Iconochasm
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Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
22hr ago
Hi, Chris! I hope life is going well for you.
It doesn't seem like your hiatus has given you much optimism on the culture war front.
In general, the hiatus went well enough. The problem came last summer, when I had both parents trying to talk to me about whatever Facebook story they were incensed about that day, from both different sides, and then Trump got shot. I let myself get sucked back in. I still think it's not a productive use of my time (and I find myself thoughtlessly developing workarounds for my self-imposed limitations), but the last year has certainly been more cause for optimism than the previous four (at least in the US), as well as being a ton of fun.
The OP here, with it's Rose Tico concern trolling, just really grinds my gears. And really, I should probably just stop interacting with the OP. They routinely post stuff that hits me as so earnestly "someone is insanely wrong on the internet" that I get all riled up. And frankly, if it's not spectacularly fine trolling, then they are probably a literal child who simply lacks the experience to grasp that other sides do, in fact, exist. In which case, my own brand of scathing heat is less than helpful.
Anyway,
After the conservative majority on the supreme court (viewed by many on the left as obtained through defection) struck down Roe v. Wade, many people here and elsewhere predicted riots and burnination in every major city in America. Ask Whiningcoil and FC about that one. Where, exactly, is the punchback from that one? Jane's revenge?
In fairness, a higher expectation for riots doesn't seem like an unreasonable prior just two years after the Summer of Love, even if it ended up being a false prediction.
Still, I don't think that's really a counter-example. The general response was still apoplectic rage, even if it didn't spill over into real violence, and kept itself to rhetoric and hostile personal encounters. My own mother blew up at me over it, even though she knows I'm personally pro-choice. Though that did give me an opportunity to gently explain that the reason she is a grandmother is because, as a man, I have literally no reproductive rights at all.
But in terms of the grace vs revenge scale, I don't think I've seen a single leftwinger say anything like "Look, the SC made their ruling and we have to accept that. Even Ruth said that Roe was on shaky legal ground. We should have expected this would happen, and better prepared for it. The issue has been sent back to the states, so let's focus on the state level and win as much as we can."
The reponse I've seen is more like "The Supreme Court is illegitimate, fuck the entire institution, pack the court, we literally live in The Handmaid's Tale." Along with a slew of very dishonest news stories, at least some of which look suspiciously like hospital administrators letting women die to own the cons. Alongside that was a bunch of low grade domestic terrorism, which was tacitly tolerated by the Biden administration.
Similar predictions of riots, defections, #resistance after Trump's inauguration in 2024. Even the protests were muted compared to 2016, Trump deleted USAID, laid off some largely indeterminate number of federal workers, is extorting Harvard and the other major colleges for hundreds of millions for 'antisemitism' (among other things). NIH and NSF have proposed budget cuts of ~40% each for 2026 - I suppose congress can appropriate the funds and Trump can just do to NIH/NSF what he did to USAID.
I think it's a bit early to call on most of this. But I don't see any tacit acceptance, or anyone saying "fair enough, we did try to bankrupt, jail and kill you, let's call it even". Instead most of the Democrats seem to be talking about how they've been playing nice up until now, and calling for the gloves to come off in a scorched earth war to the knife.
Since you want to talk about immigration, where's the liberal defection in response to Desantis and Abbott sending busloads of illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard or other liberal strongholds? People bitched about it, but it's not like Desantis/Abbott are being harassed by the feds or blue states are shipping red-county fentanyl addicts to Florida and Texas.
They made a huge, grandstanding spectacle calling Abbott and Desantis cruel monsters (for exposing their own hypocrisy) and demanded they be investigated by the feds for human trafficking, kidnapping, fraud and deprivation of liberty. The feds didn't comply - is that where we want to set the bar for compromise and reconciliation?
Your example for Republicans is what, 17 years old? And isn't even from a sitting president. Has Trump ever told his supporters to be nicer to Biden? There's no asymmetric defection here.
Yep, the best examples I could think of were old. We're well down the slippery slope at this point. There are examples of Trump doing things like that, but they're all blatantly insincere and backhanded.
To be clear, I'm not saying the Republicans look particularly good under this light. A huge part of Trump's appeal is specifically that he's a Molotov cocktail thrown at norms and conventions that his supporters see as having been weaponized. He is the Devil turning round on you.
My incensed objection rather, is to the naive or trollish implication from the OP that the Democrats have clean hands.
You mean the lockdowns that started during Trump's administration, that he could have stopped at any time for months? Lockdowns that had overwhelming bipartisan support in the first 1-6 months of their institution? Lockdowns that, I'll remind you, many people here predicted would be permanent as they asserted the government would never voluntarily relinquish power that they had taken from the people and it would be 'lockdowns forever.'
Most lockdowns were state and local. It wasn't the Trump administration that was prosecuting gym owners - that was my Democrat governor.
You're not concerned about Trump calling a governor and asking him to find votes after losing an election? I'm genuinely asking - do you think it was justified because democrats stole the election in Georgia, because this is normal behavior for presidents who lose elections, or you just don't think he should face consequences?
I sincerely don't think he was asking for what you think he was asking for. That line came at something like the 53rd minute of a conversation, and the whole prior discussion was Trump confidently insisting that an investigation would uncover large numbers of fraudulent votes. I don't think Trump is as dumb and blunt as many, but I do think it's more likely he was referring to that, as opposed to pivoting abruptly to overt requests for obvious crimes on a recorded line in front of multiple other people. If nothing else, that theory presumes that Trump believed that he truly lost Georgia and I don't think his ego would allow that.
I hardly think the man covered himself in glory there, but there's a reason that investigation fell apart after the only prosecutor willing to push it was caught using the situation to engage in blatantly shady corruption.
And that was the "good" case. The asset valuation fraud and the 34 counts ones were, I believe, very clearly corrupt, politically motivated lawfare.
Come on, this is your steelman for why people are worried that John Bolton was arrested? The guy publicly had a falling out with Trump, wrote a nasty book about him and now he's got the FBI kicking down his door. You're not worried at all about the weaponization of the DoJ?
The DoJ was already weaponized. Do you remember when they were falsifying evidence to spy on the Trump campaign?
Tons of people write nasty books about Trump. And there's a thing among that cohort, where a lot of them seem to want to believe that Trump is out to get them personally, but most don't even merit a nasty Truth Social post. The Bolton investigation had been going on for years before it was shut down by the Biden admin. If anything, it looks like he was being protected by politics.
And really, it was for leaking classified documents, i.e. the exact same thing Trump had the DoJ kick down his door and riffle through his wife's underwear. Did that make you worry about the weaponization of the DoJ?
Do you have any specific reason to think Bolton is being held to an unusual standard? My memory goes fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure a few generals or other high level political types have gone down for very similar behavior to what Bolton is alleged to have done over the last few administrations.
I genuinely still don't know why this is. Are the moderates leaving the site and losing interest, and all that's left is the bitterest remnant? My perception is that this seems to be broader than TheMotte, though. And my recollection of you, at least, is that you were fairly restrained in your rhetoric and beliefs.
Honestly, polarization spawns clicks and posts. Like I said in the beginning, I'm honestly pretty happy about how the country is going. I just don't feel the need to post about how I got what I voted for again. I just laugh at the meme and move on.
And I understand that the other side is going to be less than pleased with this turn of events.
Let me take a step back for a moment, and share a bit about where I'm coming from. Iirc, you and I are around the same age. I graduated high school just in time for Iraq, and that colored the hell out of my view of politics. I cut my teeth writing heated diatribes about Christian fundamentalists and neocon warmongers.
My tepid willingness to consider myself a Republican these days is mostly dependent on the fact that those factions lost, and the party was forcibly remade in a different image.
The Democrats now find themselves at an even starker crossroads. Their approval ratings are at historic lows and they are hemorrhaging voters. It's time for reevaluation and repositioning. For moderation. There have been a few gestures in that direction, but overall it looks like they're worse than doubling down. Beto is giving speeches about how the problem isn't that they support Unpopular Thing, but that they haven't been big enough assholes in their support of Unpopular Thing. And Trump has just been baiting the shit out of them, taking positions like "Crime is bad", and then watching them scramble over each other to claim the extremely bold "There is no crime and also all this crime is your fault" position.
I see videos of people who seem to think that the Ministry has fallen and Voldemort rules the land, genociding the Muggleborns... even as they feel emboldened to harass and attack federal law enforcement officers. If those people honestly think that the Biden administration was unacceptable generosity towards the outgroup, and that once they get into power it's time to be brutal and cruel...
And I do see many people openly calling for this.
On the plus side, I think/hope that the Democrats are going to spend the next 10 years in the political wilderness, and all their bloodthirst will amount to little.
But if I'm wrong, and their worse natures prevail, then yeah. I think that's potentially crossing the line where responses of a euphemistic variety go on the table.
Same reason I think we should be arming moderate rebels in the UK.
Secondly - much ado is made about the loss of faith in institutions over the last decade, but I have to admit the inverse is just as interesting to me. Why was faith in our institutions so high 50 years ago? Do you really think the government or New York Times were that much more honest with the plebs in the 70s than they are in the 2020s?
The NYT, no. The government, yes to an extent. In being less developed, it was less captured by people whose aim was power within the government over doing the government's job. I think there was more room for optimism then, regarding what could be accomplished by the hand of the state, and that a large portion of the lies we live under now came as a response to that optimism failing.
And if not, is faith in flawed institutions nevertheless adaptive for a society?
It's more general than that. One of our earliest social technologies was loyalty, because faith in an imperfect leader was better than no leader at all. But there does come a point where a terrible leader is so bad that your loyalty becomes maladaptive. The hard part is figuring out where that inflection point lies.
Iconochasm
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1d ago
That's actually a very good example. Thank you.
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1d ago
This is a good point. I'd extend it even further. I think a lot of heat arises from the fact that news media brings political conflict right to our faces, but doesn't give an outlet that viscerally feels like retaliating.
I think this is a major cause of the phenomena of "progressive woman screams at her phone camera" videos. It's why people spiral deeper and deeper into violent ideation. If they redistrict us and then we redistrict them back, it just doesn't feel like a proper retaliation to an ape brain that expects retaliation to feel like knuckles violently impacting something. The endocrine response is just frustrated.
So we do a 2X tat, but it feels like a 0.1X tat, so we demand a 20X tat.
Multiple by emotional incontinence, mental illness, and arrested development.
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2d ago
The implication of this is that the entire rest of the internet exists as a left-wing dominated space.
And no one ever tries this precious stuff there.
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2d ago
Not quite, this is still scientism. Economics can help answer the actual object-level question, "Are tariffs an effective way of obtaining a desired outcome?" It can tell you what the trade-offs are.
But the questions of what outcomes are desirable, and what trade-offs are acceptable, are values questions.
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2d ago
Right now, Trump is playing two-tits-for-a-tat, and his core supporters fully support him in this. The Democrats believe, arguably correctly, that they have been playing 0.9-tits-for-a-tat, and the "we need a fighter" debate on the Dem side is whether they should switch to playing two-tits-for-a-tat and embrace the downward spiral into continuous mutual defection.
In the same sense that it's "arguably correct" that the Earth is 6,000 years old. It's been asked repeatedly in this thread, but can anyone name a single time Democrats opted for grace and forgiveness, for not "punching back twice as hard", for not "sending one of theirs to the morgue"?
In the dim recesses of the past, I can recall John McCain telling one of his supporters to be less racist and cruel towards Obama. But I sincerely can't think of an instance from the other side more recent than Bill Clinton's Sister Soulja incident.
For God's sake, we just had four years of lockdowns, riots, and total defections on having a border at all. They went Stalinist levels of low to throw Trump in jail and bankrupt him, and as many of his supporters as possible alongside him. The totality on the left of people who gleefully cheered when Trump was arrested spent this weekend crashing out because war criminal John Bolton was arrested. That would have been a perfect example of "revenge logic" if the whole post weren't artlessly partisan, but it's an even starker example than that. Bolton is about the most perfect patsy to sacrifice to defend "principles", to regain some clout and credibility for the next time people want to throw a show trial at Trump. And instead we just see wall-to-wall meltdowns decrying and denying any possibility of fair play.
If Democrats honestly think this is "0.9-tits-for-a-tat", then we should just start the civil war.
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2d ago
Wow. First of all that’s mighty quick to jump to “sides”.
Eh, maybe. But like I said, this pricked a bugbear that I've been on about on numerous occasions before.
Second, I think you’re misrepresenting the game theory. It’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure that “generous tit for tat” usually wins in the situation most like US politics (you copy the last move of the other side, but occasionally show forgiveness - note that tit for tat also allows chained cooperation, so it’s not infinite revenge).
No, you're correct on the theoretical game theory. I just can't think of a time in American politics in the last few decades when someone has shown forgiveness and it worked.
Third, you’re misrepresenting Democrats. “When they go low we go high” was the motto for quite a while. You can make a good case it was never this rosy but many felt that way.
Yes, that was a line in a speech. What tangible example would you point to when the Democrats ever went "high"?
In that respect Newsom’s actions are a half anomaly and not universally supported to boot (though anti-gerrymandering is not a partisan issue; even my home state of Utah passed a ballot measure for independent redistricting, though the legislature has tried to nuke it).
I actually don't think Newsom's actions on that account are particularly egregious. His own state isn't maximally gerrymandered (only down to 9/50 Republicans compared to 45% voting) and he only has to spit on his state constitution to force an out of cycle redistricting. It's at least cleaner than the solid month of "finding more votes" California had to flip 5ish seats last election.
A better model of Democrats - at least as far as you can consider them united, as disclaimed - is that they are pro-rule of law or “norms”, but frequently break those norms just a little bit (eg federal judges without 60) and then go all surprised face when Republicans decide it’s open season and blow by whatever excuse/reasoning they gave (eg SC without 60). That is, Democrats are broadly reasonable but also guilty of first small steps, but Republicans are guilty of escalation. Which is worse? Eh. Depends on what you view as the normal population of game theory players! Which is debatable, not fact. Though I’d be interested to hear you actually put some reasoning to your claim.
That is the sane-washed story they tell themselves. In practice, Democrats only hold to norms to the extent that they are winning. Consider the Supreme Court. When the SC was delivering progressive wins, it was an unimpeachable source of restraint and goodness and laws and norms. And then when Trump gave us a conservative majority, they immediately switched to "This SC is illegitimate and it's rulings are illegitimate. We should pack the court when we get back in power."
There was a fun bit of needling a few weeks ago, when conservative shit-stirrers were tossing progressives their own tweets about court packing (because now Trump would be the one appointing them).
That’s a little depressing until you recall that this isn’t too uncommon when an abstract principle collides with a concrete example.
Thus always. Except not always. As a pro-choice atheist myself, I was rather impressed with how many conservatives took the double-barrel blast of "demographic implications of abortion restrictions" and just went YesChad.jpg.
And to be fair, there's points on the left where they'll go down with the ship. Importing infinity wife-beating criminals and child rapists. Hating men. Sterilizing and mutilating children.
And all of this is besides the point that these "Don't you know fighting is bad?!" posts always get directed towards the right and never towards the left. It's not a quick jump to sides when every example is one-sided.
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2d ago
You're right. Revenge is bad and unprincipled. I stand ready to applaud your valiant and arduous efforts to convince the Democrats to not seek retaliation or revenge after what gets done to them over the next 3.5-12 years, and to lash them with scathing criticisms for every hypocritical turn.
Just point us to where you're doing that. I'm eager to start applauding.
I've gotten testy on this topic here before. Maybe to you. Maybe to an old alt of yours, or someone else. But I'm going to be real with you dawg. Really, really-real. Ready?
If you want to argue for disarmament and cooperation, you have to already have a plausible commitment from your own side.
That's table stakes. That's the cover charge at the door before you even get to enter the building where the table is. Non-negotiable. Because without that, you're just a fool walking up to an enemy army (while your own stands battle-ready, blades still wet with the lifeblood of wounded POWs) and asking them why they insist on fighting. The audacity is just breathtaking.
And I notice, because of course I do, that no one ever, ever, ever, ever, ever makes this argument at Democrats. That they should just stop fighting, because fighting and defection is bad. None of the examples in this post are Democrats leaning into a revenge narrative. Even though that's functionally their entire pathos at the moment, with the calls to counter-gerrymander even harder and apply nebulous violence to all ICE agents.
Can you draft up a letter to Gavin Newsome, explaining that he's being a hypocritical, unprincipled fool?
Are you aware that you won't even try? I honestly wonder how cynical these takes are. Is this the work of Grimma Wormtongue? Or just Retarded Rose Tico?
Because in the real world of Iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas between actual factions that have their own beliefs and minds and aren't just going to be Jedi Mind Tricked into suicide, tit-for-tat is a generally optimal policy. Revenge is a fully sufficient justification when you don't want people to hurt you again, and you don't have a trustworthy arbiter to seek justice on your behalf.
And the way your faction approaches this instead, is something like insane demon logic. When someone chooses to cooperate, progressives defect against them with savage malice. And when someone defects, progressives choose to cooperate (with other people's money).
Slave Morality risen to halls of power, laureled in madness.
So please, show me any sign that someone on the other side is willing to take an L for the sake of peace. Because if you're not even capable of waving a truce flag when you come make the breathtakingly audacious demand for disarmament, then the response need not be civil.
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2d ago
I wasn't thinking about it in a sort of "grass is greener" sense (I really am quite happy being invisible!) It strikes me more as a people vs things dichotomy. Like, the detailed flourishes of the attention are the draw of the work, for women readers, where as it's just not for male readers. And that isn't to say that women don't appreciate some plot, or men some interpersonal character moments. But I observe a sort of fascination from one or the other that serves as a fairly reliable tell.
And I would bet that for women authors, delivering satisfying amounts of good attentions, and satisfying comeuppances for bad attention is possibly the most important skill in their craft.
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3d ago
Yeah, as a doctor your day job is often going to qualify as "helping someone", at least by the prompt. Out of work examples would fit the bill, or times you went above and beyond for a patient, enough that you would want to brag about it to coworkers.
When I was a teenager, I suffered a bizarre injury to my eye. I had to take some kind of medicine to keep the pressure down, but I got the flu at the same time, and couldn't keep the medicine down. And the optomitrist who was taking care of me made freaking house calls. In his Porche, in the snow to come check on me, every day for a week, until he decided I needed surgery, and then he did the surgery.
It's been 25 years and my family still talks about the lengths that man went to to save my eye.
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4d ago
How often do you get to perform a notable good deed? Not just putting back a shopping cart, but something worthy of being a least a story about your day? Examples for scale:
A few months ago, I was hiking and happened upon a damsel in distress. A woman had fallen over and couldn't get up. She didn't seem seriously injured, more ungraceful and bruised, but she was struggling to get back up. I helped her to her feet and then escorted her back to the entrance to the park.
A few weeks ago, I was in a Walmart when I was stopped by a very short Hispanic man. He pointed up towards the top shelf and said, in an oddly Italian-sounding accent, "Can you please reach for me? I am too eh-small." I helped him, exchanged a quick pleasantry, and went on my day.
A few days ago, coming home from the same Walmart on an unlit back road, I nearly ruined my month. A tree had fallen across my half of the road. It was long dead and trimmed, leaving it like a telephone-pole sized spiked club. It was partially hidden by poor lighting, a curve, and a hill, and I came within a few feet of doing thousands of dollars of damage to my car. I managed to spot it in time, went around, and then I parked just past it, got out of the car, and hauled the tree out of the road.
With that act, it feels quite possible that I saved some nameless stranger from large expenses and hours of stress. I'll never know who, or if. But doing that felt good. Prosocial. Made me feel strong and competent.
But the real reward was getting to tell the story to my dad. I wound him up with expectations before revealing that I did not fuck up my car. And I got to see, when I mentioned picking up a tree and moving it, a flash of pride on his face at his son's casual might.
A flash of pride that I am reliving by telling the story now. And it occurs to me that this perk is probably a critical mechanism for inspiring people to do random, notable good deeds. And as a man who usually prefers his social invisibility, having one of these stories to tell is one of the rare times I'm happy to draw attention to myself. So.
What was your most recent good deed? Your greatest? And how does your willingness to preform them vary with how much social accolades you expect from people around you?
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4d ago
I'm not saying it isn't true, or at least very common. I'm saying that as a man who is usually invisible, it's not something I can easily relate to.
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4d ago
I picked it up from my son, and it really feels like a perfect term to describe the thing in a lot of progression fantasy where the MC does something impressive, and then the focus swaps out to random other characters just to show how jaw-dropped impressed they are at how that was IMPOSSIBLE!
It hits a sweet spot as a specific term for unsightly over-praise.
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4d ago
Worm was written by a man, and it shows. So was Practical Guide to Evil. It shows so hard that you can clock the author's sex just by reading the book, even when they use a totally sexless pseudonym and write an opposite sex protagonist.
A quick check confirms that Samus was created by a man as well.
If you've ever read chicklit, the difference is obvious. A female author of a female protagonist will linger on her interactions with every remotely relationship-appropriate male, to make sure the reader knows how desirable he is, and the flavor of his desire for the main character. Is he a good friend who respectfully hides it? A burning frenemy who offers aid even though he shouldn't? A simp?
As a man, reading that sort of book is alien in a way that few other things in sci-fi or fantasy manage. Like, you really go through life keenly aware that most men you interact with are at least some level of interested in you? Just because? As the default?
There is a male version of this, called "glazing", but it takes the form of gratuitous reaction shots to something impressive the male character has just done.
But women can more easily imagine being showered in attention and praise for doing something impressive than men can envision a world where they are loved and wanted just for existing.
Disclaimer: I think that last category might actually exist in anime, but I don't watch enough to know for sure.
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6d ago
The tiger is an active threat. The deer is not. Hate walls off the vile spark that spares the foe. And if you were at risk of starving, I bet you'd muster up the courage to hate that deer - for your family's sake.
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6d ago
The tiger, like a political opponent and unlike gravity, is a problem that you can at least theoretically end. And once you've made that decision to seek it's end, it is an adaptive simplification to just psychologically refer back to that seeking of ends as a terminal value.
Thus, it makes perfect sense to hate the tiger.
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7d ago
A more "gloves-off" approach to online speech is a win for free expression, but its most visible result has been the normalization of unapologetic racism. The core of this argument isn't just that it's unpleasant, but that it's actively corroding social trust and making it harder to have a unified country. Not sure if you’ve seen this too, but I see tons of ‘black fatigue’ and explicitly white nationalist people in my feed and there’s not much I or anybody else can do about it. What does the most persuasive version of this argument look like?
This is "wet streets cause rain" thinking. Unapologetic racism was always there, it was just some people weren't allowed to participate. Consider the recent blowup over Doreen St. Felix, a writer at the New Yorker who published an insipid bit of Sydney Sweeny commentary. She was discovered to have a decade+ long history of meme Nation of Islam tier racism against white people, and that was considered perfectly socially acceptable.
Have you ever actually looked at black twitter? Indian twitter? The stuff you're complaining about is still tame in comparison.
What makes me think about this point is all of the talk about Indian people online. Like them or not, they are STRONG contributors in the workplace.
Are they? Then why is India a dumpster fire? American culture has had the stereotype of the soullness, number-pushing striver for centuries. Are they STRONG contributors in a way that, say, Ayn Rand would recognize? Offering high value for high value? As opposed to ethics-free system-gaming? From the country famous for scamming and fake degrees?
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7d ago
Seems a little extreme to jump straight to talk therapy and medication. Have you tried heavy metal and a personal trainer?
But yes, you have correctly identified an issue. His emotions are an inconvenience to virtually every woman on the earth (which includes most of his teachers, administrators, therapists, and IEP-professionals). The call for him to express himself is somewhere between solipsistic ignorance and a cruel, Mean Girls lie.
This is unfair. There is no systematic solution. The closest you can get is to stop asking other women to fix him (be wary of feminine men here, too). My own teen son is very well-adjusted, and I still have frequent issues where his grandmother freaks out over his being "moody". Whereas I can tell that she's just utterly incapable of reading his moods and either working around them or overriding them. He needs male role models, male peers, and acceptably pro-social outlets. Sports would cover all three, but if he's not that kid, then at least try a gym membership with a trainer and a Dream Theater concert.
Feel free to reread my prior posts, and the other ones people are posting in response to you.
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8d ago
No. As I just said, the point is irrespective of if they should be punished. The point is that regardless of whether or not they should be punished, they have no right to object on principle.
If you willingly join an army that refuses to take prisoners, and just executes all surrendering enemy forces, then you don't get to cry when you get summarily executed instead of taken prisoner - regardless of the moral positions of the enemy forces.
This is pure "your rules, applied fairly".
If Tao objects to this, then perhaps dear Terry ought to evolve his moral universe beyond the level we expect from elementary schoolers. As far as complaints go, "He hit me just because I hit him first!" is the mark of a particularly dull and narcissistic child.
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8d ago
And yet somehow it seems everyone just takes it for granted, of course it's targeted government punishment coming down over personal wrongthink they say, Tao's beliefs are definitely relevant to the cuts.
No, this is not quite correct. Everyone is acknowledging that even if the government were punishing Tao in particular (and they are not, they are targeting the university in general), then Tao has already voided his right to principled protest. In terms of defense in depth, Tao's motte was already invested with demolition charges, by his own rotten hand.
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11d ago
What do you think of "gym muscles"? Referring here to the idea that musculature bought in the gym is less effective than muscles bought by manual labor.
I think there's some validity to it, but it's not in the muscles themselves.
Imagine you could run scans through my body to figure out exactly how muscled I am, down to the gram and square millimeter. A boxer with the "exact same" stats is still going to hit way harder because they have a massive advantage in more ephemeral elements, like muscle memory and training their body to work together in a certain way.
Just so with manual labor. I did it for years, and I can do the thing where I can heft up some enormous, heavy object and casually walk it a hundred yards. But the thing that lets me do that isn't exactly being strong. It's having an intuitive, pre-conceptual understanding of torque and leverage and balance and how they interact with my body.
I had an incident last week where a young, scrawny employee expressed some degree of being impressed at me raw carrying some large object. And I paused, holding it up with one arm, and explained that my arms really weren't doing much work. I was just holding it steady so that the center of mass was balanced over my shoulder and aligned with my core.
I think that's where the discrepancy comes from. It's not that one "type" of muscle is different from the other, but that you develop different suites of subconscious support skills from different activities.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
11d ago
In Lieu Of Dystopian Sci-Fi Movie, American Just Watching News From England. I've been unironically doing this for a few weeks now.
Canada is even worse. It's time to start building a wall to the north, and thinking about how we're going to handle it when that expanse of desolate wasteland fully devolves into a third world shithole.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
13d ago
That's a valid enough point. I checked for the governor, but didn't think to look at the legislature.
Regardless, there's no reason to think there's a connection to Trump and the OBBBA based on that article. This was decided at the state levels months before the bill passed, or was even finalized.
About that.
I'm and pretty sure that for 99% of Republican primary voters, their opinion on Nick Fuentes is somewhere between "that wierd gay Mexican kid that hates the Jews?" and "literally who?"
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