BANNED USER: /comment/193024
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
Failed repeatedly in his attempts to die a hero and has now lived long enough to become the villain.
User ID: 659
Banned by: @cjet79
First off, getting apples to apples comparison of violent crime between the UK and US is difficult due to differences in standards and reporting practices. For example, it my understanding that the UK only records a death as "intentional homicide" if there is a suspect and then has separate categories for manslaughter and suspected foul-play. Whereas the US records all three under the single header homicide before breaking it down by degree. When one digs into the numbers one finds that most of soundbites and examples cited in the media about US violence relative to the UK are playing fast and loose with this distinction. IE comparing all gun deaths in the US (including accidents, suicides and those shootings ruled lawful) to the specific subset of "intentional homicides" committed with firearms in the UK.
Second off, and kind of related to the point above, the more "red adjacent" an American is the more likely they are to question the validity of "gun homicides" as a metric. Sure if you could somehow Thanos snap all the guns in civillian hands out of existence gun crime would likely be dramatically reduced, at least temporarily. but what of it? There seems to be this underlying a assumption behind a lot of these posts that a person killed with a knife, or lynched by a mob, is somehow less of victim. For my part I don't see how that can be, KIA is KIA.
The cynical bastard in me can't help but suspect that a lot of this is downstream the progressive affinity for external loci of control and the broder millue of secular post-modernist nonsense. When some strapping schitzo with a dozen prior arrests kills Granny by bashing her head in with a brick, or pushing her into the path of an oncoming train nobody panics because it's all part of the plan. The posts about focusing on mental health and how "we all live in a society" were already written before the corpse was cold.
Meanwhile if Granny pulls a revolver from her purse and plugs her would be killer center-of-mass, or some bystander intervenes and drops him. Everyone loses their minds.
The simplest and most straight forward argument in favor of "liberal" gun laws is in the old saw, God made men, but Sam Colt made them equal.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
60 years ago it wasn't at all surprising that a Nixon or a Reagan could win 49 out of 50 states running on a platform of US civic religion.
A religion that academics, imagining themselves to be somehow more worthy than everyone, have always deeply resented and accordingly have spent the last 60 years trying to undermine and destroy.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
How many people did Alex Jone's listeners shoot as a result of the Sandy Hook Controversy? How many did they kill. How many business did they force out. How many buildings did they burn?
Temporal length is not the only means of measuring "damage."
A quick summary...
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Biden had long been suspected of being in the pocket of the Russian mob with rumors to this effect dating back to the late 90s.
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Biden's son Hunter, leaves his broken laptop at a one of those "Geek Squad"-type repair places and forgets to pick it up.
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The tech snoops around the hard drive and in addition to a lot of sex and drug stuff they find correspondences that appears to confirm that Biden had been accepting money from foreign (mostly Russian and Ukrainian) oil oligarchs in exchange for political favors during his time as VP with his soin the conten acting as the intermediary. (Whether it was legal for the tech to go snooping in the first place is part of "the scandal within the scandal")
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The tech contacts the FBI with the above evidence sometime in the spring of 2020.
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On October 14th 2020 the NY Post publishes an article claiming that the FBI has proof that Biden has been accepting bribes and is actively working to suppress this information lest it help Trump win reelection.
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12 Hours later the NY Post's official Twitter account is suspended and the FBI raids the home of the article's author. Ostensibly for distributing illegally obtained documents. (see previously mentioned "the scandal within the scandal")
There's lots of talk in the moment about whether the FBI documents and alleged contents of the laptop's HD linked in the article are genuine and whether the NY Post violated journalistic ethics by publishing them, with the general consensus being "no", and "yes" respectively. The latest wrinkle is that it looks like that the FBI believed the documents and contents to be genuine and formally asked social media companies to suppress the NY Post story.
Edit to clarify: As to "why we should care" it's yet another instance in recent memory of the FBI acting as a partisan hit-quad. It also undermines the wider "Russian collusion" narrative by putting the media in the position of having to defend Biden against the very allegations that they had leveled against Trump.
Apologies for the low effort but things are looking to get interesting because in the last 60 seconds Trump not only announced that he's running, he's announced that if he's elected going to seek specific laws against insider trading by members of congress, and ban on mail in and electronic voting. Direct quote "third world countries are better at democracy than we are and that is embarrassing"
Edit: "we will be attacked slandered and persecuted by one of the most dangerous and pervasive government apparati ever designed by man or women but we will win."
"We we will defend life liberty and the pursuit of happiness against the great enemy."
Edit 2: Speech has just concluded; Stand Up and Heroes are odd but appropriate choices for walk off music given the speech.
If were being honest I'm actually kind of nervous. On one hand this was a good speech that hit the right notes, it's what Trump needed to say if he wants to get elected. On the other this is the second time in 3 months (the other being Biden's Leni Riefenstahl moment) that a mainstream political candidate walked right up to the line of calling for the opposing party to be arrested and or shot and reading the reaction in red leaning spaces I gotta say that I'm feeling a lot like RDml Painter
I feel like I see this particular issue a lot in "message fiction". Like ok, you (the author/director/whomever) have come up with an interesting premise that invites the audience to look at [issue] from a new angle but then you shy away from actually leaning into this premise. I have two competing theories for why that might be. The first is simple lack of imagination and/or concern. The author got as far as "wouldn't it be cool if..." and stopped. The second is specific to message fiction and might uncharitably be described as "lack of respect for the audience". More charitably the issue is that if you actually follow through on your premise, the fictional world stops being a 1:1 analog of the real world and the changes might end up undermining "the message". The quintessential example of this in both comics and film being The X-Men. As much as they try drawing analogies between the mutants and various oppressed minorities. It becomes a lot harder to paint the baseline humans' paranoia and persecution of mutants as unreasonable when you actually start to think about what common knowledge of the existence of shapeshifters and mind-control could potentially do to a society. You see a similar trend in modern vampire movies like Twilight, True Blood, and Anne Rice's novels. They try to play the tragic romance and victim cards, it's humanity that's the real monster you see. But while I'm not without empathy, I can't help but notice that the baseline human is 100% justified in distrusting and fearing what is, in the most simple terms, their natural predator.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
What's the old line? Most of what's posted on the internet is written by insane people? I feel like that's kind of what's going on here. My guess is that as a general rule people with day-jobs, families, relationships, etc... aren't committing 60 hours a week to their niche project or interest and thus "the weirdos" gain an outsize presence/visibility relative to their actual prevalence.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
To me this sounds like the same old issue that the GOP has been complaining about for years namely that it's been de-facto IRS policy for years now to preferentially target rural/low-income individuals because they are viewed as being "easier marks". Wealthier people/businesses have the money to hire lawyers and accountants to fight you which is not what you want if you're an IRS agent trying to make a quota.
As for the accusation of racism is, impression is similar to yours, the democrats in general and the media in particular have been so thoroughly mind-killed by identity politics/intersectionality that they are simply incapable of not projecting racism, sexism, homophobia, etc... onto everything they see.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
Gr 3 math teacher comes to me, kid is multiplying stuff like 71x83 incorrectly, but getting correct answer every time. He’s doing tens then ones, instead of ones then tens. She cannot understand how this can work, because she has never actually understood multiplication.
*Eye Twitch* had almost this exact thing happen at a Parent/Teacher conference for my eldest (9) involving fractions/division.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
Continued:
My chain of command have been shitting on me and occasionally acting as though they were trying to get me killed but they were also on my side. How can that be you ask? It comes down to the "functional" in there being two key elements to a functional hierarchy. So long as the fire keeps climbs up the hill, the needs of an isolated individual can mobilize the might of a nation. At the most fundamental level, the answer to what it means to be on "a side" is the same as what makes a tribe or a nation. Your side is not your culture your ethnicity or your religion. Your side, your tribe, and your nation, is who's back you have in a crisis and who has yours.
Tyrone Woods had many friends. Friends in the military and veterans' communities, friends in the EMS community, friends in the So-Cal surfing community, friends amongst the surfers musicians bikers and drunks who inhabited the dive bars of San Diego. Many people who would have had his back, flown a plane to get him out, or taken up arms beside him if granted the opportunity. Unfortunately he didn't have any friends where it really counted, The White House or the State Department. Simply put Hillary got her 3:00 am call and let it go to voicemail. And as all these well meaning very intelligent people who said they loved America and wanted my help to put a Republican in the white house, also told me I was over reacting, being silly, that we shouldn't allow a mere four deaths (how many die in car accidents again?) influence national policy. ...and in that moment I understood, these people were not going to be on my side.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
...are you under the impression that Cersei Lannister and her children lived happily ever after? Because I get the feeling that you might be under that impression.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
I've seen both. My grandmother was spry, sharp, and leading tourists and boyscout troops on horseback-riding and canoeing trips right up to the morning she died of a stroke at the age of 89. Her husband (my grandad) having succumbed to cancer 20 years prior.
In contrast my next-door neighbors are in their late 60s early 70, but since the pandemic they've stopped going out, stopped taking care of themselves, and I feel like I've watched them age 20+ years in the last 3. And it's depressing because their daughter is a friend and my better-half and I will get phone calls asking if we can do some basic house-hold task or another because they're both too frail now to take out their own trash or work a toilet plunger properly.
INAT but a dude in my regular TTRPG group is a teacher for the local school district and if you get a few shots in him he will go off at length about how our very "blue" state's official curriculum is absolute shit. He says that it seems to actively discourage the development literacy and language skills, to the point that his ESL students end up out-performing in-state transfers on a semi-regular basis because they at least understand the concept of a root word and the Indian/Mexican/Other Foreign-born moms tend to be a lot less concerned about their kids feelings then they are about whether homework is getting done. According to him the only way any kids in this state learn to read is through a combination of involved parents, and individual teachers/schools-districts having the balls to say "fuck the curriculum" and do their own thing.
Your example of the teacher covering up the word, and the "soft bigotry" as he puts it of giving kids a pass despite not learning the material, are exactly the sort of thing he will typically cite.
It seems to me that the obvious offramp is for Texas to simply do nothing, wait for the feds to start tearing down the fences/wire, and then film them doing it. With the purposes of making sure the footage is seen in every state during every commercial break from now till November while also redoubling the bussing efforts.
It seems to me that the Feds don't really have a winning move here as anything other than letting Abbott have this one seems more likely to blow up in their faces than to stop Abbott.
I view this thread and the one about Poseidon Archer above as further evidence that Id-Pol makes people stupid.
Your framing is interesting but your, and the authors', fixation on the Melanin content of recruits' skin is causing you to ask the wrong questions, and become blind to the obvious.
As others have pointed out, the core of the US Military since World War 2 has been the multi-generational "Lieutenant Dan" types, and this is especially the case in the middle-management and critical skill positions, Pilots, Senior NCOs, Nuclear Engineers, that kind of thing...
The topic of "Retention" is probably worth multiple effort-posts in itself so I'm going to stick to the cliff-notes but the conventional wisdom post-Vietnam has been that Retention was more important than recruitment when it came to maintaining capabilities. That paying a fat re-up bonus was a small price to pay in comparison to the 1-2 punch of losing experienced troops as well as having to recruit and train new ones. There seems to been a shift away from this approach in the early 2010s (some of which I witnessed first-hand). The idea, on paper at least, was to move towards a "leaner" more "agile" and "economical" force based on the principles of Just-in-Time production. The theory was that fewer people sitting idle and less equipment downtime would mean more getting done, in practice what it meant was dudes burning out, and lapses in maintenance and training due to lack of slack in the system. Mutiple fatal mishaps in the US 7th Fleet ought to have been a clue but like I said this issue and the associated political wrangling could be a series of effort-posts in itself.
What does that have to do with recruitment numbers though? Well, that's where the "Lieutenant Dan" types come in. The naive take is that recruitment, is about selling military life to high school kids. The Savvy take is that it's about selling it to the troops because if the troops are sold they'll stay in, and you'll get a shot at their kids to. Burnout doesn't just lose you one man it runs the risk of losing you his friends and family as well. Simply put it's guys like me, that is a decorated combat veteran with an honorable discharge and multiple male heirs, that the DoD should be courting and yet it seems like it's guys like me that the DoD with all it's [current year] DEI bullshit seems most hell bent on alienating.
Look at Benghazi was handled.
Look at how the withdrawal from Afghanistan was handled.
Look at just how few shits our so-called "elite" give about the lives of American service members.
Why would I entrust my sons to these people?
As @remzem observes downthread, the woke don't really think long term.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
7mo ago
Why is the emotional harm to his wife privileged over the emotional harm to his employees?
Umm... why shouldn't it?
Yes, that's a serious question.
From where I am standing if we're to be ranking sins in order of severity, "violating a sacred vow" or "cheating in a relationship" strike me as far far worse than "hooking up with a coworker".
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
8mo ago
They were a little too successful and in so being present something of the two-fold problem to people like Freddie and Scott. First is the issue of "cream-skimming"/"brain drain" second, and I suspect the real sticking point, is that "School Choice" in many states means having the option to opt out of the progressive education industrial complex and I suspect that they are starting to recognize just how much of a threat this represents to their business plan.
I must confess that I am baffled by the sentiment I see being expressed by yourself @Tarnstellung @Folamh3 and others that the response is somehow "disproportionate".
The Bud Light's VP of Marketing Alissa Heinerscheid had previously described Budweiser as "a brand in decline" and had stated that she wanted to distance the brand from its perceived "frat-boy" and "older working class white male" customer base to pursue a younger, hipper, "more inclusive" audience. From the looks of things her efforts were massively successful so why is she being placed on administrative leave instead of receiving a well-deserved round of high-fives, and a 6-figure bonus?
To my eyes answer seems simple, as much as upper-class urban professional types like to talk about elite theory, shareholder capitalism, and how culture is downstream of politics, the bottom-line is one of those things you can ignore right up to the moment you can't, and you can't piss off your core customer base without effecting your bottom line. The beer business is not like the banking business or the venture capital business the cost of switching from the perspective of individual customers is low and the industry itself is heavily dependent on local bottlers/distributors, if even a small fraction of them decide to cut ties or raise rates in responses this can have a significant downstream effect on a brand's profitability.
This is not Anheuser Busch making "a mistake", or conservatives pouncing on some naive interns' minor screw-up/faux pas, this is a senior executive executing a stupid self-destructive plan with competence, elan, and complete success, only to be surprised to discover that shooting yourself in the foot results in a bloody mess. Even if you're broadly sympathetic to the LBGTQ+ cause this is absolutely 100% the sort of fuck up that an executive should get fired for.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
In the Wheel Of Time series the Aei Sedia (a guild of sanctioned magic users) are bound always tell the truth via magical means. This is ostensibly done to convince non-magic users to trust them but in practice it has the opposite effect because due to this binding members of the Aei Sedia often become quite adept at word-games, lies by omission/implication, and using nitpicky technicalities to get around their "limitation". Of course, the normies notice this tendency and naturally come to trust the Aei Sedia even less.
Reading this along with Bounded Distrust I find myself wondering if Scott is being purposely obtuse as a means of currying favor with his ingroup (wealthy bay-area progressives), or genuinely doesn't grasp the above dynamic.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
5mo ago
It does not feel like pure hate, but rather a hate that is born of fear, true xenophobia in its original meaning of the word.
The reaction is not fear, it's disgust. It's the reaction of someone who logged in to their feed to watch cat videos and was instead presented with scat videos. Some mix of "WTF" and "OMG kill it with fire!" is a natural human response.
Inferential Distance Part 3 of ?. On being a not-so-special agent.
It's 2012 or maybe 13 I'm honestly not sure, but the 15 year-old border guard keeps his AK on safe as he inspects our paper-work and negotiates the customary 'service charge'. In reciprocity I keep the revolver concealed in my jacket pocket pointed at the dirt instead of the kid's groin and quietly pray neither of us will get shot today.
This post is an installment of an ongoing series.
I've started writing this post at least a dozen times now and each time I have hit a wall and stopped. There's an idea/feeling I want to convey but I don't have the words it for in part because it is the water I swim in. At the same time the a number of recent posts/threads have left me thinking I really need to just say fuck the wall and kool-aid-man my way through it. I freely concede that the rest may come across as nonsense but I swear there is is point to be had.
Anyway, as we pulled away from the impromptu border checkpoint on the A3 outside Liboi I notice that the young med-students volunteering for [International NGO] and the Mormon Missionary that I'd been charged with chauffeuring are giving me odd looks. As I re-stow the Brazilian-made Smith & Wesson clone in the center console the missionary begins to hammer me with questions "have you had that gun the whole time?" "yes". "Were those real cops?" "Real enough". "What do you mean 'real enough'?" "Just that". "Did you bribe them?" "No, I paid a service charge". "Were you really going to shoot them" "Not if i didn't have to". "Who sets the service charge" "the guys running the checkpoint". "Are you sure it's not a bribe" :Now Faintly exasperated: "Yes, if it were 'a bribe' it would not have been included as a line item in your travel budget because that would be illegal"
10 years later I'm in the back yard talking to my elderly neighbor who lives in the other half of the duplex. She's angry that her purebread indoor cat that she spends a fortune on premium cat-food for has gotten out out of the house yet again and has been running around the back yard, getting dirty, eating table scraps, and having sex with the local stray. She makes some vague insinuation that my kids are somehow to blame. I calmly point out that she had left her kitchen door wide-open and that's probably how the cat got out. "But that was to get some fresh air in the house not to let the cat out" she explains. I nod and pretend to understand, but I don't. Instead I am reminded that missionary on a dusty African highway a decade ago.
Can you see the common thread? If not, perhaps a third example will help clarify...
If you have to dry the dishes
(Such an awful boring chore)
If you have to dry the dishes
('Stead of going to the store)
If you have to dry the dishes
And you drop one on the floor
Maybe they won't let you
Dry the dishes anymore
- Shel Silverstien
I don't know if you're seeing what I see here, but in my mind all three of these examples, the missionary's questions, the my neighbor complaining while the cat does as she pleases, and the Silverstein poem all seem to trip the same breaker in my hindbrain and gesture towards the same underlying feeling. They are simultaneously nothing alike, and the exact same picture.
If I had to distill it down to a single sentence it would be "the sensation of agency" but that doesn't quite cover it because a major component is also the awareness of the pressence of other agents in the environment and like water for a fish (or air for a human) most people never consider it's presence unless confronted with it's absence.
On a related note, I think one of the more valuable lessons another person ever taught me was "Never give an order that will not be followed". It was part of an NCO leadership course that I attended prior to my second deployment. The course itself is something I've been meaning to write about at somepoint because the material was almost the polar opposite of what you might expect from an official military curriculum or formal "leadership" course and yet I can say with confidence that it made me a better leader, a better folower, and 15 - 20 odd years later arguably a better parent and boss. The dude who taught the course was a crusty old fuck in his late 50s who'd served from the end of the Vietnam War through the fall of the Berlin Wall and then continued to work for the DoD as a civillian employee through the 90s and into the early 2000s which when our paths crossed.
Those of you who've been around for a while may be aware of my claim that despite endless protestations to the contrary the US military is oddly democratic in the sense that that much of the actual power and decision-making is concentrated in "the Demos" IE the enlisted rank and file. Much like my neighbor's cat, Marines are gonna do Marine shit regardless of what you want them to do and it's on you to adapt to them rather than vice versa. The point Mr. Young was trying to impress upon us as future Platoon, Company, and Detachment leaders was essentially the same one that Tywin Lannister/Charles Dance is trying to impress upon his grandson in this scene from Game of Thrones back when it was still good. As rigid as the military hierarchy may be portrayed, it is far more flexible in practice. It is important to remember that those under your command are agents in thier own right. They have thier own objectives, their own opinions, thier own desires, and they are fully capable of making thier own decisions about who what to do, and who to listen to. The key to being obeyed is understanding what orders to give. The best orders are those that your subordinates will understand and want to follow in their own right. Any officer or NCO who finds himself appealing to authority is effectively inviting mutiny. Hence the admonishment to "Never give an order that will not be followed" and the observation that a man who needs to keep reminding people that he is in charge is not truly "in charge".
Which brings us to the flip side of the course and what I have in mind when I describe the course as "the opposite of what you might expect from an official military curriculum". That being formal training in the esoteric arts of "Malingering" and "Malicious Compliance". As a senior NCO your job is two-fold, to keep the enlisted men on task and to punish the stupidity of officers. Simply put, the ability to recognize and implement such techniques is a core competency for both jobs. The word "No" is one that should be used sparingly precisely because it is powerful. "No" is not a teaching word. However following an order to the letter even especially when doing so will get your superiors in trouble is a teaching moment because it teaches your superiors to think carefully about the orders they give.
I've heard through the grape-vine that the old Navy/USMC NCO curriculum developed during the Vietnam War was superseded by something "more contemporary" not long after I completed the course. I can't imagine that this is a good thing because I feel like this intrinsic conceptualization of "the contested environment" not just between ostensible opponents, but those who are in theory at least on the same side is something that is sorely missing from modern commentary.
As I've said before I feel like the left's dominance of academia and traditional media has effectively left a Hobbes-and-Burke-shaped hole in the discourse. We have users here saying things like "the only wardrobe that allows CCW in New York is a police uniform" because the possibility of a human being choosing to disobey the law is just not something that exists within their philosophy even as they complain about rampant criminality. Would it have been legal for me to shoot that teenage border guard? No of course not. Was anyone at anytime under the impression that this legality or lack there of played any role in my ultimate decision not to shoot him? No of course not.
Yet another one of those core points of inferential difference between woke urban progressives/rationalists and the mainstream right is this distinction between law and social hierarchis as a means vs as an end. The difference between "we follow this man because he is the king" and "this man is the king because we follow him".
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
Your post brings to mind a bit that occasionally comes up in rationalist spaces about "shape-rotators" vs "wordcels". I've mostly just rolled my eyes at it, but now I'm thinkin there might be actually something to it, but not in the way Vice and rationalists typically describe it. I think the better (more accurate) distinction is between "thing-manipulators" and "symbol-manipulators". To me it seems obvious that the creative/theater-kid archetype is very much a "symbol-manipulator". Their world revolves around manipulating, language, allegory, emotion, etc... Conversely a plumber or Electrician is very much a "thing-manipulator" their world revolves around analog processes with clear and immediately observable consequences. The Shit and/or Electrons either flow or they don't.
While I don't think it's accurate to say that all "symbol-in the manipulators are left wing" or that "all thing-manipulators right wing" I do think there are elements of both that actively select for the respective sides. I have a degree in mathematics, but coming into it as I did, IE later in life through the GI Bill after already having had a career in the military, I often found myself butting heads with my fellow math nerds over questions of "practicality". I was that guy who would ask the lecturer "ok that's really clever and all but what's the use case", which always seemed to rub certain sorts of "pure math" guy the wrong way. For those longer-standing users who where wondering on what occasion I had to to interact with Scott Aaronson professionally here is your answer.
In any case I feel like there is a clear tension in math circles between "Pure/Theoretical" Math and the "Applied". Similarly I feel like there is a tension between more symbolic fields of engineering like software and the more physical fields (civil, mechanical, electrical, etc...). And I feel like this tension maps pretty neatly to what both you and Dreher are talking about regarding "theater kids". Back when Scott was first formulating his thrive/survive theory I speculated that the reason that the "working class" seemed to skew right-wing/survive relative to the gentry was that they were generally less insulated from consequences than the gentry were and I feel like a similar line holds here.
Being a "theater-kid" in this context is something of a luxury. The sort of luxury enjoyed by someone who doesn't have to worry about base level analog bullshit.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
Are Americans just tired of this subject?
No, I think this more an issue of Progressive media bubbles than anything else. EG. This is on the front page of Fox News right now.. What I suspect is that CNN, MSNBC, Et Al realized that calling the GOP racist for wanting to building a wall out of shipping containers, calling out the national guard etc... was helping guys like Abbott, DeSantis, and Trump more than it was hurting them and decided to quietly drop the issue.
Something to keep in mind is that the book the movie was based on was written in the 80s and set some indeterminate ammount of time in the past.
I also suspect that there's a certain amount of "how Hollywood liberals imagine" the deep south vs "how it be" going on.
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