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.
7mo ago
· Edited 7mo ago
My ancestors tried to escape organized religion and live a holy life with no private property in a commune on the New World. Their ship, the Mayflower, nearly sank but for a great metal screw, possibly part of a printing press. Half of them died that winter, but they were saved by an Indian who walked into town and asked them for beer. This man negotiated an alliance for agricultural knowledge and trade with the local tribe. Once they got back on their feet, the Pilgrims had a great harvest feast with the Wampanoag before the next winter set in.
Although there was a clash of these civilizations several generations later which set the groundwork for many ethnic conflicts and genocides, what we celebrate is that fragile peace and brief cultural understanding that gave us the harvest we needed to survive.
Whatever your family’s story, I encourage you to celebrate my family’s holiday, giving thanks to your gods and/or economic systems for providing your daily meals and your full bellies through the coming winter. Happy Thanksgiving.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
Yes to the latter.
Reddit’s “There Was An Attempt” subreddit is for failed attempts at doing simple or easy things. This news article was posted there as “To stay alive as a PoS who made millions off the suffering of others.” As of now, approx 8000 upvotes and 1000+ comments, most of them cheering on the assassin.
It’s culture war because the Democrats forced the country’s insurers via the ACA to stop offering all healthcare except “Cadillac plans,” and to cover all pre-existing conditions, and reduced the employer-provided requirement down to 30 hours.
Then they successfully blamed Republicans and the profit motive for increasing the percentage of 29 hr/wk jobs with no healthcare, making all healthcare costs skyrocket, making doctors and nurses quit and new people not want to go into the field, and making Big Pharma rich.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11mo ago
Babylon Bee headline satirizing the bias: “CNN: ‘Clumsy Trump Hits Head On Bullet’ ”
Videos of the incident and the shooter: https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/229040
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6mo ago
The Time Wars Have Begun.
President-Elect Trump has put his weight behind ending Daylight Saving Time. Pretty much everyone likes the idea, but immediately the perma-DST vs. Noon-Is-Noon factions drew up battle lines.
I’m not here to litigate that battle, it’s tiresome; all the points have been made elsewhere and basically come down to if 9-5 or 8-4 (solar time) is what our civilization should stick with, and what we should call them, for the sake of the children and for having some evening daylight after work.
Instead I propose that schools and businesses start using “sundial time”.
They’d open at, for example, one hour after dawn and be open 8 or 9 hours. Retail stores, bars, and other businesses that rely on evening business could base their workday around sunset, closing at (let’s say) three or five hours after sundown.
Their door signs could be IOT smart displays, automatically coordinating with a virtual sundial based on their GPS coordinates, with translation into noon-based time. Smartphones could show these times pretty easily, via a settings switch.
We even have the Latin abbreviations AL (ante lucem), PL (post lucem), AV (ante vesperum), and PV (post vesperum) ready to go.
The major plus would be health, as instead of one hour jumps in spring and fall causing heart attacks, times would adjust only minutes each day, steadily.
Would you be opposed to this in your city/town, and would you be more or less opposed if your political rivals suggested this? Do you have any priors re which political tribes would hold which opinions?
Are you PDST or NIN and a night owl or early bird, and do you think that influenced your other answers and arguments? (For transparency, I’m a Noon-Is-Nooner night owl.)
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11mo ago
No direct culture war implications, at least not directly left/right. However, this was easily predictable by readers of Michael Crichton or Ayn Rand, both names in the “up/down” culture war (to coin a phrase).
Crichton’s most famous work, Jurassic Park, was largely about chaos theory. When working with a complex system, that is to say one driven by logic and rules, an outlier can bring down a house of cards through emergent effects. John Hammond not paying for a team of programmers led to dinos eating people. Today’s a mundane version of that.
Rand had a lot to say about innovative producers versus free riders, and apropos to today, about smart people who can create or repair machines versus everyday people who can just use their interfaces until something goes wrong. When it does, the cynical cry of, “Who is John Galt?” escapes their lips.
In the classic book “Atlas Shrugged”, the phrase Who is John Galt is a cry of despair and hopelessness. It describes a situation wherein the pistons are removed from an engine making that whole metal mass of a car useless.
The pistons form a small part of a vehicle’s mass, but provide the entire reason for a (petrol) car’s existence. Similarly most great organisations and societies are moved by a small group of people — the innovators. When those are removed, the entire thing falls apart. And the engine is usually among the last parts of the car to give up. And when the engine gives up, usually you don’t find a replacement — you just sell the vehicle to scrap. When the small minority of truly creative, entrepreneurial, risk-taking people are removed from a society, the society completely falls apart.
John Galt is a symbol of that risk taking, entrepreneurial guy. And when he gives up, the despair sets in. “Who is John Galt” is a cry from the masses who are confused about what is happening and who are despairing to get back the people in charge [the people who can take charge of reality through reason and bend it to their will].
And the truly creative, entrepreneurial guy need not be a rich industrialist. He can be a worker. He can be an artist. He can be a banker. He can be a professor. It is not about their wealth, but about how much they move the status quo.
The American IT industry was hit hard by COVID. Businessmen, C-suite execs, saw their people remoting in from home and trying not to return to the office. These execs, many of them free riders, realized they could halve their costs by hiring remote MSPs from out of country for IT and relying on Crowdstrike to be their security bottom line. A flood of IT layoffs happened this past year, deflating IT wages and making entry level jobs scarce.
Then today, only people with the admin password or a modicum of critical thought could restore the most well-protected systems. Today, companies across the globe learned who their John Galts were, their Eddie Willers, their Dagny Taggarts.
Although, as to the left/right culture war, imagine if this or worse had happened on Election Day and all the votes had to be hand-counted.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
· Edited 2mo ago
He could be renamed Pope Basil, to keep the theme. St. Basil was an influential theologian and bishop.
Most major and minor characters in the Dragonball saga are named for food (or rarely, clothing or musical instruments). Pizzaballa vs. Zuppi is therefore weak metafictional evidence we’re living in a Dragonball fanfiction.
Time to start chi-building exercises.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
CS Lewis mentions the paradox of how Christianity is not only more spiritual than any Greek philosophy, it’s more carnal than any pagan religion: blood, perfectly pure God in farting, belching human flesh, a real human sacrifice to trade for your life, insistence that certain bodily acts stain the soul, and so on.
The Gnostics lose sight of the carnality of Christianity because of the ick factor, or as Lewis put it, “repellent doctrines.”
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
8mo ago
He’s a showman and a patriot.
He’s the reincarnation of PT Barnum, running a rally at Barnum’s own Madison Square Garden. He’s a dealmaker from Queens. He’s someone who took the silver spoon he was given and made the most of it. He’s the average non-ideological American who never really thought about partisan politics until it started affecting him.
He’s a husband and father whose family saw him almost get killed several months ago.
He’s a political moderate who came in as an outsider at a time when Americans wanted an outsider and Bernie had been taken down by the ultimate insider, “Crooked Hillary” Clinton. He’s an anti-woke political moderate who’s seen the beast from the inside, and wants another stab at its blackened heart. He’s the kind of man who believes in strength and power and expects to be lauded for using them for common-sense win-win goals. He’s the kind of American the founders imagined standing next to kings and holding his own.
When everyone else is playing chess, he’s prepping a pro-wrestling move that’ll knock the board over. If Ted Cruz is Batman, Trump is Superman.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11mo ago
You see his performances, not his daily life. It follows that you have the impression of him he wishes you to have.
The man is an actor, a consummate performer. Even on the video of the shooting, you can see him grimace, then realize he’s being photographed/recorded and compose himself to raise a fist and shout “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
9mo ago
What erosion of democracy do you believe Donald Trump, avatar of your outgroup, to want?
Steelmanning voting concepts, I have observed that my fellow Americans either want:
- zero fraudulent ballots cast at the cost of stringent and sometimes onerous requirements that may result in fewer legitimate ballots being counted, or
- zero legitimate voters prevented from having their ballots cast and counted, even if that may result in a few illegitimate votes being included in the count.
Accordingly, I refuse to countenance the strawman of “Republicans just want to suppress the legitimate vote” without the flip strawman, “Democrats just want to stuff the ballot box.”
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
12d ago
Mine had almost no sensory issues; primarily social blindness, dyspraxia (clumsiness, stereotypically picked last in gym class or on the playground), and a touch of faceblindness.
I couldn’t understand emotions until I discovered a philosophical ontology in early 2001, which made me aware of emotions and how pervasive they are, but not how to use them right. I spent five years becoming codependent best friends with mood disordered people, then cut them out of my life, and then five years blindly trying to extract myself from their mind games and mind mazes.
Then in November 2010, in my darkest depths, I discovered My Little Pony Friendship is Magic. The show modeled good friendships, but also taught me the hidden mechanics of friendship through the framing device of small-town businessmares befriending an autistic grad student learning magical sociology. Just the first season reduced my blindness to emotions and good relationships to nearly none. The third season finale helped me understand even more.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
- Accurate philosophy, primarily ontology (lists of categories of things) can act as medication to us with autistic traits.
- Emotions are a third of human reality when viewed one way, four sevenths when viewed another, so understanding their hidden rules is important for living in this world. My emotional instincts may be impaired, but I excel at understanding systems, functions, and rules, so I set my mind to understanding.
- From Triessentialism: There are three types of emotions: identities, relationships, and imperatives. They can be caused by any experience, and need not correspond to the reality they model. Identity emotions are positive and negative valuations of (thing) that is (type), and can be in first, second, or third person, singular or plural. Relationship emotions are in the form of paired roles and distributed duties which one believes of oneself and the other person or people in the relationship. Imperatives are wants and needs which drive people toward or away from things, experiences, etc.
- From My Little Pony: the five Elements of Harmony are essential virtues underlying all mammalian relationships, from married lovers all the way to pets and their masters: Kindness, Honesty, Loyalty, Generosity, and Laughter. If they are in balance, supplied by all members of the relationship according to their ability, it will be harmonious. If one party goes against these virtues, leaving the other to supply them, it’s codependent. If two or more Elements are constantly betrayed, it’s toxic.
- Inspired by My Little Pony: the closeness of relationships is not just quantitative based on how long people are friends. There are three qualitative levels of friendship. Acquaintances share attributes, such as being neighbors, attending the same school, being in the same trade, or sharing an identity emotion such as being LGBTQ, furry, Christian, Chinese, etc. Friends share experiences, their nervous systems humming in tune at similar stimuli and offering similar responses, possibly working together for similar goals. Ohana share purpose, such as lovers looking to build a life, brothers at arms protecting each other sacrificially, parents giving up their entertainments to raise children, found family holding and healing each others’ griefs, and so on. Another way to see it is to think of who you invite into each room of a house: acquaintances in the living room, restroom, and dining room, friends in the kitchen and den, and ohana in the bedroom.
- The Fourth Step Moral Inventory of twelve step groups like CoDependents Anonymous can be performed with awareness of the Elements of Harmony, Levels of Friendship, and Ontology of Emotions. Doing so can help people understand the unconscious emotions they’ve built their successes and failures upon, the reasons behind their addictions, habits, hurts, and hang-ups.
This is enough material for a two hundred page book, but this summary is my answer to you.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
5mo ago
From Tucker Carlson’s interview with former State Dept. guy Mike Benz, it sounds like USAID was some unholy combo of CIA and the State Department, doing state-destabilization work neither of those relatively above-board organizations wanted to do.
DOGE is basically a Scooby Doo episode where four hackers pull a lever and fall through a trap door into the secret basement of a charity, where they discover the Illuminati are running The Matrix.
“Well gang, let’s pull the mask off this monster and see who it really is…”
“Gasp! It was old Man Kristol all along!”
All sardonic takes aside, it looks like State is bringing all the non-woke USAID charities under its purview.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
The ACA was designed to make private health insurance so onerous a hassle and so hideous an expense that the public would overwhelmingly approve Hillary’s single-payer she’d been working on since the 90’s.
Then Trump won, tried to kill the ACA, and was stopped by McCain’s spiteful deathbed vote. So it endures.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11mo ago
I have a lefty Coworker, and the only way I could get him to give up the Teleprompter glass cut hypothesis was showing him multiple pictures of the Teleprompters not being broken on an article on Snopes about same.
Whereupon he fell back to the blood pellet or palmed razor cut theory.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
Another piece of the puzzle: humans and wolves domesticated each other so much that our neurologies meshed and matched. We humans expect snouted faces.
Being autistic means a statistically higher chance of being furry or faceblind or both. I theorize being faceblind to humans leaves the expectation of snouted faces intact, leading to a default mapping of lemurian preprioception onto canine heads and humanoid bodies.
Evidence: Many pieces of furry art of anthropomorphic felids are actually a dog with feline features. Having lived with a cat, they’re far more alien than all the dogs I ever had. Even My Little Ponies have evolved from cutesified dwarf horses to basically dogs with hooves. (The gallery at the top is what I’m referencing. For Generation 5, they deliberately reduced the horse-like haunches of G4 to dog proportions to reduce the “male gaze” appeal.)
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
9mo ago
There's certainly a gish-gallop to choose from. The clearest meta-evidence that these are nonsense is that nearly everyone I've debated with has chosen a different set of claims to really dig deep into.
It seems to me that if each claim in that extensive list has an advocate diving deep into it, yet still convinced, that’s meta-evidence that more than one scheme might have been used. Instead of a single silver Biden bullet, perhaps it makes sense to look for a spray of silver shotgun pellets.
As for neutral sources on the validity of the claims, the moment any reputable news source even hints that they think a single Trump-positive election fraud claim has enough merit to consider possibly investigating, their editor will forever be branded a MAGA Republican in the bag for Trump. This is how political tribes work, and how they capture without explicit conspiracy: likemindedness, singularity of purpose.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11mo ago
In shorter form, Kamala Harris’ Blackness has a lot in common with the personhood of an unborn child: it depends on who’s asking and why, and it’s a political football in the hands of a Lucy van Pelt.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
America thrived on a whale fall after WWII, but the bones are picked dry and the Baby Boomers were the ecosystem which thrived upon it. That’s my new metaphor.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
14d ago
Conspiracists who can see past the “controlled demolition” of 1 and 2 to the truth of the floor truss narrative nevertheless tend to get one-shotted by talk of building 7. They don’t know NIST also has a report on why that building collapsed.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
TriWest was a southwestern US insurer for veterans and their families. Valid claims just sailed through with minimal administrative overhead because their claims system was well automated and optimized.
They were good and not-scummy.
UnitedHealth bid a lower cost for the contract, won it, and promptly started denying most claims on the first pass. Only clinics which sent appeals would get paid, and almost always did.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
8mo ago
that was about the time when I noticed, in the modern era, an end to our civic-minded Schoolhouse Rock version of American politics where Republicans and Democrats could still grill together.
Rush Limbaugh came to prominence by imbuing his show with the concept that the Democrats were not just eroding the bedrock of America, but using civility itself as a mask to hide their deeds in plain sight.
Thus, we right-wingers were to investigate any calls for civility as if they were cover for nefarious deeds being planned. Trump took this to the next level in his Tweets from 2012 onward. And here we are.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
9mo ago
Regarding the fictions you described, I think you’ve rediscovered a dynamic that Ayn Rand and C.S. Lewis observed from different perspectives:
- The trope of “the wisdom of the collective versus the evil of the individual”, a necessary prelude to a society readied for Communism.
- Treating evil as an illness to be cured, a behavior to be modified, or some other analogue of a possessing demon to be cast out, instead of a choice to be argued out of.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
For grognards, any impressive use of the venerable Commodore 64 is worth watching. Take this demo, Nine, for example.
To someone unaware of the hardware limitations of the device, it’s a fun little animation suitable for kids. But show it to someone who’s tried to code on the beige beastie, and you’ll hear “but that’s impossible!” and “How?” several times. For starters, the C64 can only display eight “sprite” graphics at once, and they can’t go beyond the border.
It turns out the author is a coding magician using multiple very subtle and invisible tricks to make it all work out. This is the C64 equivalent of Penn and Teller’s Fool Us, and a fantastic job it is.
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.
The predictions I made:
Thanks for reminding me that the blackpill mentality is extremely online and conspiracy-focused; mea culpa.
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