JTarrou
6mo ago
Nothing is fair except double-blind lottery by SAT cutoff. It would be interesting to see the student mix that creates, but it won't happen.
JTarrou
4mo ago
1: We fund the Ukrainians until they can't fight anymore, then they get a worse deal or none at all.
2: We enter the war on the side of Ukraine, mudstomp Russia for six minutes before the nukes fly, and we all sing Kumbaya as the bombs fall.
3: We strongarm Ukraine into making a bad deal and hope it gives us time to strongarm Europe into maybe starting to think about having a military at some point in the future.
4: Pre-emptive nuclear strike which will fuck Ukraine worse than the Russians.
Any other ideas?
JTarrou
9mo ago
The loss of institutional prestige in the SS has some downstream effects. Most notably, every crackpot in the country now knows (whether true or not) that the service is not protecting Trump, or is wildly incompetent. I would expect political assassination attempts in general to rise for a while, as nobody is scared of the talent on display from that particular agency. The myth of the secret service terminators stopped more guns than the actual service ever did.
Now? The first marginally competent goon to rock up is gonna have a field day, but apparently today is not that day.
JTarrou
4mo ago
There is always and forever a pool of disaffected young men who want to make a splash in the world and don't mind getting attention the negative way.
How this tendency is expressed depends a lot on the sociopolitical situation, carrots and sticks etc. A hundred years ago, they'd have been Anarchists, fifty years ago they'd have been lefty terrorists, some are now school shooters, far right or muslim terrorists, trans AI doomers etc. etc.
The particular expressions are memetic, mass shootings, car attacks, arson, assassination, bombings etc.
The population is the same.
JTarrou
2mo ago
So your scenario is an oil field roughneck who transitions so well that he passes, but goes back to his job?
You got even one example of this, or are we purely hypothetical?
JTarrou
1yr ago
They're not China, they're Canada.
Politically irrelevant backwater just north of an actual powerful country. Being "progressiver-than-thou" about Britain is Scotland's national identity. Just another not-really-a country making stupid laws to stick it to The Man (meaning the people who protect their borders and fund their government).
JTarrou
7mo ago
Clinton was so charming that he probably could have run on a bizarro world mirror image of the package he actually ran under (protectionist, openly pro-gay marriage, doveish on the international stage etc., unlike the real Clinton) and would still have won a first or even second term.
I think this is off base. Clinton was charming, but he won his first term with a plurality because Ross Perot won 19% of the vote. And immediately he had to govern far to teh right of how he campaigned. All that "Triangulation" stuff was Clinton being a shrewd political operator and figuring out that the country didn't want his ideas, they just wanted his face and interpretations on a Republican policy platform.
The Democrats got smashed in the '94 elections (where Joe Scarborough got his start as a firebreathing Republican). Clinton made political hay out of the defeat, and it won him re-election. Welfare reform, the '94 crime bill (notice that year?) etc.
But no, there is no way in hell the people who were in power and voting back in the '90s were in any mood for very liberal policies except perhaps a narrow range of gay rights and general fun-having. If you think liberal criminal justice policies were popular the year murder peaked in the US, you didn't observe it up close.
We'd just won the Cold War, had the Gulf War and no one wanted the stern Republican daddies in charge anymore, but they certainly didn't want the policies of the seventies back. And marginal Republicans weren't as worried about the existential nuclear threat and ideological superstruggle anymore, and were willing to vote on other issues. Hence, Perot picked up a lot of people from both sides who were looking for an option to the old ideologies. Clinton was the one who wound up seizing the moment to change the policies and interest groups of the left-wing coalition, which is what is being reacted to with the current re-alignment.
Only this time it is Trump who is doing the moving around, liberalizing the old Republican doctrines that no longer serve their new political base.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Nonsense, we've never given weapons to some indigenous radical group because they were fighting the Russians, only to have them turn on us once that war was over!
JTarrou
9mo ago
Parsimonious explanation, the first Joker was supposed to be a middle finger, but it was too balanced and hit at the right time and people liked it. So they went back to the drawing board and made a musical.
JTarrou
2yr ago
White people move in - Gentrification
White people move out - White Flight
White people stay where they are - Segregation/xenophobia
White people move somewhere else - Colonization
Few progressives will say it, but 'ol Willy Ockham's shaving implements point to a direct and explanatory answer.
JTarrou
1yr ago
neoreactionaries like hanson
lolwut.
Your evidence is a breitbart article that lumps a bunch of people into a vague category that didn't mean much back in 2016, and that category is not "neoreaction".
Says a lot more about you than it does Hanson, who isn't nearly interesting enough to aspire to neoreaction.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Let me illustrate by talking about a game that I was very interested in, bought, and turned out to be shit. This has nothing to do with SBI directly.
For those who don't know, the Payday series is co-op crime shooters, think first-person GTA without cars and with friends. You get heists, objectives to complete, you can do stealth or go loud etc.
Payday 2 was excellent, it still has a strong playerbase despite being released over a decade ago. I played quite a bit of it.
So they announced Payday 3 and I was ready. The initial guff I got from beta testers was that teh game was a bit janky (somewhat to be expected) and the female models had gotten ugly. There were a couple people whining about "diversity" and shit, but nobody really cared if the game was good.
Narrator voice: The game was not good. They made it permanently online, meaning you had to be connected to their servers, even to play alone. You needed a new launcher and a special Starbreeze account. And their servers didn't work. And the whole structure of the game was just......bad. It wasn't fun or engaging. Just a joyless grind-fest with no rewards. If you could even get in to play it, which you couldn't for the first three weeks of release. The relative fatness of the female characters was the least of anyone's worries. Frankly, the models weren't that bad.
The playerbase cratered after an initially decent start. Within a few weeks, the number of people playing had dropped 99%.
According to SteamDB, Payday 3 has a 24-hour peak of just 378 players compared to Payday 2's 31,866
The CEO of Starbreeze just lost his job for his role in this abortion.
And yet, lots of people who didn't play the game defend it against people who did by claiming that they just hate diversity.
It's not about the uglier female models. That's just a symptom of a deeper problem. When you see that in a game, it indicates that the game wasn't meant to be good, it was meant to tick the DEI boxes. IDGAF about the female models in isolation, but I have a very strong association between obvious political choices in games and shit games. I gave the game a shot, ignoring the trolls whining about unimportant things like how fat the females are now.
Now I'm out forty bucks and I have a game that is worse in every single playable way than its predecessor. Because the studio decided that chubbing up the female models was more important than making sure the servers were functional for a permanently online game.
DEI, not even once.
https://www.ign.com/articles/starbreeze-ceo-out-after-payday-3-disaster
JTarrou
1yr ago
Technology as politics.
Feminism is more a product of the washing machine, the pill and air conditioning than it is political organizing. It is less an ideology than it is a set of opinions enabled by a certain level of technological advancement.
Anti-racism is more a product of the steam engine than it is of any moral progress. All of human history no one thought to free the slaves, until one day from out of nowhere.....the richest and most technologically advanced society on earth invented a way to turn fossil fuels into energy and all the sudden slavery and the racism that supported it isn't strictly necessary. Hence "moral progress".
Today, we all benefit from less-than-free labor in third world nations making us cheaper consumer products. In the most technologically backward parts of the world slavery still exists. That is not because those are worse people than those of us who can afford to pay for the labor that supports our first world lifestyles.
The "moral" arc of history bends toward whatever options technology provides.
What this means for the age of AI is anyone's guess.
JTarrou
1yr ago
This sensible advice will always founder on the rocks of female sexuality. Women do not want to be safe, they do not want safe men, and if the literature they consume is any clue, practically every "romance" novel has a positively described rape scene in it. Rape is simultaneously a hideous crime and the central sexual fantasy.
Gay guys don't want to catch HIV, but they want to do all the stuff that produces that outcome. Straight dudes don't want to get stabbed by a crazy girlfriend, but they definitely want all the stuff that produces that outcome. We are all enslaved by our own sexuality to a greater or lesser degree. Some people don't have much trouble with it, but it's a reliable failure mode of humanity.
JTarrou
2yr ago
Reposting on request from Zorba:
The discussion of defensive gun usage in a major survey in the CW thread got me thinking about an experience I had some years back. I thought I'd tell the story to illustrate the sorts of things that can happen around violent or potentially violent situations. For what it's worth, I'm not sure if I classify this as a defensive gun use or not, but it qualifies under the terminology of the survey. It was very much a memorable night, and made me rethink the way I carry guns and the sorts of scenarios I prepare for.
First thing: I was drunk. Dancing-in-public drunk. My girlfriend and I had attended a wedding of some friends, someone else was the DD, so I took full advantage. At the time, my girlfriend lived with another single girl in a house outside town. Isolated, quiet. Cornfields and scattered houses. The housemate had been on a date, and the two of them were back at the house when we got dropped off. We said hello and left them to do whatever people on dates do on darkened living room couches while we went upstairs to bed. I passed out almost immediately.
The GF woke me up a short time later, there was a commotion downstairs. A strange man had arrived and was banging on the main door of the house, loudly demanding to speak to the housemate's date. I went downstairs, the date said he knew the man, that it was his pastor. He said he'd handle it, so I went back upstairs. As a precaution, I retrieved my carry gun and kept it close to hand. At this point, I was regretting the drinking. Waste of a good drunk.
Outside, the date had gone out onto the porch to talk to the guy, we could hear muffle conversation, then escalating in volume. There was a series of loud crashes, and the housemate started screaming that she was calling the police. Fuck me running. I remember clearly getting out of bed the second time, gun in hand, wearing basketball shorts, dress socks and nothing else. An ironic thought occurred to me: "so this is why people look like this on 'Cops'". Not the sort of situation I had envisioned when I started carrying a firearm.
I got downstairs and the date was bleeding from his face, apparently his pastor had assaulted him. The housemate had called the police, but it would be over twenty minutes before they arrived (given where we were, that was probably a fast time). Meanwhile, the pastor had discovered a hatchet that had been left out of the shed and started walking around the house, hitting the siding with the hatchet and shouting for the date to come back out and talk to him. Needless to say, that dude didn't seem enthused about the proposition. The crashing I'd heard had been the date falling into and through the screen door on the porch after the guy decked him.
The GF was curious, but I sent her back upstairs, told the housemate to lock the door behind me, and went out onto the porch. I might be tanked, but it was not my first rodeo. I leaned against the wall of the house (casually, I hoped) both to stay steady on my feet and to conceal the pistol I was now holding behind my leg. The situation was fairly simple: The man would have to make a 90-degree turn to come up the steps to the porch, after which I'd be within arms reach. I set my line at the bottom of the steps. If he tried to come up onto the porch, I would shoot him.
For a lunatic who was banging a hatchet on the side of a random house at 2AM in the middle of a cornfield, the pastor sounded lucid. He just wanted to talk, he felt bad, the whole thing had gotten out of hand etc. etc. Whole time he had the hatchet in his hand. In my hazy state, I decided to go with simplicity. "Put down the ax, go back to your car, and drive away". He'd try to argue something, and I'd just repeat it. This went on for maybe ten minutes. I was feeling like a broken record, but finally, finally he walked away. He dropped the hatchet, got into his car, and drove away. Shortly thereafter, the police showed up.
I went back to bed.
The coda is that the date didn't press charges, turns out the "pastor" was a self-proclaimed one with a long history of mental illness, sort of a street-preacher type. The housemate had to pay for the siding repair herself. The police were little help, and the prosecutor's office wasn't interested in dealing with a mental patient over property damage.
So that's the story. It's weird, but in my very limited experience it looks a lot more like the median "DGU" than a shootout in a pawn shop. These are the sorts of stories that do not generally make the papers or the police reports, but happen on a daily basis, many many times.
JTarrou
2mo ago
I maintain
1: Virtually no one passes in person, definitely not in a communal shower.
and
2: Any scenario in which this could theoretically be an issue is so vanishingly rare as to be not worth worrying about as a societal problem. This is trans angels on the head of a pin.
JTarrou
6mo ago
Alternate headline "Meta renames its DEI program". No one will be fired, they will all be moved to new departments with boring names that continue to do the exact same thing. They'll be working hard to use technology, algorithms and AI to advantage/disadvantage whatever group their slack channel demands for the rest of their careers.
JTarrou
2yr ago
Meh. I've never been a Trump partisan, but this changes little for me. I still view Trump as the prole's middle finger, and his decline into persecuted irrelevance is part of the cyclical tragedy of class politics.
I called this right at the start. Trump is not Caesar, Trump is not Hitler. Trump is Tiberius Gracchus. He was, is, and will always be the failed aspirations of the working class projected onto an incredibly flawed cartoon of a human being.
We're not to revolution yet, but if and when we get there, the memory of how Trump revealed the depths of the deep state and baited the establishment into scrapping all their old norms will be strong.
The working class has been defeated, their champion will now be buried under every over-charging liberal prosecutor in every state and city where they have authority. The PMC cannot allow the threat that Trump poses to their hegemony to go without absolutely humiliating and destroying him (in their own minds, anyway).
So, when a competent successor appears, promises all the same things Trump did, and manages to get his hands on the military, he might well decide there's no point in comfortable retirement, because that won't be an option. If you want to lead the Populare faction, you must win or die in prison, poverty or both. The proles will not be allowed an equal voice in the operation of the country except by force.
The American Empire will have its emperor soon enough, and we will have Alvin Bragg to thank, in some small part. The senatorial thugs who killed the Gracchi rejoiced at their victory over the Populares. Sulla dug up the bones of Marius and threw them into the Tiber, and the senate rejoiced because they had reset the constitution to ensure the proles would never threaten again. And Julius Caesar watched it all, and when his turn came, he did not submit to the orders of the Senate. And yet he could not bring himself to kill them all, so they killed him.
Man has only two choices in government, autocracy or oligarchy. The people will support an emperor because the oligarchy is uncontrollable otherwise.
Yes, I get that.
But he isn't paying people what the market will bear for those skills. The only way he can keep workers is if they're legally tied to his company after they are trained.
So he isn't paying market rate for those jobs. That's how people can leave for more money. If he were paying the going rate, his newly trained ungrateful american workers would have nowhere to go.
Those other companies apparently value those workers much higher than OP does.
JTarrou
8mo ago
For most of teh Roman Republic stage of the empire, they maintained the fiction that most of the territory controlled by Rome was technically sovereign and merely an "ally".
The US is a good bit less interventionist than we could be, and that's probably for the best, but we should not pretend that just because we haven't annexed Canada that they aren't US territory.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I smell statistical bullshit.
My normal standard of living has taken a noticeable if not disastrous turn. My pay is roughly the same, my costs are a third higher to double on most normal expenses (energy, groceries etc.). My rent is up 30%, the value of my savings is down 20%, and the cost of buying a house is up 50%.
Three years ago I had a lot more disposable income. Now, all that might fit fine within the "economy is doing fine" narrative, but it doesn't feel fine to me. What I hear from posts like this is "economic metrics are bullshit statistical lies". I am noticeably poorer today than I was in 2020. All the statistics in the world aren't going to change that.
JTarrou
8mo ago
Closest I've seen is Generation Kill, a miniseries, which was written by an embedded journalist, had a dozen of the guys from the unit on as instructors and producers, and one or two even played themselves (Rudy Reyes).
JTarrou
1yr ago
A world in which we go from a significant Hispanic and African American Ivy League admissions rate to one that is virtually zero would not be tolerated by the existing social order.
We already have that. Virtually no poor black americans wind up in the Ivy Leagues. The children of wealthy black immigrants do. The children of foreign elites who are also black, or "hispanic" or asian do. Not the actual struggling communities here.
Your whole structure is built on the social identification of poor black americans with much richer, more educated and very culturally distinct groups based on nothing more than skin color.
Yes, so long as black americans think the reason they aren't getting into Yale is that Yale hates black people, not poor people, this will not be tolerated. But that's an assumption that could change quick.
I love you guy, and I get the appeal. Did a bit of trapper-convention cap and ball a few times. But fundamentally, it's a long time to load the thing, not much to empty it and an hour to clean it.
There is something to it, but it's not how I approach and think about firearms. You know, different people are into different cars for different reasons. Classic collectors and rat rodders want different things out of their machines. Guns to me are just the gear of a martial art. I do appreciate guns aesthetically as functional machines, and a lot of those old guns are pretty. In fact, those old .44 Armys of mine might be my prettiest guns. Everything else is basic bitch ARs and Glocks, plus a couple hunting guns.
If you like taking your time and shoot for sentimental reasons, you might take OP up on it. Some other positives, it's relatively cheap, recoil is generally mild (unless you're getting into buffalo guns), and those old guns are surprisingly accurate and some have quite good triggers. Cons, they're heavy, awkward, messy to load, ergonomics suck, sights are appalling, wildly unreliable by modern standards. It feels just a touch like alchemy getting the whole contraption to go off. 2/10, haven't shot my .44s in years. And just wait until you get to adjust the rear sight!
But, if we're using the car metaphor, I'm an amateur competitive driver, not a classic collector or a hot rodder.
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