JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
I think what affluenza people in the US call "western materialism" many people in China would call "non-shitty standards of living at last". The generation that experienced the last famine in China is still alive, I think. I would expect them and their descendants to want to be a bit "materialistic" about not experiencing it again?
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
the entire existence of Israel is due to people like Weizmann pining for a home he felt his people had lost almost 3000 years ago.
There's a point in that, though to be honest while the link between Jews and Eretz Israel is deeply embedded in their culture, not so much in Arab or Muslim culture links them to the same land (except for Jerusalem maybe?). But maybe they disagree. Still, if we look at what the Jews were doing for those 3000 years, they certainly didn't sit around and complain about being refugees. I mean, some probably did, but that wasn't the mainstream activity. Sure. some Arabs lost some assets there, and probably they wouldn't mind getting them back. But living in "refugee camp" for three generations is taking this too far. It's like if you get your car stolen, and instead of buying a new one, you walk barefoot your whole life (to emphasize your loss) and so do you children and grandchildren - isn't it taking that a bit too far? I mean, surely some of the Arabs dream about recapturing the Palestine and throwing Jews into the see - even if, with God's help, that would never happen, they can dream. But nobody prevents them from dreaming the same while living in proper cities, having proper jobs and no-completely-shitty standards of living. I just feel these people are being used as a cannon fodder for political agendas - in service of the idea that if these people would settle, that would lower the pressure on Israel to make concessions to them. I think three generations should be enough to realize this is not working, and maybe these people need to be relieved of their role of cannon fodder and let live normal lives.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
That too. What we see now on the Left is the fruits of work which has started almost a century ago and intensified about 50 years ago. Maybe in another 50 years the right will develop their own CW capabilities comparable with those of the left.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Taleb talks about this quite a bit in "Skin in the game". I am not sure I entirely agree with him on all conclusions (mainly that everything is doomed and intolerant minority always wins), but there is certainly a good point in noticing this dynamic.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Because what most of them really wants is to just grill in peace. CW is not what they really want to do, it's something they feel compelled to do by the external pressure and events.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
99.9999% of what you do in your daily life (I am not sure about the number of nines, but a bunch of them for sure) is resting on thinking done by the old dead men (and a few old dead women too, thankyouverymuch) who had no conception of what a smartphone is. Even if you are a genius far surpassing such people as Newton (who wasn't too proud to admit his debt to his predecessors, old dead men who didn't have a concept of calculus or gravity), you still could not manage to create much of what you enjoy from the first principles without relying on those dead old men's work and thought. Even if you skipped the exercise time. You could be thankful and appreciative for it, or you could throw a juvenile temper tantrum and scream "you are not the boss of me!" and slam the door to your room, it doesn't matter - your debt to those old dead men is still real, enormous and never to be overcome. Unless you renounce everything and go to the caves (to think of that, I think Rousseau already explored that too?). Given that you post here, it's probably not your cup of tea. Which is smart. Enjoying what the old dead men could give you instead of petulantly denying them would be even smarter.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
2013 was probably the last or one of the last years where saying "I'm against censorship on the internet" won't get the comment "oh, you're one of those nazis who just wants to call people racial slurs and spread conspiracy theories!". Paradoxically, after uniting under "stop censorship" slogans and learning how much the US government in clandestinely meddling with internet, a lot of people and organizations just switched to "well, maybe a little censorship for a good cause is not that bad - actually, even necessary - and we can surely trust the government to do the right thing here". Maybe it just coincided with some kind of generational shift or something, or maybe it's The System's reaction to being defeated, but living through it was - and still is - pretty bizarre.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
The impeachment itself won't matter too much, what matters is the approach - hitting "cooperate" over and over in hope that the other side would finally stop hitting "defect" does not sound like a winning strategy, and that's what the red tribe is starting to notice.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
OK yes I stand corrected, I meant nobody involved in the culture war, of course, which PP has been into for years.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
That's pretty much what McConnell is doing now - trying to achieve the treaty by appeasement. Do you think if Trump wins again (big if, I know, but let's assume that) it would stop the Dems from impeaching him, if they have the majority, because McConnell called for truce when he could support impeaching Biden? I don't think so.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
I had hoped that if you play by the rules and do the right thing, it will turn out right, but that’s not the case.
Nobody actually thinks this, not in the middle of the culture war that now encompassed law enforcement and legal system completely. It's just performative posing. There still might be a-political law hiding somewhere, deciding disputes among neighbors about a bush of raspberries, or trying to figure out who is to blame when contract about shipping gadgets is violated. But not in cases that concern high-value hyper-politicized targets. The Party of Lawyers started it - hoping to win it, because who wins in lawfare if not lawyers? - and now it is on. And I don't see how it could be turned off in any near future. I mean, if blue tribe strikes at NRA, why shouldn't the red tribe retaliate against blue tribe assets? If they don't, they'd just keep losing until their voters get fed up and elect somebody who will stop the chain of losses. How else could it go? In an environment where organizations are encouraged to become tribal (not that PP ever wanted to avoid it, but even if you want to, it'd be very hard to keep out) that's what will keep happening. And the nice ideals would get the treatment the ideals usually get in the middle of the war.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
I think what the first author meant was that the increase in prices would be compensated by the potential savings from using electric cars, since - by their opinion - the TCO of the electric car is lower than the TCO of the gas car. I'm not sure it's true (I guess with enough taxation is could be made so) but at least it doesn't sound insane. The second claim about the grid I have no idea what could be meant.
As for AC, technically it is true - any AC would waste energy as heat (thermodynamics commands us so) and thus, inevitably, heat up the city. I am very much in doubt that heating would be noticeable though - and basically any activity, from breathing to walking, also produces heat, so short of total death of all living things, this is unavoidable. The addition there "is being pumped back out into the city, which is already hotter than surrounding areas" is a kind of dirty trick though - cities are hotter, but AC has nothing to do with it. Removing all AC would not do a thing to change that.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Much truth in that, unfortunately, due to how the world works, the first-worlder manufactured problems tend to become real problems in the other worlds...
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
In Israel there's no "refugee camps" as far as I know. They are either on "territories" - which are under military administration, and yes, military administration can - and does - set up checkpoints, as needed for security, but they are not exclusive to the places called "refugee camps"; or they are in "Palestinian Authority" territory - inside which they are in security control. When entering Israel-controlled territory, again, from PA-controlled territory, there would be security checks - as there would be when crossing any border between areas where people don't exactly trust each other. But this has nothing to do with "refugees". I don't think PA limits movement inside their zone of control - I may be wrong here, not too up to date on the details of their security. Israel does limit entrance for non-citizens - but that applies for every non-citizen, nothing special for "refugees" here, every country I know would somehow regulate entry of non-citizens.
people who lost their homes.
That's the point. None of them lost their homes. None of their parents lost their homes. Maybe their grandparents abandoned their homes 75 years ago - but how many generations should be enough to start getting some other homes finally? By pretending there are some mythical "homes", which current occupants of these places "lost" - despite none of them every living there and most of those not existing already, and those that exist having no chances to be given to them after 75 years - they are only perpetuating the situation where living a normal life is so much harder. I don't think it is reasonable - and probably hasn't been reasonable for half a century now.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
This is the good old malicious compliance technique. You want to cut our budgets? We will find the program working with most sympathetic, most photogenic and most poor orphans and start cuts there, while crying "oh why you hate orphans so much!". You want to regulate our content? We find the most innocent content and maliciously misunderstand the rules to ban it, then go and complain to the local press. You want to inspect our programs? We'll ask you to sign off on every typo fix in every booklet, and then complain you're blocking us from fixing typoes because you hate education and want the students to be illiterate. And so on. It's a war, after all, even if just a culture war.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
as an aside, a Palestinian woman once told me that people joked the Israeli Palestinian refugee camps
"Refugee camps" is such an abused phrase. One can not seriously be a "refugee" for three generations. These are what in the whole other world called towns, or villages, but since certain political forces don't want to recognize Israel exists and is not going away, they still pretend people that fled from there in 1940s-50s are just temporary "refugees" and are about to return there any minute. And of course, people in those "refugee camps" try to live their lives just as they do in any other place. In Lebanon it's probably tougher, because it's a place of constant warfare and also because nobody really is interested in Palestinians setting there permanently (especially given the history of how that worked so far) - but in West Bank there are much better conditions for permanent living.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Fatah (the Islamist faction that runs Gaza)
ITYM Hamas. Fatah is, effectively, PLO.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
How are you listening to music? I've discovered it's hard for me to listen to the music on the background, e.g. while working or reading or anything else. Too distracting. I only can enjoy listening to music when that's the only thing I do, or when I do something that does not require any mental effort (like mowing the lawn). But that leaves me with not a lot of time to listen to any music, especially given I can also listen to audio-books when mowing etc. I'd like to listen to music more but somehow it doesn't work out. Any ideas what could I change?
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
libgen is very different, because each unauthorized copy of the copyrighted material is a separate violation (including, technically, each time it's loaded from a computer disk or network into memory - that's copying too). However, while copyright has been used sometimes to suppress discussion of things (e.g. by scientologists) I don't think that's the issue here.
I'm not accusing you of anything, I'm just noticing how the actions of Big Social influence our thinking about what's allowed and not allowed.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
When I was a kid I wanted to be a fireman, because that's what every (male) kid wants to be in a certain age (or at least that was my impression back then). Well, that and a cosmonaut, but that wasn't really serious because everybody knew how hard it is to become a cosmonaut (for some reason, the same everybody had no information about whether or not it's hard to become a fireman). Then I learned about computers and never wanted to do anything else since.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes
Never heard about such rule, and now that I had, I will defy it with the full feeling of my righteousness, because doing something like putting punctuation inside the quotes is just wrong.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
This thing: https://www.thegripjaropener.com/ - makes jar opening non issue. I'm sure there are many variations of it, I just posted the first that came up in search results. I am probably strong enough to open many jars the old way, but I never do anymore - why bother? I only wonder why this thing is not the standard in every kitchen.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
An example of how social media molds the public discussion. Of course, publishing information which you obtained by legal means about somebody is not illegal. Obtaining it may be illegal if done by means of breaking into somebody's property, for example. But it's not called "the dox" anymore then. But - since Twitter and Facebook told us "publishing hacked information is prohibited!" (which also was a lie in several ways) - now people go around telling each other "talking about hacked information is illegal!"
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
In broader context, at least what I saw from that person until I blocked them, it appears to be on the mark. If not to a particular comment, then definitely to the particular personality.
Though stories like this: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/tsmc-delays-us-chip-fab-opening-says-us-talent-is-insufficient/ (yes, I know the difference between Taiwan and China, but it's beside the main point) make me think it may happen not only because of China getting better, but also because of the US getting worse and losing the hitech edge in service of myopic political considerations. The smart thing would be to say "fuck the unions, chip producing facilities on US soil are vital, especially given how vulnerable Taiwan is" but that's exactly the opposite of what is happening.
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