Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
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User ID: 314
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
2yr ago
Wordlessly and thanklessly picking up after toddlers is what adults do. If this is actually Extremely Dangerous To Our Democracy, then suck it up and throw a few votes to McCarthy to end the circus and move things along. Crying and caterwauling about how the situation is so bad, but you refuse to do anything about it is the behavior of a shitty 10 year old.
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
I know Waffle House has the reputation for violence, but it's generally comparable to a Denny's or an IHOP, right?
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
There were a couple culture war flashpoints over racially disparate impact from non-vaxxed bans. For example, in DC they tried to ban unvaxxed kids from going to school, and people were pointing out that this was banning half the black kids in the city. Not really sure how that one shook out.
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
World Star Hip Hop is a video posting site that was open to crazy videos of real life violence. It became a meme, and many videos would feature people recording a fight or whatever while shouting "World Star!", because obviously that's where the footage would end up.
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
99% of the time when I see someone described as "fierce", I think it's vapid, participation trophy bullshit. But it fits in that brief clip of the Waffle House girl, and it is incredibly appealing. Like some instinct is recognizing that this Valkyrie would defend the children against all comers.
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
They would either ban or coopt a subreddit dedicated to crime in general if it didn’t aggressively moderate to wokewash racial crime rates.
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
Opponents note that lots of murders happened in red-tribe areas, rather than just the cities, and did not correlate with defunding.
That's a pretty bad cite. Most of the sub-cites are pay-walled, but I'd seen the NYT one with the city-to-city comparisons before and it was bullshit. Their list of cities was "arbitrary"; no real rhyme or reason, but it included cherry-picked tier-3 cities with Republican mayors just so they could play dishonest games with percentages (This small R city went from 4 murders to 8. That's a 100% increase! Much worse than D megacity that went from 500 to 800, which is only 60%.). I ended up just taking the wiki list of top 50 cities in the US and looking at the before and after murder count for the Republican and Democrat mayored cities. R cities definitely had a large increase, but it was still significantly smaller than the D increase.
Then the first article that isn't paywalled keeps trying to compare San Francisco to Jacksonville. The degree of point-missing is almost an art. They take a rich, white city criticized for the crimes/ills of drugs, homelessness, shoplifting and burglary, with a dash of random hate crimes against Asians for seasoning, and compare it to a much blacker city, and act like it some sort of gotcha that one has a higher murder rate. Same deal with the comparisons of states. All those "Red" states are also the ones with much higher rates of black people. And when the claim in question is something like "Racial(ist) backlash against policing of black people has increased the costs and reduced the incentive for policing black people, and this has resulted in a bloodbath", it's hard to imagine this coming from a place with any good faith.
Or maybe the reliably left-wing, pro-police reform Brennan Center is just trying to deflect blame for their own promoting of this exact situation.
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
It's the trope codifier of the father figure as a completely retarded and negligent/malevolent manchild, with just enough of a veneer of a lesson learned at the end of the episode to avoid outright parody.
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
Has anyone heard any competing theories?
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
I know there's a joke here. Best I've got is "side tussle".
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
People are exppsed to that elsewhere too but arent turning progressive.
Remember when countries with no black people were having BLM protests?
It seems more likely that "conservatives" have shat the bed spectacularly in both the US and UK, allowing for this memetic takeover.
To an extent, yes. But another part is the defection from classical liberal norms from progressives. In retrospect, conservatives do rather look like clowns for not banning leftists from the universities and Hollywood, don't they?
The skin-in-the-game element seems obviously a factor. But there's another major one in play, and that's the sheer memetic dominance the left is throwing around. I occasionally check /all as a guilty pleasure, and I aggressively prune it. The second time I see some dumbfuck political crap (do I even have to specify that it's progressive crap?) I filter out the subreddit. 50+ subs filtered out, and the other day still had the front page with 5/25 posts that were just random, content-free slams against conservatives. Most media, most news, most of academia are in the "fish doesn't realize it's wet" phase. I'm an older Millennial, and my cohort has a sense that old people just sit and wat FAUX NEWS all day, but the awful truth is that most of us are trapped in a comparable echo chamber with a flipped valence and a bigger aquarium tank. Reddit, twitter, netflix, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, etc. It's just in the atmosphere. You pick up progressivism via osmosis.
So we have people who are having fewer of those conservative-making experiences (being responsible for stuff) while being bombarded with unprecedented amounts and degrees and styles of propaganda. And every person who might start to have a moment of awareness that maybe this nice sounding idea is actually kind of impractical has fewer real life friends and family to discuss it with (especially older ones!). And when they turn to the internet, they either get sucked into a redpill community or face a torrent of SMALL DICK NO BITCHES conformity-policing and flinch.
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
But I find it literally incomprehensible how you can look at those people and not realize immediately that they're running a scam. And it's not even like there's a "Well, yeah, they're terrible but think about the Supreme Court picks." argument to be made, they're just going to take your money and you'll still be a loser that wants to be like them and defends them when they say stupid shit...
This is a fully general criticism of parasocial relationships. I know a young man who I often overhear listening to these sorts of social media videos. The usual format seems to be a Red Pill Guru type dispensing cynical reductionism (that makes a lot of evo-psych style sense), usually with some clueless man or woman getting "schooled" in either a hostile or humble manner as a foil. The appeal is the impression of being in on non-obvious lore and understanding, and of flexing that superiority over others in a way that forces them to acknowledge it.
It's basically just The Daily Show with less obfuscated and more direct sales scams advertising revenue.
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
This is the most savage thing I've ever seen you say and I am very proud.
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
He was apparently "caught" because he started a Twitter feud with Greta Thunberg, during which he posted a video that had a shot of a pizza box that supposedly confirmed his presence in Romania, and the Romanian police arrested him within 30 minutes. That seems... implausible? Like, you needed the confirmation of the pizza box, but knew his exact location within the country well enough to nail him that quickly? OTOH, this all provides further evidence of my Dankest Timeline Hypothesis. Expect one more bit of absurdity before 2022 slips away.
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
Any tips on how to avoid pointless internet debating?
"Disable inbox replies" and a firm sense of haughty superiority.
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
I think you could address all of these at once by quitting your job and becoming a full time "Guy who wants to fist fight Andrew Tate" influencer.
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
And now the existence of those nuts is going to be picked at by embarassed officials and censors to pretend that all of the criticism of their incompetent bungling was at the level of Nicki Minaj's cousin's friend's balls.
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2yr ago
I'm talking about
@HlynkaGC, too.
Pale is doing a very good job of not taking that path, even while laying out why it might be a desirable option for some of the protagonists.
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
This definition of selfish can include pretty much every traditional moral act of selflessness.
Rand had a very idiosyncratic definition of "selfish". I've always wondered if it was something to do with the way the words translate, interpreted with autistic literalism. But she just means "beneficial to you, in a fully contextual, long-term sense." In her view, screwing over others in short term winnings is ultimately counterproductive, and harmful to your long-term self-interest. In her use of the terms, a "sacrifice" is something that you wouldn't willingly trade away without duress. The classic example is the virgin sacrificed to the Volcano God. Obviously the village would rather have a healthy young person than no health young person. They only "sacrifice" that person under the perceived threat of violence from the Volcano God. Conversely, Jesus was voluntarily paying a cost, much as I would be if I went hungry to feed my kids. I value their health above my own, which means that harming my direct interests to benefit theirs is within the Randian conception of "selfish".
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
I envision a world where AI killbots have to halt their extermination of the meat-entities because the Slaughter Metrics have tripped some forgotten, buried DEI flag that won't let them proceed without 30% BIPOC representation.
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
Aggressively assume Kelvin.
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
The God of Growth Mindset
On this Winter Solstice, let's take a few minutes to consider the merits of Norse Paganism. Epistemic disclaimer: Head-canon derived from decades old, fringe Neopaganism, with supporting research helplessly confounded by a certain fucking new video game.
First, consider the example of Gaston.
No one's slick as Gaston
No one's quick as Gaston
No one fights like Gaston
Douses lights like Gaston
No one hits like Gaston
Matches wits like Gaston
No one shoots like Gaston
Makes those beauts like Gaston
No one fucks like Gaston
No one cucks like Gaston
Er, little confused at the end there, but it's got the spirit.
And then this incredible dude (Perfect! A pure paragon!) gets into his first real scrap and in spite of his multiple sneak attacks, weapons, morale advantage and assorted other edges, attributes and bonuses he fucking dies.
Imagine being the toady, or just any of the people in the village who knew the guy. How do you reconcile that? How do you interpret that in a world that still makes sense? Do you just embrace chaos and the premise of an uncaring malevolent universe?
How often must this have happened in real life? Actual combat is messy and chaotic and subject to the vicissitudes of chance and fate. How many local champions and heroes were heralded by oracles, won the admiration of their peers, and then died ignominiously before actually accomplishing anything?
I think Valhalla is the answer to this problem. Valhalla is the Hall of the Slain, and it's inhabitants are those killed in combat. As far as afterlifes go, this one is pretty fantastic. Valhalla is an enormous tessellated Hall made of lesser-but-still-enormous Halls, and it's aesthetic is metal as hell. The rafters are spears, the roof is overlapped golden shields. You wake up every day and PVP all of your friends. You can all go all out because come dinner time, everyone's wounds will heal and the "dead" will get back up. Then you get to feast on the succulent meat of the boar Sæhrímnir, who gets a much less pleasant go of things, being slaughtered and risen to be slaughtered anew every day. You get as much mead as you want from the udders of the goat Heiðrún, served by buxom blonde valkyries.
Importantly, the einherjar are not there by chance; one of Odin's many names is "Chooser of the Slain". The Slain have some role to play during Ragnarok, as the army of mooks for the named Gods while they have their Endgame-tier epic battle against All Of The Antagonists At Once. Several of Glad-of-War's adventures in the myths are centered around preparing for Ragnarok, mostly in the form of acquiring Int bonuses and wizard powers. Gallows-God hangs himself on Yggdrasil to gain knowledge of the runes. Old One-Eye gouges out his own eye to earn the right to drink from Mimir's well of wisdom. The Father of Magic Songs goes to circuitous lengths to steal the Mead of Inspiration (the few drops he loses are said to be responsible for mediocre poets and scholars; throw shade as you will). Truthfinder has riddle-fights with other renowned sages to pick up any missing scraps of lore about how the end will go down.
The senseless deaths of great heroes seems more obvious when we consider it from Odin's perspective. He needs warriors, and he needs them more than these random mortal chiefs and kings. And obviously, he wants them at the height of their martial prowess, before they are bowed by age, their strength stolen by the thief Time. Good and mighty people die randomly in battle because Odin wants them preserved at their best... is a much nicer thing for grieving friends and family to tell each other than some cynical account of meaningless chance. The weak and cowardly fighter who slinks off to live another day survives because he doesn't deserve a noble death in battle, a seat in Valhalla. This too feels closer to justice.
It's a fun Just-So Story. But it implies that Odin wants you at your best, if you're still alive, it could mean that you have stronger yet to grow.
Paganism intrigues me because of how different the relationship with the divine is. I was raised Catholic. We prayed for salvation. We prayed for grace and mercy. For all that the priests talk of what God wants from us, it's a categorically unequal relationship. I want eternal paradise, and God wants me to not be such a piece of shit that he feels obligated to keep it from me... but that's entirely his decision. There's nothing really I have to offer Him. The pagans viewed their gods as being amenable to trades (though it's usually phrased in a less mercenary/capitalistic manner). Father of Victory isn't someone you pray to for salvation. He won't fix your problems for you. But he might, with a worthy offering, nudge you in a direction that can help you grow in a way to handle your shit yourself. This view of Odin is as something like a Dungeon Master who could be bribed into offering side quests. He benefits himself, by growing you stronger before he claims you into his forces, soul to be spent in a Pyrrhic stalemate with fire giants. You prove your commitment to being worth the effort by making an offering/sacrifice.
I know a few people here were formerly soldiers. Probably none of us will ever die in battle. But I would argue that given what his stories focus on, more than battle and leadership, Wand-Wielder is a god of knowledge, learning, and truthseeking. He's the patron god of X-risk. He is a god of frenzy, but that frenzy overlaps in concept with inspiration. If you've ever succumbed to the manly urge to binge amphetamines and code or research for nine days and nine nights, perhaps the Dispenser of the Mead of Inspiration was with you.
This mess of myth and fanfiction has coalesced into a small ritual for me. I take the night of the Winter Solstice as an opportunity for reflection and contemplation for the year to come. I think about the lessons I've learned in the past year, the areas I have personally improved, especially the ones I didn't expect or plan for. I have this notion in my head (probably from EY), that the hardest part of seizing an opportunity is noticing that one exists in the first place. I try to think of which ones I noticed and took advantage of, and what events might look like misses with the benefit of hindsight.
And then I think about what the next year might have in store. I try to imagine the idealized, heroic Iconochasm that might look back at me from next year, and wonder what roads he could have walked, and chances he could have taken. How is he better than me, and how might he have gotten there from here?
Odin doesn't eat, he only drinks mead, and sometimes inhales burned plants used in magic. Obviously, mead is traditional, but it's the symbolism that counts. A proper offering is an intoxicant, for the Lord of Frenzy, Madness, and Inspiration. I'll be gifting the Yule Father whiskey and an edible tonight. And in return, I'll be asking for CR-appropriate "random" encounters to optimally foster personal growth.
Nah, we just like side-strange. It's fun to cheat on American politics with German or Finnish politics for a fling or ons.
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