JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
4hr ago
This is the problem with discussing large-scale trends - whatever statement you make, there's always "well, akshually" about it. Yes, there are red-tribers in Europe, technically speaking. But they are mostly powerless, feckless and nowhere nearly at the level of influence that red tribers in the US have.
JarJarJedi
6hr ago
Links to Chinese and Indian government crackdowns? Ok. I mean, there's a reason I don't live there and call both of those regimes authoritarian.
If you think it can only happen in China and can not happen in any other country, you are very dangerously naive. Europe (and Britain, which exited EU but somehow kept the worse parts) is well on the way to implement widespread internet controls, surveillance, universal digital ID and mandatory device lock-ups. See for example: https://reclaimthenet.org/uk-lawmakers-propose-mandatory-on-device-surveillance-and-vpn-age-verification - for the children, of course! Yes, China and India and other countries that never had traditions of freedom are further on the way but nobody really values freedom in "the liberal West" anymore, so it's only question of time.
I should want to have a seat at the corruption table?
You should want to have a seat at the table where the policies and the future of the society is decided. Or maybe not, they'd decide it anyway, whether you want the seat or not. You may not be interested in politics, but the politics is always interested in you.
Why would "they" (I think you mean legislators) want this?
For the same reason they always want it - control. More controllable population is easier to govern. If you control the information, if you control the narrative, it's easier to govern than if you do not. You can implement policies without some pesky irritating dissidents asking stupid questions. You can just order people do things, and they'd do them without you worrying about their "rights" or "freedoms". It's much easier to rule as a king than as a temporary mayor who is constantly questioned and could be deposed anytime. You are a good person who has some excellent ideas about how to govern things - imagine how much good you could do for the society if you don't have to waste your time on anything else but implementing your excellent ideas!
Then you're just feeding into a straw man archetype.
Saying "straw man" does not automatically refute any argument. These are real men, who pass real laws, which you can witness being passed right now. You can ignore this is happening, but it won't ignore you.
I'm interested in preventing a censored future.
But you think that the best way to do it is to deny it's possible, in the face of all the facts, until the very last moment where it comes to your home and drags you to the lockup? I don't think it's as effective a strategy as you think it is.
But what you're presenting is an "you're already fucked!" blackpill doomer scenario
No, I am not saying you are already fucked. I am saying you will be fucked, if you do not start fighting it right now. I am saying Europe is probably already fucked, because there's nobody left to fight anything there, but in the US there are still some people that care. The institutions that used to care - ACLU, EFF, free software, etc. - are falling one by one, but they are not yet all dead, and it's not too late. But it will be, pretty soon.
There's a lot of logical leaps - they're gonna find a way to fuck you, bud!
No, it's "they already found a way to fuck you, and here's examples where they are fucking other people the same way they're going to fuck you - you still have some, very small, timeframe where you could prevent them from fucking you in the same way they are already fucking other people". Of course, this requires, as the first step, recognizing this is actually happening, and it's a serious problem. And it's not going to be solved by "oh we'll just commit a small patch to fix it".
JarJarJedi
7hr ago
How about this one, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%C3%ADno_genocide
And yes, I agree that at least "kill them all" does not sit very well with Christian doctrines, but I don't think religious doctrines had ever been a major impediment to doing what people wanted to be doing.
JarJarJedi
8hr ago
I don't think you'd be surprised to hear me call this a slippery slope argument
There's nothing wrong with the slippery slope argument, if there's an actual slope, and it is very slippery.
This stretches credulity.
No it does not. It already exists: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/india-orders-mobile-phones-preloaded-with-government-app-ensure-cyber-safety-2025-12-01/ https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/china-implements-mandatory-face-scans-for-mobile-phone-users-report-says/ https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/354
And how does "phone" and "unlocked" get defined in a legal sense.
Let that not bother you, the government has enough money to hire a thousand of lawyers and let them outplay you in any rule-lawyering contest - given that they will actually be judging who won anyway. Mandating every phone having locked boot sequence that is signed by approved government key is enough to build it. And easy to check.
If I assemble an old hobby kit radio, do I possess an unlocked phone in principle?
We have already played this out with guns and drugs. If you assemble some weird shit that the government struggles to classify, you are a dangerous person who is presumed to do something evil, and now you have to spend enormous resources to prove otherwise and stay out of jail. And, since nobody but you does this weird shit, you have no allies and stand on your own against the government machine, and nobody even cares if you win or lose but a couple of principle freaks with Mastodon accounts. And if by some weird luck somebody cares and you manage to win in one case, and become popular, the government just puts the law in the next 2000-page mega-bill that bans specifically what you are doing. Because it's dangerous to children or something.
I think the more likely answer is that a lot of legislation is going to fall apart because of a technical illiteracy.
That's a big failure mode that geeks still persist on holding onto. We are so smarter with the technology that we will out-technology the government. It works on the small scale. On the large scale the government will just lock up the whole environment - and if there is a couple of rats and cockroaches under the floorboards, it's not a big threat. Yes, you can run around as an individual rat and collects some scraps and crumbles that fall off the table. But you will never get a seat at the table itself while being a rat. And that's the goal.
It does not matter that specific legislators get specific details wrong. It does matter that they have the power to control these details. And once it is established that they do, they will eventually lock down all the specific details in a way they want to. If they want 99.99% of people using government-controlled identity-linked devices to access the internet - that's what will happen, and the fact that you can solder together an unauthorized device and use it in your basement (until your ISP blocks you and notifies the police) is not a big win on your side.
JarJarJedi
8hr ago
Europe is way further on this road than US, and Americans who worry about it are worrying that what already happened to Europe will happen to America too. It's not even about demographic replacement per se - as a genetic makeup - people who worry that Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio are not "white" are deep fringe - but a cultural shift. In Europe, being a national patriot, relating in any way to traditional European culture and values is passé and very suspect. In the US it is the case too, but in much narrower context, not society wide. Basically, in the US there's still red tribe and blue tribe, the Europe is mostly just various shades of blue tribe. Of course red tribers are worried it will happen to them too, since their cultural values are the same values that used to exist in Europe and are now mostly extinguished.
JarJarJedi
9hr ago
Not controversial among whom? Europeans had been fine with genocide as "kill them all" until about 19th century when the "white man's burden" took over, but if you extend the definition of genocide to forced population control and cultural suppression, then well into 20th century. Many non-European cultures are still fine with the former one (of course, when applies to really bad people over there). They may not be stressing this point when talking to Europeans, but their actions and even their words when not talking to Europeans show that clearly. I don't think it's as non-controversial as you think it is.
JarJarJedi
10hr ago
Strictly theoretically, yes. Practically, if your bank requires using an app to access the account online, and that app refuses to work on non-"secured" system, you're out of luck. If your government has "digital ID" system, which only works on "secured" platforms, and you have to use it for any interaction with anything government-related, which is everything in a modern welfare state - you're out of luck. Yes, you can choose not using any of it, leave the modern society and live in a hut on an isolated island and survive on moss and mushrooms. Nobody really is going to choose that, so that's not a real choice.
Of course, there will always be the black market. USSR had the black market (a huge one), North Korea has the black market (that's how they haven't starved yet). The Powers That Be are mostly fine with it, as long as it remains black and thus hard to access for somebody who is not already "outside" the system - criminals, spies, etc. I mean, they would fight them case by case, but they are not an existential threat. Controlling the wide population is existential, controlling 0.1% of freaks is merely police routine. And the governments are increasingly moving towards legitimizing and enabling population-level controls. We will soon see delegitimization of non-controllable software and hardware - first as "insecure" and "dangerous", then as a tool of criminals - i.e. finding an unlocked phone on somebody would be universally treated as a sign that person is a criminal. Then it will be officially banned.
JarJarJedi
10hr ago
I'd say it makes some parts of development for me way more productive. Where I could have spent hours researching how to do a certain thing with certain API by reading the docs and browsing StackOverflow or such for examples applicable to my specific case, now I can ask LLM and get the same in minutes. It's like having Wikipedia instead of going to the library and looking up stuff in the Britannica manually. Huge time saver. But definitely does not replace other parts of development - like figuring out what you actually need to do and how given the requirements and limitations you have.
JarJarJedi
11hr ago
I am disappointed tbh. I spend time answering those questions in the best way possible (and they are not written to make that easy, they are loaded with weasel words that make figuring out what they mean very elusive) and what they give me is "if God is good, why suffering exists?" Oh come on, that's weak sauce. No, I mean, theodicy is a real philosophical question, but not exactly a novel one worth spending time answering questions.
But at least it's real. The other "contradiction" is "these two beliefs are not strictly contradictory". Well, dudes, if they are not, why the heck are you listing them as contradictions then?
And the third one I got is a cheap trick on "will you be literally dead instantly if you don't get it? No? Then it's not "necessary"." Ugh. I wonder if that's the same definition of "necessary" that the philosophers use when applying for their next grant.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
Apparently most people just come in off the street expecting to YOLO into a job.
It's pretty much everywhere. People just hate reading stuff. Users don't read the docs, no matter how good they are. Coworkers do not read meeting notes and pre-meeting materials, no matter how many times you ask them to. That's just how people are. Exceptions, when they happen, are surely appreciated.
Congrats on the successful completion of your mission.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
Who's "we"? Nobody in the current US federal government or US Congress ever gave any indication they know better. And it's not like we're talking about 20th century BC - it's literally the same people now, just way older (and a bunch of new ones, many of whom are so far left FDR looks like Mises from where they are standing). I know of no major political party in the US that makes "knowing better" any part of its program (no, LP does not count as "major political party" and if their past performance is any indication of future results, never will).
JarJarJedi
1d ago
US government has been doing it for the most of 20th century (I am not even talking about FDR who pretty much run the economy on manual, but it persistent well after) but Trump has this miraculous quality of making people noticing what is happening when he's doing it. Maybe we can have an actual discussion about whether the government intervention into the economy is really as good as it has been told, now that Trump had done it?
JarJarJedi
1d ago
I've read this one recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Physics I admit I don't have nearly enough knowledge to make any reasonable assessment of my own, but it certainly was illuminating is a way of "oh, so that's a thing too!". And given the general state of academia, I totally believe in the possibility of institutional capture, but I have no means to figure out if it's actually happening or not.
AI Global fertility Global debt
None of it would be world-changing in 30 years. I mean, yes, the world will change, a lot, but not in a way that makes current wisdom irrelevant. Internet changed everything, and yet saving now is as relevant as it was before the internet. If you started saving before the internet, you can enjoy it now, with the internet, no less. If AI proves as world-changing as internet was - which is not a given but let's assume it will be all that and twice all that - I am still sure fundamentals would not change. I mean, there could be some life-changing things that could be very valuable - like, I knew about bitcoin's existence extremely early and if I invested in it seriously, I probably could retire and be a rich man now. I did not. But somebody probably did. Somebody would invest in something AI-related and become fabulously rich in 30 years too (probably not me again). But for the rest of us, it'll be the same but with AI.
As for saving vs making memories - it's much more complex question. I admit I have no idea what's the answer for me. My thinking shifted a bit after COVID when I realized how fragile is everything we're enjoying and how easily it could be destroyed - not by something big and glorious, but just by a bunch of panicked idiots that find themselves in an unknown situation and start thrashing around. So now I am more on the side of "making memories" but still in a pretty conservative stance overall. But I can't guarantee some shit like COVID won't happen again and that time the breakage would be personally ruinous for me. I feel this is much more realistic threat scenario than "global debt".
JarJarJedi
1d ago
My cynical point of view has an extremely good track record of predictions, sad to say.
Predictions of what? You can't know what Adams was actually thinking, so what exactly are you predicting and how would you verify this prediction?
For better or worse, he adopted that approach, near daily streaming and constant commentary on daily events
Anyone can do that. I have a blog. I put my opinions there (no, I won't link it here). People read it. If anybody would demand of me to do something to their liking because I owe them for being their role model, I will tell that person to stuff it. And also probably find a responsible adult to run their other life decisions by, because it's clearly not within their competencies.
There are literally millions of people putting shit on the internet all the time. So yes, Adams was one of them. So what?
JarJarJedi
2d ago
I guess I disagree. I mean it's a fine choice, but the other choice - choosing to do different things, even if they might be not as successful as things you've done before, and being OK with that, even in public - is fine too.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
In the way that any dude having a hot girl on his arm is using her as a 'selling point' just by showing her off, I'd argue.
That's a very cynical point of view, but you can not really fault him for your perception. I mean, what, is he supposed to lock his wife up at home so you don't suspect him in "showing off"? I think this is going way too far.
you kind of do owe it to your audience to be very open about failures as well as successes.
I am not sure the guy who literally talks about "failing at almost everything" in a very title of his book is a good target to accuse of hiding his failures.
he kind of let that get swept away when he got a taste of true 'influence.'
I think there's a difference between a person who is willing to share his opinions - and let people be influenced by them, which is kind of the point of sharing them anyway, not? - and a person who must subject his whole life to forming some kind of heroic example for the followers. I don't think it is fair to demand from everybody who shared one's opinion publicly to become full-time role model.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
"Follow all this advice and read my books and you too might be able to marry a hot single mother for a couple years" is not a massive selling point on its own.
I don't think he ever used his marriage as a selling point for his books, did he? That said, how many of the 63-year-old geeks who aren't billionaires actually get hot smart model pilot wife, even just for 2 years?
This gets towards Scott's other aside about various intellectuals who he seems to think have beclowned themselves in moving beyond the areas that they achieved their original insights and following.
I actually see no problem in that. Nobody owes anybody to be anybody's role model. If a person X is successful at something, and then they want to try something else, and fail miserably, they don't owe Scott or anything to live their lives in a way that would not diminish former success in Scott's or anybody's eyes. If he didn't want to live his "legacy" for the rest of his life, he has full right not to. He was his own man, and did not let anybody else - neither his "legacy", nor anybody else's needs - define what he's doing next. I find that laudable, even if he did not always succeed and sometimes looked ridiculous. That's the price one pays for trying things. It's not for everybody, but I can find no fault in Adams being one of the men who wanted to do that.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Not for us to decide, for sure.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
I think he wrote quite a lot of his business failures. What he was probably not ok with is for his success as a cartoonist defining him for the rest of his life, but I don't think it's a bad thing. I think on the contrary, looking for being something more is what made him interesting. Yes, he failed a lot, but so what? I think him keeping at it means that's what defined his identity more than anything, and him not accepting "stick to drawing comics, monkey brain" is actually much more part of his real identity, as he saw it.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
The person baselessly accused me in endorsing murder for the purposes of sending a political message. Nothing I wrote gave any reason to do that. I do not think that was an example of discussion that can be reasonably continued in that manner, and yes, if it comes to that, then maybe ending it is the best outcome. "Do you really love Hitler so much?" - is that a discussion that I need to strive to continue? I have my limits, and being falsely accused in endorsing state terrorism is one of them. I try, but I am but a weak man.
If it was a way to make some point, it was easy to say it in a way that does not put the words in my mouth, there are hundreds of way to argue the same point. Glassnoser chose to say "do you really support ICE killing people to send the message" - as if my support for that was an established fact and he is just couldn't believe I really sank this deep and gives me the last chance to step away from the abyss. He demonstrated a pattern of what appears to be quite frivolous handling of the facts over the whole discussion, but I'm fine with it as long as it does not turn to libel against me personally. And I think I am very well on point when I say accusing me of thinking "it's preferrable that ICE kills people to send the message that people should stop protesting them" is a bald-faced lie. I never said it's preferable and never said anything that can be considered by any reasonable reader as supporting that.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
I can’t help wondering what his life would have been like if he’d been equally willing to assert the okayness of the rest of his identity.
I wonder what is the rest? "It's OK to be male" probably would get him cancelled as fast, and the label of misogynist is arguably even worse than "racist" - the latter gets you hated, but the former gets you despised. "It's OK to be a nerd"? But what does it mean? Some nerds are billionaires ruling the world now. Others are a caricature in a popular TV show. Others made a deep dive into various stuff Scott enumerated so eloquently. Which one is it OK to be?
But i think Adams never doubted that it's OK to be Scott Adams. His whole life, and his whole public persona, is a testament to that.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
if you're going to advertise as this professional persuasive hypnotist guru
I don't think he ever advertised himself as professional hypnotist. He did advertise himself as trained hypnotist, but that only requires one to pay for a training course and successfully sit through it. And I don't think he ever claimed he uses his training to convince women to sleep with him?
Indeed, this sure reads like he got hypnotized into a situation by some of the oldest persuasive tools in human history: a woman with an hourglass figure and decent makeup skills.
You are saying it like there's anything bad in it. I am a happily married man, but if I weren't, and I were 63, and a hot young lady, which I liked, were willing to live with me, I'd take any time I can get, be it two weeks, two months or two years.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
In Greenland, as we learned recently, until 1990s.
Yeah, I am pretty sure if those were Spaniards it would go differently. But, OTOH, see England/Ireland, I think the Irish are still pretty salty about those times...
I think it's not a useful distinction. If somebody murders a lot of people and wipes whole cultures, it doesn't matter much, morally speaking, whether you thought "fuck you in particular, this culture, I hate you specifically because your language irritates me and your dances are ugly!" or you just thought "it'd probably more useful for me if this two-legged cattle just died, and I don't even care how they call themselves". This argument sounds like a pointless rule-lawyering, where you substitute naming question for substance question, and try to argue that because exact labelling and classification may be questioned, the substance - massive dying of people caused by somebody's actions - is not not as reprehensible, because some definition of some word does not cover this particular case with enough precision. I find such kinds of argument utterly useless.
No True European Culture, amirite?
Yes, it's not "true Christianity". But somehow things still happened... Just as slavery - according to many, many Christian authorities - weren't part of true Christianity, and yet, it happened too. As I said, people are very flexible in their religious beliefs when they want to be.
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