JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
1hr ago
There is a first mover advantage in sports and soccer spread first
Modern football rules were finalized in mid-19th century. Rugby rules were finalized at the same time. Baseball became popular in US at the same time. There was no "first". Of course, all of those games had historical precursors reaching into the ancient times, but whatever criteria do you use, it is not possible to establish one was "first".
Other countries are in fact poorer than America
Assuming they are (though that would be highly dependent on definition of "poorer" - by GDP per capita both Norway and Switzerland beat the US) I am not sure what this has to do with anything. Rugby is not much cheaper to play than football (if you don't count medical bills of course).
You can reasonably say soccer is more popular elsewhere because they are poorer.
No, not reasonably, Vast majority of players do not play it as high-stakes competition, any they very well can afford the basic equipment and training, They just don't seem to want to. Netherlands may be slightly below US by the GDP per capita, but it doesn't mean they can't afford a baseball bat or an egg-shaped ball. So no, it's not popular because they don't want to play it, not because they can't afford to.
JarJarJedi
11hr ago
Inferior to what? Team sports do not excite me usually, especially very long team sports (I barely have patience for basketball, anything longer is a nope, maybe highlights only). But I assume by "American sports" you mean egghand, which Americans insist to calling "football" to piss off Europeans (a noble goal, but doesn't make it make sense) and baseball? The latter is so boring that it should come with a warning label "may cause prolonged coma, do not attempt without medical supervision", while the former is more exciting, to the point it looks like a bar brawl but without the fun parts like alcohol and singing. Of these three, football (which Americans in line with the Good Ole England tradition long abandoned by the English call "soccer") is the most entertaining, and this is very well confirmed by the experience. Games like baseball or rugby exist everywhere, and they have some popularity, but you would find orders of magnitude more kids (or amateur adults) playing football than any of them. The market has passed its verdict.
JarJarJedi
11hr ago
they would have to pay fees and potentially lose their home.
I haven't heard of any case that HOA evicted someone from their house for unpaid fines. In any case, that would likely be a multi-year very expensive lawsuit. And the students would likely be renters, so they couldn't care less about that. Given that renter evictions in places where there are a lot of students usually are also a long and expensive process, the only real threat to the noise makers would be not extending their lease at the end of it - which may be up to a year ahead - and police arresting them (which probably wouldn't happen but at least they could threaten and intimidate them - if they show up at all).
JarJarJedi
13hr ago
That's by design. High-trust society does not need overlords. Low-trust society does, because it's the only hope peaceful people have against random violence and petty warlords. It all works towards the same goal.
JarJarJedi
13hr ago
always felt that if those things came to life it would be right and imperative to fight against them
Now you're realizing there will be no fight. Good and kind citizens would just vote everything in, to protect the children, preserve the peace and fight the terrorists. And people who warn about the dangers are just insane fearmongering extremists. Who you're going to fight - a concerned father that thinks his teenage daughter spends too much time on tiktok? How are you going to fight him? And when he votes in the regime that can disconnect you from the internet if they don't like what you say, how your fight is going to look then? Are you going to murder all those kindly cat ladies from Kids Guardianship Bureau that would disconnect your account for exposing children to dangerous ideas? Reading 1984 as an adult is much more scarier, when you understand how this actually works...
JarJarJedi
13hr ago
Power of HOA is not inherent - it usually resides on city codes, state laws and such. It is not weird to argue for changing those to curtail powers that can be given to HOA. Regulations that make certain contract provisions - either inherent or implied - void by law are not unheard of. And most HOAs use template contracts, so arguing for changing those is valid too. I had an HOA and I didn't feel its power is too big, but I also heard horror stories too, so I think one can't just dismiss it so easily.
JarJarJedi
13hr ago
Noise ordnances can only be enforces after the noise is made. And, to be honest, what the enforcement can do? In the best case, police would come and tell them to shut it down. For today. And they'll also hate you forever if they learn who called it. And will repeat the same next week. More likely though, police wouldn't even come because they have better things to do (and if it's a university city, as likely as not they voted to give them as little funding as possible anyway) so they'd just register the complaint and be done with it.
JarJarJedi
13hr ago
lots of the (good) places were 55+ and obviously not available to students.
Remembering myself as a student, I am thinking maybe that's exactly the point. I mean, I wasn't particularly wild and rowdy, but there was certain amounts or drinking, listening to loud musing and various behaviors that could be considered obnoxious by 50+ year old me involved. If you want peaceful, quiet, respectful neighbors, the students kinda carry a high risk profile on this one. I know not students are like that, and not all the time, but why take the chance?
JarJarJedi
2d ago
it takes a special kind of ideologue to openly talk about the power over others being an end in and of itself.
Somehow when people imagine going back in time to middle ages, they always imagine themselves as a knight or noble, and never as a peasant who works 18 hours per day. Despite the latter being vast majority.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
I thought degrowth people are just Gaia worshippers that think humans need to be punished for their sins against the Goddess.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
There are much more efficient way to sneer at people. For example, full citizens can sneer at latini, latini can sneer at socii, socii can sneer at provinciales, and all of them could sneer at barbarians. All of it could be done without enslaving anyone. People are very good at constructing hierarchies, there are so many ways. Even if post-basic-material-scarcity society there would be some scarcities, not everybody can command a space ship or be the best Klingon opera singer of the galaxy.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Well, that's like when archeologists find some artifact they don't understand, they classify it as "religious", because anything can be classified this way and it doesn't have to make any sense. Who knows what kind of weird religion those people had, right? But that's not good writing, that's almost literally deus ex machina. Proper worldbuilders don't just push weird stuff into religion.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
As much as I try, I still can't get my head around the mindset of people that insist the government absolutely must prohibit them from filling their own car with gas, and only permit it to highly trained professionals (because all available evidence suggests filling up a car carries a deathly risk and requires very extensive professional expertise to accomplish).
JarJarJedi
3d ago
TBH this all "slave labor" always sounded ridiculous. I mean, you have interstellar technology and energy appliances that can evaporate stars, and yet somehow you still need to feed slop to extremely inefficient biological machines to mine minerals for you? I can see it as a punishment method, but as an economic model? Never made any sense.
It is and it isn't. I mean, in some sense it most certainly is, but it's more than that. For one, it doesn't even mention Christ anywhere so far (I'm about half through, and not once), and neither does it discuss any specifics of the religion. It could be as well applied to any deistic religion (and if it didn't personalize God, some non-deistic ones too). I'm not writing it as a criticism, but rather to say the bucket of "Christian apologetic" is way too small for it, it's like saying Hamlet is a "murder mystery". Technically, yes, but...
JarJarJedi
7d ago
The Screwtape Letters from C.S.Lewis. Even though wokepedia calls it "Christian apologetic" and I am not a Christian, it is a very illuminating and though-provoking work for me. Written in 1942, but so far I have encountered nothing that sounds out of date.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
If we were at real war, it'd be operating. But since they can very well do without it, nobody wants to take a risk, so everybody is covering their asses and crossing the t's and dotting the i's. That's very different from being "destroyed" or even substantially "damaged".
JarJarJedi
10d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Israeli_helicopter_disaster - 73 people died. No enemy action whatsoever.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
potentially in a way that violates federal law and the Constitution
I can't claim I know "federal law", it's vast and incomprehensible. But the Constitution is reasonably small, even with the amendments, and pretty straightforward. How exactly did the military violate it when describing this incident, in your opinion? If you want to expand on the federal law part, feel free to also.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
Ugh you are right, I misread 400% as 4x.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
Race+gender+class+sexual orientation gets you most of the way there.
So if I am a demi-quasi-three-spirit-furro-gnostic-quiddich-alloromantic-onmisexual (a sexual orientation that belongs to me and me alone), I should have exactly the same power as 7 billion or so straight people? I never knew I deserve so much power!
Given that progressives continually make efforts to allow the 72 IQ drug addled rapists what they want,
Nah, they don't even ask those what they want (not if they did they could have gotten any coherent answer anyway). They instead let them roam free and hurt other people if they like to, and then claim power for themselves in their name. Excluding Hunter, there aren't too many drug addicted derelicts in the corridors of power, at least not the open ones (and even Hunter mostly had the power as his dad's proxy). The progressives rule in their name. If you think that billions of dollars allocated for "homeless support NGOs" actually are distributed to the homeless, or the homeless have any say whatsoever in where and how much of that money is going, man I have news for you.
My point is that the progressive system makes it a moral imperative to do so specifically in the direction of lower power groups taking down those with more power.
Again, close but wrong. The direction is progressive-aligned groups taking power from groups that are not progressive-aligned. It absolutely does not matter who had more or less power before. Did you see some progressive complain about women underrepresented in academia? Sure you did. Did you know that women are actually getting significantly more academic degrees than men, and it's not even close? Now, did you ever hear any progressive complain about that or do anything to fix it? Of course not. Because the direction is not towards equality, but towards more power to progressives. If it turns out that certain minority demographic tends to predominantly hold conservative views - the progressives instantly lose any interest in this group being represented or holding any power.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
The fact that this identity matters enough to write about, and that doing so can garner pushback, is itself proof that there is still a lot of work to be done.
Funny how that works. For example, black characters in movies aren't surprising anyone for decades now. And yet, we get black Anne Boleyn, black vikings, black Snape, black Helen of Troy, black Snow White - damn the realism, who needs realism, we need to push representation! Moreover, the more it happens, the more oppression is being claimed, and the more attention is paid to the identity of the actor. It's like the Stalin's theory of class struggle - the more "representation" we get, the stronger and louder "oppression" claims are. Moreover, simultaneously identity does not matter at all (so what if Vikings are black? They are just actors, ignore their skin color and don't be a bigot!) and matters a huge deal (try casting a white person to play Rosa Parks or a straight person to play Harvey Milk and see what happens). As always, this is the sign that the rules aren't meant to achieve result, they are meant to exercise power. It's not for you to decide whether historical or fictional character looks one way or another. It's not even for the author to decide that. The needs of the Party will determine that. And if the Party says Anne Boleyn was black, then she was black, and if you object, that's the proof you are a racist and we need more power to the Party to force you in line.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
The point isn’t that no person should have power over another,
Well, you literally said this: "that no person or demographic should have power over another." But if you admit it doesn't make sense, we can move on to this:
no group (and there are a set number of defined groups that qualify here, not just drawing random lines) has any more power in society broadly than any other.
Where those groups come from? Why those groups and not others? Why shouldn't they have more power? If one group is a single man, and another group is a million women, why the latter shouldn't have more power? I don't think there is any sensical definition of "groups" and "power" that can make this not crazy. Even if we go just numerically - why 100 highly virtuous people, who had broad knowledge, exemplary behavior and excellent morals, should not have more power than 100 crazy drug addicted rapists with IQ of 72? I don't think anybody who is not hardcore anarchist, whatever party he is voting now, would sign up under them having the same power.
It requires those who would naturally be on the bottom of society (or near it) to band together to exert power over those who would otherwise be more powerful.
This is completely vacuous statement though. Of course if some people band together and exert power, the other people would be less powerful than if they didn't. That's just how "power" works, you don't need any ideology to realize that - just as you don't need any ideology to realize gravity exists.
It is attempting to neutralize the dog-eat-dog state of nature
In what way? What you described is just "we want to eat dog to, let's eat dog". I mean, fine, if it's about banding together to seize more power - that's natural, but then be open about it. And, incidentally, that's exactly how I described it initially.
JarJarJedi
13d ago
Your not trying hard enough, should of tried harder!
The existentialists are the worst!
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