JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
Formerly "SandwichWarrior" and "The Upright Man", may or may not be feral, is most certainly quixotic.
User ID: 4009
I see what you're trying to do here, you have been extremely rude and passive-aggressive throughout this entire thread and I think it's bullshit. As such I choose to embrace Puddleglum.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
10d ago
As someone who has been on the opposite side of a number of these arguments, I feel like the obvious reply to your "obvious solution" is that immigrants are not "doing the jobs Americans" wont, they are doing the jobs that you do not want to pay an American to do.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
11d ago
there is nothing special or interesting about Judaism qua Judaism
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
11d ago
Christian views on lying are complicated.
No they really aren't. It's almost universally accepted that all dishonesty is sinful, what disagreements there are, are about to what degree and what constitutes "dishonesty". EG is a false statement still "a lie" if there was no intention to deceive?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
11d ago
What's the most Israel-like country that's not Israel?
I feel like it would probably be Poland or Ukraine.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
11d ago
Astronaut with a Handgun: Always has been.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
11d ago
I feel like the combined abandonment of both impartiality and anonymity is what im talking when i talk about the internet becoming more "closed" it used to be that no one gave a shit who you were, where you came from, or what you thought but those days are long gone.
I feel like the "mid-2010s" is too late, by 2010 the internet was already mostly closed, at least compared to what it had been in the late 90s and early 00s.
I was talking about this in a reply to @SneedNibba last week and now I think I may just have to suck it up and rewrite my lost post on "Toxic Femineity and Cyberpunk".
What Trump's policy which you consider a resounding success would be threatened by the Dems taking over Congress?
Immigration, Onshoring, and the ongoing war on fraud and lawlessness (see my prior posts on picking up tuna cans). Furthermore it is not like the Democrats have have been particularly shy about their intentions should they win. We have sitting senators like Elissa Slotkin (D Michigan) flatly stating that the Department of Justice should use targeted prosecutions to deter young people from doing business with Republicans, and rather than call out such blatantly fascist bullshit, the response from the "moderate center" has been to complain about how her statements could potentially undermine said prosecutions.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
12d ago
I agree that "Maybe it's an age thing"
but at the same time "discontent young men" are not exactly known for having their shit together.
You are correct, and I appreciate you propagating the knowledge. To be clear I am only recounting my own experience of how the culture of "tech" changed during that period rather than commenting on the tech itself. As I recall MyDoom and Conficker both had their hey-day in that 2005 - 2008 transitional period that I cited, and I would posit that both were contributing factors to the internet becoming a "low trust" environment.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
12d ago
For the record; you are making appeals to "simple and straightforward language" in a space where talk is cheap.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
15d ago
I know at least one who does.
Debatable. Superior to certain denominations of feel-good Protestantism or the prosperity Gospel? I will grant you that. But superior to "any sect of Trinitarian Christianity" full stop? I think the jury is still out.
Is this really true?
Yes, but much like a Good Jazz club during prohibition, you're not going to find them unless you already have a notion of where to look or who to ask because they're not in the Yellow Pages.
Part of this is by their own design, and part of it is because the Obama and Biden administrations both collaborated with companies like Google and Meta to suppress red-aligned sites and stories.
Perhaps this is just nostalgia talking, but I feel like hacker/techie culture and the "open internet" peaked in the early 00s, it wasn't quite the wild west of the 80s and 90s where you could just remote in to Cal-Tech's network if you knew the socket address, but we had maps/discoverability and the internet was still generally a high-trust environment. Bots and spam were not really a thing yet. IRC and BBS were at their peak and the high degree of overlap between the hacker/tech scene and AM/HAM radio culture ensured a broad representation of cultures and backgrounds.
I won't try to claim that the four tribes lived in harmony until the Fire Nation attacked, but I do feel like there was a certain Understanding or Detente, where everybody kind of agreed "IDGAF who you are, show me the code".
Somewhere between 2006 and 2010 this changed. both the IRC and radio scenes were in decline and the scuffle for control of the Open Projects Network after Rob Levin's death in 2006 combined with "Big Short" in 2008 seems to have formed an inflection point where the neighborhood changed and people started locking their proverbial doors. "Codes of Conduct" and "Position Statements" proliferated while big names like Torvalds, Stallman, and ESR publicly started building walls and planning their exit strategies. Meanwhile less prominent users started to self-sort into their own spaces.
Reddit and Twitter briefly reversed this trend of self sorting by virtue of being so big, but both were explicitly west-cost liberal aligned spaces (until Musk bought twitter but that's a separate story), and thier moderation/norms reflected this. Contra a lot of posters here who will point to Gamergate as the pivotal moment in the culture war, I feel that by 2014 the different tribes had already mostly gone their separate ways. Gamergate was a intratribal skirmish amongst of Blues arguing about "ethics in games journalism" while what Reds who were paying attention watched on in bemusement. Imagine believing that Journalists have ethics
There's a huge potential audience for a leet uncensored darknet cyberpunk hacker forum, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't exist yet.
If my own experience is representative, such spaces tend to be "by invite only", and to the extent that they are not, finding them is the first test in the entrance exam.
These days I find that the bifurcation of internet spaces and by extension the echo chambers is increasingly amplified by algorithmic factors, as Google, X, TikTok, Et Al are businesses and their business is not "Truth" or "Communication" but rather "Engagement". They show you what they think you want, and what they think you want is based on who they think you are. There is "Youtube A" and "Youtube B", "X A" and "X B", and only rarely do the two meet. If you want to do a fun experiment, buy a new device and spin up a new google account on it, keep it on a separate network from your main device, ideally try to keep it in a completely separate room or building. Then either loan it to a friend's tween daughter or download a bunch of Lainey Wilson and Ella Langley, (or if you're already a country type download a bunch of K-pop instead) and note how your search results and twitter feed on the new device differs from your main one.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
16d ago
I was speaking more generally, but part of my point is that if you are typing your search in Latin characters rather than kanji the algo is not going to give you the native Japanese internet.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that.
Last week I started writing an effort post that was in part a response to @SneedNibba's post on the closure of the internet and some of the replies to @Lizzardspawn's post on the French Freezer hack only to loose it to a negligent refresh.
The post was about how a "high trust" environment turns into to a "low trust" one and the transitional phases in between. When @Lizzardspawn says that "there was never trust which could be betrayed" I know that they are wrong, because I saw it with my own eyes. I'm not quite old enough to be one of those "ancientfags" who pines for the days before the Eternal September but I am old enough to have watched the internet transition from open frontier to a collection of closed territories.
My first tax-paying job as a snot-nosed teenager at the electronics store back in the 90s was as much for access to the employee discount and manufacturers catalogs as it was for the money. I was one of those young BBS punks who, in the eyes of the ancients, was ruining the internet, and now with the benefit of hindsight I agree with them. While I may have been just one drop in a deluge, I did my part to make things worse, and recognizing that had a profound influence on the paths I would take later in life.
I have written before about how the thing that what made early LessWrong and the weekly discussion threads on SlateStarCodex.com special was that they were a neutral third space where genuine cross tribal communication could occur. While I can't really blame anyone deciding that they no longer wish to carry the burden of maintaining such a space, because make no mistake it is a burden, I can't help but feel like something of value has been lost. I am not angry, I am disappointed.
Where this comes back to you comment is that because as one of those young IRC/BBS punks turned "oldfag", I am conscious of the algorithm and it's nudges, I am aware that there is are entire internet eco-systems that might as well be made of dark-matter to the people who post here because the algo would never show it to them.
Point being that there are spaces online where Anime is discussed in Japanese, there are spaces where MAGA is the norm and any claim that "woke owns the discourse" would be met with derision and possibly a ban. The world (both online and off) is so much bigger than people know.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
17d ago
If you are talking about the availability of handguns say "handguns"
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
17d ago
And junkies want their next fix, that doesn't absolve the the dealers.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
17d ago
It's almost as if you will know them by their fruits.
More readily available firearms
In 1950 and ammunition were something that anyone with the scratch could simply order through the mail or pick up off the shelf at their local home goods store. The federal requirement for a license to manufacture or sell firearms and ammunition doesn't come along till 1968, and background checks not until the '80s.
Similarly when my Grandmother was teaching high school in the 60s and 70s the school had a gun club and a marksmanship team, and as a result there are photos of students and teachers walking around the school with rifles over their shoulders like it's no big deal.
Point being that the availability of firearms declined dramatically between 1950 and 1990, only recently (within the last decade or so) has that trend reversed.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
18d ago
Concealed carrying teachers is a solution for the exurbs, not cities in blue states with terrible schools for ideological reasons.
It's a solution there too, just not one that any right thinking blue would be willing to countenance.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
25d ago
Subnautica 2 and Soma make an interesting pairing if you want something you can play together with the wife. Wildly different tone and color-pallet but a lot of overlapping themes.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
27d ago
In the US at least "Watermelon" is a Commie who pretends to be an Environmentalist. Ie "green on the outside but a red on the inside".
Neither your patronizing contempt for your audience nor your obvious ignorance of Christian Apologetics (or Western Literature for that matter) paint you in a very flattering light.
My point is simple, I have free will and I can choose to believe or disbelieve as I see fit. In other words...
If that makes me "not very rationalist" then so be it.
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