone else. It works pretty darn well, so I’ve never had to ever debug, refactor, or otherwise fiddle with it. It’s not at all involved with the issue I’m having, I just mention it for documentation completeness.
  2. In that same folder are several custom batch files I’ve used for ten years as wrappers for that batch file, to pass it specific arguments. Once I figured out how to call the main batch file correctly in Windows 7’s CMD.EXE from a wrapper batch, I’ve never had a problem no matter which Windows computer I’ve copied it onto.
  3. In the shell:sendto folder which holds right-click-menu shortcuts, I’ve got a shortcut to each of the wrapper batch files. They “start in” the Program Files folder where the main batch and my wrapper batches exist.

I’ve documented TWO new bugs I’ve never seen happen! I used the batch files last week on this computer without any issues, upgraded today due to a forced update, and ran into this problem.

  1. The %~f argument has different output. It has always returned the full path of the specified file without the file extension. Now it returns it with the file extension! This messes up my string manipulation for naming the resulting converted/altered file. EDIT: actually, it's always been like this. Whew.
  2. Windows’ Send To right-click command passed the selected arguments to the wrapper batch file without full path names, resulting in the batch files using the arguments as if they were in the directory of the batch files, and not in my documents’ actual location!

Oddly, the second bug has vanished after I documented it in a two separate tests. The first bug, however, persists.

EDIT: Well, that's embarrassing. After checking my deleted files on a Windows 10 computer, it turns out I was wrong about "bug" 1: it's always been that way, I've just grown so used to it over the past ten years that I forgot how it works. But bug 2 did indeed happen.

That oft-reviled individualist, Ayn Rand, said that creating something great by your own standards of greatness is the only way to generate happiness.

There was a time about three years ago when I was struck by an inexplicable urge to build a new shed out of cinderblocks. I did not, for various reasons including the fear of hassles, but I believe it would have resulted in a satisfaction and happiness I have not felt since recreating a particular Macintosh AfterDark screensaver in Turbo Pascal on a 486 in 1996.

If you’re looking for a purpose toward which to put the work of your hands or mind, my suggestion is journaling your honest reactions while reading the book of Ecclesiastes, at least three reactions per chapter. Here’s a poignant translation.

In my personal experience, depression is part biological and part psychological. What’s worse, depressed thoughts make the brain release depression chemicals, which causes a negative feedback loop.

Also in my personal experience, both the hardware and the software can be reconfigured. But not in the way society generally thinks they can.

First, biological depression. Before trying prescription drugs (assuming you aren’t already on them), have a physician check your blood for levels of vitamin D and zinc. Odds are you’re deficient in at least one.

Vitamin D definitely impacts my mood for the better when I take it within a half-hour of waking up, and I don’t presume to be a neurochemically distinct anomaly. The 10,000 IU pills are fantastic to get levels up, and 5k IU should be enough to maintain.

I have no clue whether proper zinc levels impacted my depression, but they’ve kept my colds from being horrible by improving my immune system, so I mention it anyway.

As for psychological depression, my personal experience is that unburdening myself through a CBT hack has made a huge difference.

The Fourth Step “moral inventory” of AA, CoDA, Al-Anon, and other such groups is an invaluable CBT tool which most CBT practitioners don’t use because they didn’t invent it. By listing the meaning, the semantic weight, of the choices others have made which impacted my life negatively, I was able to get to the cruxes of many of my issues.

Being in a weekly peer talk support group (such as those I mentioned above) with journaling has also helped me to face my issues head on. Never underestimate the value of company in misery.

I’m autistic and introverted, but I still need people around me for my brain to generate the community chemical, oxytocin. I have several community-based hobbies and a “Third Place,” church in my case, to produce lasting friendships. I also watch My Little Pony Friendship is Magic, which was the first thing to really pierce my depression of nine years by that point. I think the show affects my brain like the “ecstasy” drug does for those who take it. I recommend starting with episode 4 of season one, watching to around episode 10, then watching episodes 1-3. It’s on Netflix and the official page. And don’t worry, it won’t turn you gay. (These are the jokes, folks.)

And when the mind isn’t as depressed, it relieves the brain, which relieves the mind. Relieve either one for a positive effect on both, and life will have more meaning.

I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and just about everyone on here is a statist of some sort.

I’m an Objectivism-adjacent minarchist Christian, so you’re one of the few here to the freeward side of me. (As opposed to left or right.)

You seem to be constraining the definition of free will to something tautological, while trying to prove some meaningful point.

There are different categories/qualities of free will, specific to any given entity and context. Free will of material+spirit sapients in a material+spirit world looks freer to the philosopher than the free will of material sapients in either a purely material or a material+spirit world, since spirit is (presumably) acausal relative to the material. However, a theologian who presumes original sin is a spiritual condition which constrains the will to the selfish choice will think a purely material AGI a freer will than an unrepentant sinner.

Assuming a purely material world, an agent’s ability to carry out a given choice or to even think of that choice as a choice is naturally constrained in many ways, by fatigue and hunger, by senses and by neurology, by lack of abilities or skills, yet that agent is still functionally free to will whatever he can imagine.

I advise you to consider the concept of Turing completeness before calling my paradox more absurd than your tautology.

It seems to me any advertised specificity of four digits is a claim of competency and confidence, not a true advertisement of a dollar amount. Put $3695.19 on there, and Normalman will think, “Man, six digits, that guy really knows his shit!”

In such a universe, “free will” more properly means the ability to consider multiple courses of action, and to reject any given potential choice based on conscious reasons, such as moral principles. In practice, our human wills are constrained by unconscious (“subconscious”) reasons, and not perfectly free.

FYI, I’ve had great success consciously removing unwanted reasons from my unconscious using Fourth Step tools from the Twelve-Step recovery method. I feel more free now than ever before.

Depends on the 4yo. I’d put the “sits quietly” expectation at 6yo, and the “not self-aware enough” at 5yo.

I have no doubt they’re killing civilians. What I dispute is that they’re murderists, a charge all too frequently leveled at Israel, and/or Jews generally, and always a subtle undercurrent when their self-defense actions happen due to circumstances they didn’t want and tried to avoid. They’re pulling the “kill one” trolley lever as fast as they can yank it, but the trolleys keep coming.

I do find myself wondering which of the COVID vaccines Navalny had taken. It’s almost more “scissor statement” than Navalny’s death itself.

Protip: to get your soldiers referred to as “murdered civilians” in the press, simply don’t have uniforms.

The closest things I’ve found are pop culture fandoms (which often involve fictional religions) and twelve-step recovery groups (which include expecting something with greater power than yourself to do the things you can’t).

The Fourth Step of the twelve is a mature psychotechnology which I personally recommend for anyone interested in altering their subconscious.

It has custom CSS for subreddits, so each of the most popular subs felt like a different site, making “reddit” more of a genre than a free forum.

It has a granular interface with the ability to customize the sorting and time range, and even the depth of replies viewed. I would often set Askreddit to two replies deep for fast browsing of the most interesting replies. Yet if I wanted to dig down in a fascinating thread of replies, I could.

It has massive amounts of info per page, reminiscent of the old web, where you can fill your eyes with as much as you want.

To this day, I use old reddit manually on my iPhone, making up over 80% of my daily web consumption.

Thank you for rehashing this. Some of us were into politics eight years ago and recall most of this, but half a generation has entered the Culture War unaware of the old guard and their malfeasance.