MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
No bio...
User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
To play devils advocate here, if the system is completely broken and unable to produce a good result on anything that matters, maybe a defect bot is exactly what you need. Cooperation with a system that doesn’t work doesn’t fix that system. I think that our systems are so broken at this point that we either do the major fixes we need or consign ourselves to the scrap heap of history where future civilizations will wonder how we let it all fall apart.
I don’t like Trump at all, I’d very much rather have anyone else. But on the other hand the hour is late and if we wait for something better we might be doing so in a completely failed state instead of merely a failing one. A third of Americans can’t read. We can’t handle disaster recovery, fix potholes, build aircraft, or fix train tracks. Large portions of most cities are no go zones, often featuring open air drug markets. Is Trump or any other “defect bot” going to actually be able to fix that? It’s one in a million. On the other hand the system that you think we should encourage cooperation with has failed in most respects. Risky surgery or slow decline into death?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
It’s a lot easier to “corral your radical elements” when you have a firm grasp on most institutions and are firmly in power. They essentially don’t need the votes and vocal support of the far left wing. They can tell them to sit down and shut up because even if that 3-5% of far left tankie communist group stays home on Election Day, democrats will still have substantial power, influence, and support. They will have 240 or so electoral votes in the can. They own the deep state, the university, the media, and so on. The GOP doesn’t have th3 luxury of telling the far right to bugger off. They lose if that faction stays home, and if they lose, a lot of the current project of trying to reconquer the institutions will be put off for another generation or two.
And I would consider Mises and Heritage foundation to be fairly galaxy brained institutions. They put out plenty of projects exploring how a conservative might go on to solve pressing issues in our society. There are also church institutions that give reasons for social conservative ideas.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
It depends. The health of the state is so bad at this point that I think keeping the status quo might be worse long term. The government we have, the old guard political class cannot actually solve problems, fix things, or come up with new ideas. FEMA can’t handle hurricane, but Cajun navy and private charities can. The government can’t handle education or health or roads. Trump might well be the shakeup we need. But I’m not sure because the amount of state capacity that will be wasted fighting every single step back will likely make it all worse.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
Honestly I’d be much more inclined to believe if physicists could explain how FTL or even near light travel is possible without an entire planet’s worth of mass for fuel. And NASA or SETI finding signals of intelligent beings. Or you know those huge space telescopes, it’s going to make me interested if they find evidence of life and especially intelligent life in space.
I’ve never heard the History Channel Alien guy explain why JWT or Hubble never found an inhabited planet.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
I’ve always seen that as a perception of social class. The left sees itself as the upper class ruling elites and the conservatives are seen as lower class. They’re “the help” the kind of people who fix your toilet, or install your new energy efficient air conditioner, or the ones who cook in restaurants or make stuff in factories or raise your food. They’ve called it Flyover country for decades because they see it as the places where the losers live.
I think at least half of the conspiracy theories started as jokes. They know that their ruling class sees them as idiots, and they might well choose to have a bit of fun pretending to believe in weird stuff just to annoy their betters. Jewish Space Lasers is certainly a joke — I know of no one anywhere who believes that the Jews have space lasers.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
I think the thing with Trump is that like or hate him, he’s not beholden to traditional politics or norms. He’s the guy who wants to get things done and build things. Whether or not he’s right about all of this, I think is up to personal opinion. But what scares people is that he sees those norms and systems as obstacles to be overcome rather than rules to obey at cost of doing the thing.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
I think I might go as an Amish woman or something. I dunno.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
I mean wouldn’t that just be plain old ordinary network security protocols. I’ll agree that you aren’t going to get to 100% trust here, but the point I’m making is that we can do a pretty good job with similar things all the time, yet somehow in the case of securing the election, it’s like there’s a bizarre mental block where it’s not worth trying to do these kinds of things because we won’t get to 100% trust or 100% hack-proof immediately. We trust that kind of technology to get packages around and to validate property transfers and bank transfers all the time. Nobody I know is thinking that UPS is going to lose their packages. The big problem isn’t UPS losing packages, it’s porch pirates.
Now secondly, providing that you keep the original ballots, finding the back door hack is dead easy because you have the data that produced the original count, and if you recount the same ballots, you get the same numbers and if you don’t, there’s a problem. There are also fraud detection techniques that are known in statistics and forensic accounting that would be fairly useful in determining whether the results on the computer are likely fraud. Even if none of that in isolation is enough, if you do good chain of custody, have good network security, have the original ballots, and use forensic accounting and data science, this system would probably be more secure than most other systems that we use daily. At some point, it’s good enough.
And I think a lot of the distrust is exact that nobody is willing to put forth the effort to secure the election to the same standard as even my Amazon order. In fact, when someone tries to add a layer of security, even fairly common sense stuff like government IDs, the resounding answer is NO. And so you can’t shakes the suspicions because it often looks like the government is hostile to the idea of making the system harder to tamper with or vote without having the right to do it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
I think it’s possible. If you have a barcode on an object that allows you to track it across a network, and you don’t necessarily have To know what the contents are. UPS can track millions of packages from warehouse to multiple locations to your front door by scanning the barcode on the box and uploading that to a server. Blockchain can be tracked without needing to know what the “package” contains or represents. This isn’t a ned to invent new technology. We could do things like this now with pretty muc( off the shelf technology. Scan the barcode on every ballot on paper at the point it’s cast. Scan every time the ballots move. If you see ballots arrive that cannot be traced to a precinct, then you’re likely seeing fake ballots.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
I think this might be a just so story. There was no serious investigation, no evidence presented, no experts testified in congress. So it’s sort of an odd proposition to suggest that a thing nobody even attempted to do could not have possibly changed anyone’s mind.
The position became very entrenched by now because every cathedral organ was screaming at them that “there was no fraud”, telling them that these were either stupid or bigoted for daring to think that, and telling them there was no reason to bother to ask questions, let alone investigate anything. At the same time the alternative press is reporting on reports of anomalies, there’s the president talking about fraud and filing lawsuits. Those lawsuits were not taken seriously and were dismissed on standing. In short the public was very loudly told nothing to see here, and no investigations happened.
Imagine the opposite. There are claims of fraud. And instead of being summarily dismissed, the attorney general of the states involved open investigations. Now there’s going to be evidence presented. If a pipe is supposed to have burst, then there’s going to be evidence that someone actually called a plumber who fixed that pipe. If ballots are showing up people are going to investigate where they came from. Computer experts would examine the voting machines and even publicly test them. Now there’s at least the sense that the system is looking at the claims. And whatever they find is publicly available. People can look at the data on the voting machine and decide, but at minimum it’s not summary dismissal. If you do that when Trump claims fraud, you can point to sworn testimony in court, a witness cracking on cross examination, or at least some evidence that he’s wrong.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
I think the legitimacy of elections is probably one of the most important things to protect in a democratic society. If people don’t believe the election is fair, eventually it’s going to go much farther than it did in 2021. Voting is the alternative to warfare and revolution. And if people don’t trust the election, they won’t accept the results. The best remedy is to take the accusations extremely seriously and do a thorough investigation, and if nothing is found, fine. But the tactic used in 2020 of blanket dismissal, condescending comments about disinformation, and generally mocking the very idea not only didn’t reassure the public that the government was committed to fair, open, and honest elections, but often pushed people the other way. The perception was “the government isn’t going to look at the evidence, and is going to simply label all of this as disinformation and call anyone who dares to question it a conspiracy theorist, so why should I believe it?”
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
I don’t see the desire to know that the system is fair as “reactionary”. It’s actually quite telling that we actually don’t have a reasonable way to detect fraud or secure the system. Add in a highly unusual election where millions are voting by drop box, introducing more opportunities for fraud, and yeah people might be a bit suspicious. I think the issues should addressed simply because until the state can demonstrate that it’s taking the problem seriously, eventually all elections will be contested simply because it cannot be demonstrated that the system has been secured.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
One thing that I think would go a very long way is taking claims of fraud seriously and taking serious steps to demonstrate that the electoral system is being run to prevent fraud. So if I were in charge of the election system, I’d require that some sort of government issued photo ID be used. I’d bend over backwards to make it easy (with proper source documents) to get those kinds of IDs. Second, I’d create an organized and fair way to validate the voter rolls such that we don’t have large numbers of people on the rolls that should not be there. Matching up names to death certificates seems like a good way to get rid of dead people on the rolls. And I’m probably not too far off in saying that if you haven’t filed state income taxes or applied for state benefits in 3 or more years, you probably don’t live here. If you’re required to prove citizenship to register, I think that would go pretty far to prevent illegals from voting.
The counting I think could be shown online without too much problem. And I think doing so would be helpful because it’s a lot harder to monkey with a count that is done publicly. And I think I’d probably also have the totals by precinct and even voting location would make it hard to inject ballots without someone noticing. I want to make auditing easier without being able to identify who voted for whom is the goal. I’m not sure if it would be possible to have a sort of blockchain setup that would allow people to track their own ballot from the moment they cast it until it’s officially tallied, but if it’s possible, not only would it help with building trust, but would make audits easier as you’d end up having ballots show up that were not cast anywhere.
Third, I’d take reports of anomalies seriously. I don’t care what people think they’re seeing, but if it’s possible fraud, it deserves a full investigation. And prosecution for fraud should be a part of that.
Do all of that, and I don’t think anyone could doubt that the election was honest.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
I have accepted that Islamist ideology is the natural bent of Islamic countries. What I do not accept is that we should allow a major portion f the globe to destabilize so they can have democracy. The results of supporting these popular movements is basically that the region is much more unstable, much less secular, and more likely to persecute women and minorities in their own countries and launch attacks against Israel. The result of democracy in Iraq was a radical Shia regime, not a Jeffersonian democracy.
I think any sane alien would be doing much like what I’m proposing. If the results of our democracy were constant attacks on other planets, murder of anyone who didn’t match our ideology, and destabilizing the rest of the galaxy, these aliens would not be in favor of us having a democracy. They’d much rather we were stable, peaceful, and under a dictatorship than that we’re attacking Alpha Centauri, killing Swedes and killing anyone who isn’t fitting in with religion.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
I’ll definitely agree on the education part. I think honestly the schools are so bad at this point that they’re meaningless. It seems like it started with the end of the Cold War, mostly because we were moving all the factories to other parts of the world. That triggered a crisis as now everyone needed a HS diploma and a bit more if they wanted to have anything like a working class, let alone middle class lifestyle. And since the biggest determinant of getting a “good job” once the factory was gone was education, all barriers to education were systematically eliminated. You can’t be so cruel as to flunk a kid who can’t do the work because if he doesn’t graduate, he’s going to live in poverty and be basically unemployed forever. Then of course you have student loans so everyone could go to college. Of course colleges saw this as a cash cow. Lower the standards so that any kid who graduates high school can “earn” a diploma.
And now you have functionally uneducated college grads who believe they’re smart competent people, but aren’t and probably wouldn’t pass their grandparents freshman year of high school. Try it. Find math problems that a 14 year old in 1920 was expected to be able to solve and give it to a college grad in 2024. They cannot do it. They cannot read books that were read for fun in 1950. Forget such arcane subjects as geography, history, or science. It’s a scary sad thing that people with college degrees know less about science than high school kids in 1980.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
But if the mandate is to mitigate the logistics and supply issue, legibility is in fact a failure. All of the time spent confronting groups, confiscating their supplies to audit them, and so on means failure at *the reason we bothered to create FEMA in the first place. I think this is one of many things Neo-Reactionary thinking is correct about. The state apparatuses are rewarded or punished and basically held to account on process and legibility rather than accomplishing the mission at hand. And so these agencies spend much time making sure that they aren’t going to get dinged for not following the process that most agencies suck at the mission they exist to do.
I think at this point, most civilians are so done with FEMA that they’re actively trying to avoid FEMA knowing where they are and what they’re doing. Which is a mixed bag. Having untrained people trying to repair things or rescue people is probably a bad idea, but following the rules is likely to see supplies not get into the zone until more people die. The loss of trust in authority is going to be hard to overcome. Not much sympathy as they seem to be bringing it on themselves.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
I think the aftermath is a complete loss. The Arab Spring wasn’t about democracy, it was an Islamist movement based in getting rid of the old guard who were largely secular socialists and nationalists. Our ignorance of the region and what these despots were holding back is obvious now and anyone familiar with the region and the history of could have easily told you that weakening these secular regimes is good optics and terrible policy. And where these despots were weakened or overthrown, we now have either outright Islamist governments or powerful military junta’s threatening jihad at either the secular government or the designated target of the Jews. But then again our midwits are not exactly scholars and were taken in by the optics that happened to coincide with their interpretation of the neo-liberal right side of history narrative that holds that humans all naturally are alike and think exactly like post-modern liberals and want nothing other than to join the Rules Based International Order and drink Starbucks and send their daughters to humanities programs at Evergreen.
To be blunt, my take on politics both domestic and international is Real Politick. You are a fool if you’re trying to govern based on delusions and fantasies about how you wish the world works. And you are a double fool if you’re misunderstanding human nature. We are not fundamentally good people, no one is. And pretending that if we just ignore reality hard enough we can wish ourselves to Utopia is just going to set everything back.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
Honestly, I think the same. We’ve lost the ability to do a lot of things that our great grandparents took for granted that would just work. I could go down the list of usual government functions and for the most part we did them better in 1924 than we do in 2024. And I think it’s a combination of easy living, culture and poor education that’s created an elite that simply cannot handle the realities of running a complex society in the real world.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
The trouble with ignoring the sentiment is that you always have to deal in the reality of limited resources. You simply cannot do everything and as such you need to set priorities that make some sort of sense. And really we don’t have the ability to police the world while also dealing with a major crisis. The same soldiers cannot both be preparing to deploy to the Middle East and mounting search and rescue in the Heléne hurricane zone. Of the two, I think any sensible leader would choose to at least delay until the S&R stuff is finished before packing them up to sail overseas.
As for the post WW2 consensus, I think it died the minute Russia invaded.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
It’s a way to get away with using less skilled workers and cheaper and faster training. Properly training someone to handle a disaster would require the person to have some understanding of what kinds of things happen in disasters to various common systems that run society. You’d have to show them what happens to electrical grids in hurricanes, the issues involved in fixing them, and what upstream and downstream effects might be. This requires at least a basic understanding of electrical engineering. Which takes a lot of intelligence and skill to understand. It’s full of math and physics, after all. Even getting someone to understand the system as well as a journeyman electrician is going to take some time and money. It will help them understand things like why an app is a bad way to distribute aid in a hurricane aftermath zone, but you’ll have to pay more to attract a better candidate, and you have to train them. Or you can set up a generic process for every disaster and hope that they’ll be good enough for most disasters even when executed by Jenny a former secretary at a car dealership who has no idea what the issues even are. Before the disaster scenario happens, you’re getting kudos for doing this because Jenny is a pretty cheap hire, and she’s ready to go within a few months instead of years.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
I don’t think that makes much sense. Simpson’s didn’t help that image, but there are a lot of big scary images of nuclear weapons being used, scare propaganda about the aftermath of nuclear war, which certainly don’t help the public image of nuclear power. Add in a few disasters (Fukushima, Chernobyl, and 3-mile Island) and as a power source it has an image problem that long predates Homer Simpson.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
I’m not going to deny the tech has a part. But I find the writing part to be a big turn off personally. No character in any story has any sort of real arc, the beats are nearly identical with only minor variations to accommodate the plot. I think part of what made the first Joker so interesting is that the character was different than the usual comic characters and rather than a story that plods along the usual tried and true beats of a superhero movie, it went in a different direction. Authentic and interesting characters, unique stories, and better dialogue I think would help a great deal. I think it would also help a great deal if the heroes of movies and their close associates didn’t have such strong plot armor. They just don’t feel like there are real stakes for a lot of reasons. Nobody gets hurt in a serious way that lasts. The characters aren’t personally invested in the outcome. It’s just watching CGI heroes do CGI stunts and I’m often left wondering why I care.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
I think the rise of streaming certainly hurt movies, but I submit that it’s the poor quality of the films themselves that are killing the industry off completely. The writing is often boring and predictable, and the plots of most movies can be easily discernible by watching the trailers. The superhero movie is boring, nothing interesting happens in them, and so nobody gets excited to go see New Marvel or New DC because everyone knows the Brand and they know what the experience will be like long before they buy their (relatively expensive) tickets, popcorn and soda. The same can be true of other genres there’s just nothing interesting going on as movies converge on the same Save the Cat beat sheet with the same progressive philosophy and the same Joss Weaten “take nothing seriously” sensibility.
This comes about because of the insular nature of Hollywood. You want in, you have to attend film schools in one of maybe a dozen Big Name schools. You need a patron. You need to go to Hollywood where you get invited to the right parties. The expense and time sink necessary to make it pretty much precludes anyone who doesn’t come from money, and the constant need to network often accidentally on purpose weeds out anyone who isn’t on the liberal side of Woke Progressive. But since everyone involved comes from the same background with the same or similar life experiences, they cannot be creative. There’s nothing new brought in. You won’t ever hear the viewpoint of a mere middle class man, let alone a poor one. You won’t hear anything authentic to a religious person. These writers have likely never had a ten minute conversation with someone like that.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
I’ll also point out that there aren’t a lot of alternatives right now with the reach and scale of Hollywood and as such it’s a lot like pro sports. Yes there are minor leagues, or maybe college sports but most often people only choose them when they don’t have easy access to the big leagues and almost no one would deliberately choose the small leagues when given the option to see major league teams.
In movies, a lot of this is based around intellectual property— there are very few space stories that you can do without tripping over something owned by a big studio somewhere. Most superhero types have something like them in either the Marvel or DC catalog. And on it goes. So you either go with small movie houses — either indies or Christian, or possibly foreign, made by people who didn’t quite make it, or you go see a blockbuster made by the usual suspects who will own all the rights to those kinds of films and shows until the end of time. If this iteration of Joker fails, who cares, we own the rights and in five or ten years we make a different Joker movie. Not like anyone else owns the right to make movies about evil clowns like this.
They’re largely propaganda machines in my opinion. They exist to create consensus around an idea and to craft legislation to turn that consensus into law. The “ideological tax” you speak of is how those groups get the money to get the job done.
It seems to go in stages with the propaganda stage going first. Issue comes up. Think tanks find research to support the ideological agenda the think tank has. Then they issue white papers that summarize that research and debunk the opposition narrative. At the same time they issue the talking points that get injected into the media by aligned media outlets and politicians. At that point they start talking about legislation to fix the issue or blocking bad legislation.
I don’t think you can get rid of them entirely. They’re a big part of how the elites control culture. If you weaken or destroy that system another will be created or co-opted. Power is power.
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