Grant_us_eyes
No bio...
User ID: 1156
Grant_us_eyes
3mo ago
It is that Red Tribers are somewhere between uninterested in and actively hostile to intellectual/cultural production
Sad Puppies says hello.
You are looking at the empty buildings and barren fields and conflating it with a lack of interest, refusing to acknowledged that the bodies have already been buried and the survivors herded away elsewhere.
Grant_us_eyes
7mo ago
I'm not very enamoured with the idea of sitting down and listening to a video essay from someone that I would likely dislike to the extreme. It's times like this I come back to my ever-increasing frustration over the lack of these sorts of people not including thier actual arguement typed out, in a proper essay, so I can actually sit down and read the damn thing.
Ahem.
I mention this to put my biases up front, and I will trust that what you state is the general gist of the video essay.
That said...
causing noise pollution
This is where I can only stare and wonder if these people actually function and operate in the real world. Large-scale interstate travel already happens through what's basically suburban areas. This is already a problem, and solutions can be very obvious - just build a goddamn wall.
As for
increasing congestion
Assuming a perfect solution - or, let's say, good enough solution for self-driving cars where thier tendancy to get into a wreck is lower than a human driver - the likelyhood is that, despite the increased usage, congestion will go down explicitly because computer-derived control will allow for smoother flow and volume management.
If you follow the logical conclusion of the above, this is even better - you can have the luxury of your own personal vehicular conveyance without the need to actually park it nearby your destination! Simply roll up, get out, and tell your car to either keep driving or find the nearest parking location. Tap a button on your phone, summon your car to wherever you ended up. All of a sudden, the need for immeadiate parking is killed, and the state mandated and required need for parking that drives current urban development has no leg to stand on, and we can all go back to the wonderful idyllic standard of walkable town centers of the early 20th century. Yay.
As an aside, I've worked in one of these areas before - they're honestly, surprisingly nice in alot of ways that aren't immeadiately obvious, so I can understand why people are so enamoured with them. That said, I can't help but feel that alot of people forget the time, place, and context in which these places were built.
And yes, the above is making a large number of utopian assumptions that I honestly don't beleive we'll ever get, but hey, I could be wrong...
All told, I tend to have a very dim view of people like this; they blatantly ignore the potential benefits and instead have a singular goal; get rid of cars, whatever the cost, regardless of the potential benefits.
Grant_us_eyes
4mo ago
That's... odd. I've never had issues seeing her posts.
Grant_us_eyes
5mo ago
This is just 'Don't fight back when your bully hits you' schoolyard reasoning writ large.
Yes, in a proper, preferable world, the bully wouldn't be hitting you. Or the school administration would do something swiftly and render further altercations impossible for either side.
Lacking any sort of higher recourse, often times the best option is to draw blood and continue to do so until they stop.
Grant_us_eyes
10mo ago
My experience having to do daily deliveries in a small American town that had setup a bike trail that intersected with downtown roads is that cyclists are suicidal, law-breaking, moving hazards and that most of them are far too stupid and/or arrogant to be allowed on the road. Ever.
I'm saw multiple instances where they'd blow through four-way stops, weave in and out of the road and sidewalk, and one marvelous instance where he blew threw a four-way stop by going on the pedestrian cross-walk only to immediately weave back into traffic. Occasions where if I - in control of a rather large transportation van - had not been driving extremely defensively, people would be dead.
The only time - the only time - I ever saw one of them obey the laws as required was when I dealt with a cyclist actually signaling she was going to turn. I signaled as well to allow her to pull in first, and I went behind her gently to park. She actually came up afterwards to thank me for that, which I thought weird, given that she was the one actually doing her due dillagance and doing what needed to be done.
I don't have much sympathy for cyclists.
Grant_us_eyes
9d ago
No one has a credible plan for that. Because the solution to the problem of 'We need to make young men rich and successful so they can have families and children' is a multi-facet plan that needed to be implemented 20 years ago, not today.
Grant_us_eyes
22d ago
Whenever I see this argument, I just helplessly gesture in the general direction of Joshua Graham from Fallout: New Vegas, how much the character is beloved in the community despite being extremely religious, before throwing my hands in the air and giving up, knowing I'll never be able to communicate the entire point without a multi-paragraph effort post.
To try and summarize the matter, actual redemption always comes with a cost. If you're not willing to pay the cost, you're not actually redeemed. You're just doing such to excuse your own guilt. Aella seems to just want things delivered to her on a platter, and is complaining her decisions have lead her to this point without any reflection.
You can't force redemption on someone who doesn't want to pay the price.
Grant_us_eyes
7mo ago
I would have thought the culture war aspect would have been obvious.
a woman stopped and asked him if he's OK
A female sheriff from Blue Ridge
My life, over the years, has taken weird turns, and put me in contact with people are are decidedly outside the norm.
Nothing best exemplifies this by my most recent job, which has put me in close contact with law enforcement around the country, Sheriffs Office's most heavily.
What I've learned is that Sheriffs actually have a very broad range in how they can enforce the law. Complaints from constituents can result in everything from just a general wellness checkup to brushing the matter off('I know the guy, he's fine, and I know the person complaining, she does this all the time') to putting out a warrant for someone's arrest.
So when I see something like this;
Later that evening, the sheriff and a back-up came back to the house and arrested the mother
That makes me raise more than a few eyebrows.
To put it bluntly, what the hell happened here to cause this reaction? Was the person filing the complaint a political bigwig who could have stirred up a massive fuss and the Sheriff wanted it taken care of properly to quiet a reaction? I've seen this happen before, so it wouldn't surprise. Or, more unfavorably, did the female Sheriff get a particular bee in her bonnet that made her bring the hammer down? I have no idea. An uncharitable part of me wants to lean in this general direction, because this entire thing is odd, no question, but who knows?
And on top of all that, this entire commotion was brought about by an 11-year old boy walking a mile in an area where a mile really isn't that big of a deal. Hell, I walked more than a mile away from my home when I was a kid, and I certainly don't live anywhere near the Blue Ridge mountains!
What an absolute mess and embarrassment for the Sheriff's Office.
Grant_us_eyes
11mo ago
Oh, she's taking it willingly. I didn't even suggest it or bring it up - she did that herself. I'm being just a little bitter when I call it a magical potion - I fully expect it to work.
It's just... one of those things that makes me grind my teeth a little. You'd rather pay 500 dollars a month for a weight-loss drug when you could just... organize your life better?
(To be clear, I don't know exactly how much she spent on her prescription - I'm going off by what a friend of mine pays for his prescription.)
Grant_us_eyes
5mo ago
hurt them hurts yourself just as much
...no? No, it doesn't.
(I'm dimly reminded of a lynch mob trying to fall upon someone, only to have them pull out a gun and have said lynch mob descend into a horde of individuals. When was that...)
Again, we've tried the entire 'be a bigger man' tactics of politics. The past two to three decades have been a demonstration of the GOP 'taking the higher road' or 'loosing gracefully'.
While we're not out of those woods yet, there seems to be some light coming from behind the trees. And thank goodness for that.
Grant_us_eyes
3mo ago
My immediate question would be 'Why do you need to spend half-a-million on a house?'
If someone handed me half a million dollars, I'd put 400k of that into investment and use the remaining 100k to start building a small home. (I'm already ahead of the curve as I have property to put said house on, but still.)
Besides, even if you did get the money, you're paying property tax, maintenance, insurance, upkeep on a house that costs half a million dollars. Talk about a bad investment.
Grant_us_eyes
3mo ago
it is not faster
I'm skeptical of this, and even if true, it doesn't matter. Economists have been wrestling with this issue for a long time, and the conclusion they always find is that people would rather be stuck in traffic in their own personal conveyance than stuck in public transport, as they value the privacy and control personal conveyance gives.
Grant_us_eyes
8mo ago
As weird as this demented chimera of a forum is, I'm reasonably certain that we really don't have any major movers and shakers in the national political realm.
Reasonably certain.
...then again, on the off chance that I'm wrong, can we, make a wish list, or something? I've got a particular bone to grind with the EPA in regards to emission standards, and as it stands, purchasing a reasonably priced Toyota Hilux is about as likely as winning the lottery by this point...
Grant_us_eyes
8mo ago
Atleast a few studies on soybean oil implies that is has alot of effects, none of them good.
I personally try to keep them out of my diet. Your mileage may vary.
Grant_us_eyes
10mo ago
Your policy would likely result in a much larger number of dead criminals and/or people, and basically boils down to 'black plastic bad, wood good'.
Most bolt/lever action long guns use much heavier caliber cartridges than your typical AR platform.
Grant_us_eyes
10mo ago
To paraphrase a video essay I'm becoming more and more fond of, 'These people don't realize they're one bad week way from being dragged out into the street and burned at the stake.'
Grant_us_eyes
4mo ago
If the world owes you nothing, you owe nothing to the world.
Grant_us_eyes
4mo ago
If we assume said videos were real, there's an ominous implication to take away from that; There were multiple versions of Covid being cooked in said bioweapons lab it escaped from, some of which were far more nasty than we want to contemplate, the Chinese knew it had escaped somehow, but they didn't know which version had escaped.
Hence the Chinese acting as if they were dealing with a zombie outbreak occurring, and not some new variant of the flu.
...of course, this is all just my personal conspiracy theory. Take it with a heap of salt.
Grant_us_eyes
10mo ago
Slavery never caught on in the British isles because they had population in excess; the same time that the US was still using slave labor had the British loosing children in mining accidents.
And despite eliminating the slave trade in the early 1800s, they didn't manumit slaves in the Caribbean holdings till around the 1840s.
If you want to be very, very cynical, the British anti-slave movement was a mix of virtue signaling and economic tactics to try and neuter an up and coming economic super-power.
Please excuse the lack of sources. It's early morning for me and I'm being lazy.
Grant_us_eyes
10mo ago
The majority of people don't understand economics and finance and wouldn't be able to if you tried.
I really, really wish I was wrong about that. But when you have a practicing medical doctor having to wrestle with money management, you start to realize really quickly that there's a broad spread of intelligence types and not everyone is good at everything.
Grant_us_eyes
11mo ago
Has there been any forum to succeed RPGnet that doesn't require a blood-sealed pledge to leftism? A part of me misses being able to browse threads about TTRPG development, strategy, and playing.
I'm not really hoping for much, admittedly. It feels like any vaguely popular thread gets flooded with leftist activism with tacit and/or explicit moderator support.
Grant_us_eyes
11mo ago
What do you mean 'didn't check'? TW, by his own admission, claimed that he believed the 'jig was up' when LoTT kept asking for, gasp, more evidence of their claim!
Leading to them faking copies of the handouts.
Stop trying to play this off as LoTT just blindly accepting whatever was sent to her. She never did.
Grant_us_eyes
20d ago
Why not? They've done it before. They explicitly went out of their way to hide the Nashville Shooter's manifesto, who was a self-claimed FtM tranny that shot up a Christian school, if you've forgotten.
Grant_us_eyes
1mo ago
It's mutually beneficial for the teenager down the street to spend some time with a toddler.
Wouldn't this also have an unexpected knock-on effect of female teenagers having an elevated desire to have children?
I'm very not certain, but I seem to recall a study they did on female teenagers back when they attempted to educate them on the benefits of abstinence by making them carry around a toddler-like doll for the entire day. IIRC, the result backfired, as the teenagers reported wanting to have children more afterwards, not less.
I could be completely off on this. I'll have to research it later.
Never underestimate the power of self-willed delusions.
My brother and I have to deal with our mother effectively killing herself by her lack of exercise. She developed a bloodclot from sitting still too much, and has refused to change her activity level, in addition to her near morbid-obesity. We have begged, pleaded, harassed, done meal prep, purchased equipment - nothing. Meal prep was a special kind of clusterfuck, as it merely resulted in her consuming the prepared meal shakes in addition to her normal food intake.
And yet, despite all this, she still claims she's more than capable of helping out outside with yard chores(she isn't). Commentary on her health and various drugs she's taking will have her brush it off, commenting on how many of her sisters were long-lived. Same with my advise that she needs better self-scheduling and to manage her food intake better(3 meals instead of 2).
All ignored.
The only time, the only time when she lost weight was when her and my father were on strict dietary regime due to his health(and hers).
That's what it takes - someone riding her near 24/7 with shame in order to actually eat properly.
That isn't to say that she hasn't tried to loose weight. Sugar-free snacks, drinks, meal shakes(as mentioned) - all of them treated like magic totems and talismans and potions that if she consumes this, she'll loose weight as if by magic while not altering her diet in the slightest.
I don't know if there's an official term for this. I like to think of it as 'Magic wand' thinking. That somewhere, somehow, something is out there that fixes everything - a magic wand, a golden ticket, that one thing that does it all without them having to expend one iota of effort, one dram of pain.
Mind, there's an aspect of culture, as well. I wonder how my mother would react if America was more like Asia in this regard - that, when getting fat, would have people actually tell her she's getting fucking fat - and, when reaching out to the wider culture as a whole to affirm her delusions, would instead be met with a cacophony of 'You're fat. Loose some fucking weight, fatty.'
Still. Her latest magic potion is ozempic. So, we'll see how that goes.
As for me, well, I've already learned my lesson long ago. And I get re-affirmation of the value of consistent exercise watching my friends barely a year or two older than I am - helping them with projects, seeing their stamina flag and suffering from minor ailments and injuries that I don't have to deal with - yeah, I'll stop exercising when I'm dead, thank you very much, and I intend for that to be a very, very long day off in the future.
(Also, don't think being educated doesn't mean you're immune to self-delusion. I have a friend of mine who's a lawyer, who doesn't believe in CICO dieting. He tends to bluescreen when I tell him how much I lost just by doing that alone.)
Now, as far as dieting goes - y'know what, I've ranted enough. Needless to say, 90% of the people who've I've seen try to diet start off on the entirely wrong foot to only have it crash and burn two weeks later.
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