Mewis
1yr ago
Right, but in practice, his academic understanding and dialectic amounted to devising ever more sophisticated methods of waging culture war, in ever sharper methods of criticism, and all with a clear ideological outcome in mind - the production of political activists to go and spread the bad news. It's hard to imagine the same thing occurring in a programming course. These kids weren't dumb. They were carefully and rigorously selected - no doubt for their ideological discipline, their ability to internalize antiracist rhetoric, and their willingness to challenge and rebel against traditional authority. They were then armed with the finest rhetorical weapons modern society affords, and taught they were not allowed to defend themselves against them. Of interest is that the professor himself has no defense against them either, beyond a weak appeal to his own anti-racist credentials.
Mewis
1yr ago
The last kids movie I saw (with my nephews) was Strange World. It's the latest offering, featuring a sensitively depicted gay main character, a harmonious multiracial family, and a plot that deals with intergenerational trauma and the need to accept reduced living standards for the sake of the environment. Not kidding. It's also pretty damn boring. (I could go into further detail.)
Mewis
1yr ago
Who's to say that some phenomenological aspects of being human aren't so complex that no one set of vocabulary is capable of describing it all? Perhaps some qualities of human minds/souls/whatever are ineffable, or so unique and subjective that one cannot help but create a new label for oneself in describing one's personality?
Obviously every individual is unique in a way that defies the ability of language to describe in a single word or phrase. But it's not clear what, if anything, this has to do with gender, or why, having staked out this position, suddenly it's necessary to invent a whole load of new terms to express the things that apparently can't be expressed. The 'demigirl' might feel less feminine (whatever that means), but does that actually justify the word rather than just describing her as an unconventional woman? Cut an arm off an octopus, you just get a wounded octopus, not a septapus.
Mewis
3mo ago
Did he pour the drinks down her gullet? Yes, alcohol impairs your judgement. And yet you are still responsible for the choices you make, wise or foolish they might be.
Mewis
1yr ago
My own two cents:
I, like very many gay men, went through a period of expressed gender nonconforming behavior in childhood. I don't remember that clearly, but this may have included identifying with female characters, playing with clothes and 'girl toys', and at one point even asking people to call me by a girl's name (though I don't remember this my brother told me I did this a few times). All of which I had grown out of even by the age of 8 or 9. I wouldn't say I'm happy today, or that I've ever been meaningfully happy, but I don't really experience any gender dysphoria (if anything I would like to be more masculine).
So from my own perspective, the rush to label or corral children as young as five into transition seems totally crazy. And it makes me wonder if five-year old me might not have been led down such a path by an over-enthusiastic adult eager to reward me with attention.
Parents are being scared into doing this. They are being told that if they don't do everything in their power to encourage transition, they could end up with their kid committing suicide or being taken away from them.
Mewis
1yr ago
Fires eventually burn themselves out, but you should still be concerned if you find one in your home.
In Rwanda, men hacked their neighbors to death with machetes. People were condemned to death for wearing glasses and owning books in Cambodia. The Soviets slaughtered thousands of whales to meet quotas that served no purpose. How crazy can people get?
Mewis
1yr ago
There's no doubt it's hyperbole, but you can make yourself believe if you repeat it loudly and often enough. You can whip yourself into a paranoid frenzy, and make yourself believe that JK Rowling is hiding underneath your bed waiting to strangle you in your sleep, and turn every single debate over pronoun usage into a life-and-death struggle for survival. Every day it's 1933 in Germany, forever. And this is in fact, effective political strategy for people who liberals find sympathetic.
Mewis
1yr ago
Even Elon Musk is a human - nobody holds their principles so highly that they won't discard them to safeguard their 2 year old child. To me, the real problem is the people who seem to think that they're exposing hypocrisy by trying to goad Elon into breaking his own rules. They're not.
Mewis
1yr ago
Because the worship of intelligence/IQ I see in these circles, including on here, usually "X is really really good at STEM/maths". I've seen comments casually tossed off about 'normies', about '95 IQ rednecks', many assumptions that Ordinary People Are Dumb, and we know it because they must all be sub-100 IQ, we know that because if they were Smart Like Us they wouldn't be rednecks or normies.
My favorite fake fact is that people with <100 IQ can't understand hypotheticals. I've worked minimum wage jobs and I've met some real fucking dummies - yes, they can understand hypotheticals.
Well, guys, here's one of the Smart Like Us crew who is dumber than an ordinary person when it came to "I can make yuuuuge money out of trading magic beans".
Ordinary people buy scratchcards. And honestly, who's to say that SBF even messed up as far as his own benefit is concerned. He got to spend several years as a rich and influential power broker, and may still evade severe punishment. The actual dumb people are the 110 IQ cryptophiles that got ripped off again.
The entire set-up at his Bahamas tax haven base (see the Sequoia article again, man that is probably the worst thing this Adam Fisher ever wrote but it's a treasure trove of nuggets about the mindset of everyone involved, from the fanboy journalist to the investors throwing money at Bankman-Fried on the basis of one Zoom call) was juvenile - it sounds like "still living like we're in college in our second year even though we're all late twenties and heading into our thirties".
This describes a lot of people in their late twenties nowadays. It's not abnormal.
Mewis
1mo ago
This sort of romantic neo-nazi image is ridiculous. The Nazis were not high trust. In fact they were the total opposite, a heap of the most venal, odious, dishonourable bandits to ever come out of Germany (which is saying something). They had no concerns for honour or trust or mercy, no respect for the traditional religion of Europe, no respect for the ancient peoples of Europe. They started vast wars over money and land, lied habitually, ran a horribly corrupt state built on exploitation and outright slavery, and slaughtered millions.
Nor was their state really ever intended to be self sufficient. From the start, the intention was to loot, conquer and subjugate their neighbours. Indeed, the German nationalist project was mostly complete by 1938 with the annexations of Austria and the Germanized regions of Czechoslovakia, and scarcely a peep from the Allies. But the Nazis dreamed of imperial domination and glory, not self sufficiency. Instead of rallying the nations of Europe against Bolshevism ( an easy task), Hitler squandered his credibility. By the end of WWII even anti communists like Churchill were drinking with Stalin, and it was left to the US to establish an anti communist front in Europe - well, the half of it that was left.
It's interesting because we have a much better example of reactionary "we don't do globalism here"autarky from the 1940s - Franco, who carefully avoided entanglement in either WWII or the postwar international order. That didn't work either, but he failed with more grace and less bloodshed than Hitler.
Mewis
5mo ago
Humans are neither hyper rational utility calculators nor are they blind rule followers. Everyone uses both rules and a consideration of consequences to help them make decisions. But it's my impression that consequentialists are much more resistant to this idea.
It's a typical consequentialist trick to conjure up some idiotic thought experiment, as if it means anything. It doesn't.
Mewis
6mo ago
No, but his work lives rent free in my head.
Regardless, the logic is simple. Skookum comes here, moans, gets moaned at. Why does he do it? Because he wants it, on some level or another. Or because, on some level, he feels he deserves it. There are many possible angles. But as someone who has also strapped himself into a rollercoaster to deal with my lack of desire or drive or accomplishment or whatever, I sort of get it, and I personally find the 'sort yourself out, mate' routine to be totally pointless. Having others scold me for being small and weak and lazy didn't resolve my feelings of inferiority, it made them worse... and yet even knowing that's true, I still want it, I still seek it out. As Dostoevsky said, men can be as fond of suffering as they are of well-being.
Mewis
9mo ago
My visa application for New Zealand has been approved. I intend to move there at the start of December. Exciting!
Mewis
11mo ago
This is kind of what asylums used to be, or were supposed to be - fairly nice open-air warehouses where people were encouraged to do a little bit of gardening or knitting to keep them minimally occupied, and otherwise drugged or sedated into docility.
Mewis
1yr ago
In terms of tail-risk, hydro is probably the most dangerous form of power around. There are dams around the world that could kill hundreds of thousands of people if they failed.
Mewis
1yr ago
Conservatives do not need to articulate a coherent vision of society - by their nature they like things the way they were or at least the way they were when they were kids. Though few really desire a return to the 1950s or the 1920s anymore, I'd say the median right-voter longs for the 90s - peace, prosperity, American power, gays out of the closet but not by much, jokes about transsexuals on TV, and a cordial racial dialogue. If this desire is not articulated by a visionary intellectual vanguard, it's because visionary intellectuals think it's silly and beneath them. Imagine wanting a society that you actually know is possible and desirable because you lived through it! Everyone knows the correct way to reform society is to dream up some ludicrous science-fiction scenario and then try to enforce it on an unwilling majority that just wants to grill.
Mewis
5mo ago
It's about skin in the game - Captains have responsibility for the ship, and therefore should accept the greatest risk, to keep them responsible.
Mewis
1yr ago
Frankenstein is about as Romantic as it comes, but it should be understood that this was the prevailing style of the time - overwrought and emotional. Men wrote this way back then too.
Mewis
1yr ago
The fact is that Ron knows that he needs Trump supporters and he knows that infighting is just going to weaken him.
I really would have given Trump more credit than to think he would launch this kind of salvo at this stage.
The guy just can't help himself. He'd really rather burn the Republican Party to the ground than share the spotlight.
Mewis
4mo ago
Europe has a bigger economy in the sense that we produce luxury goods that are much more appealing and valuable. It doesn't mean that we just produce more of everything. This is particularly true in cost disease vulnerable sectors... Like defense. French winemakers are maybe more productive than Russian factory workers... But unlikely to win a war.
This isn't to say that Russia has the upper hand, but it's closer than the economic data gives credit for. That's how North Korea can be a threat to South Korea despite the economic imbalance.
Mewis
7mo ago
Risking your life is a great way to gain respect... from men. In which case it might work, if what he needs is more self-respect
Mewis
10mo ago
I don't really find this account compelling. The Roman Empire was damaged heavily by the efforts of popular military leaders to seize power, but this pattern started long before the use of foederati in the army. Far from decadence and complacency, Rome was damaged by the irrepressible ambition and ruthlessness of generals and soldiers.
But I would expect people on the right - and I mean all those talking heads, think tanks and high-flying politicians - be interested in figuring out whether DIE actually makes the army stronger - and if not, pushing that fact hard.
Does it matter? If foreign wars are pointless, and America should turn away from military adventurism, does the strength of the army actually matter that much? Is the army naught but an appendage of the state - in which case, it hardly matters what the people in it believe? Or is the expectation that the army could provide a bulwark against leftism - in which case, the army is now interfering in politics? Is it wise to invite interference from an institution that is vulnerable to capture by your opponents?
I think it's worth asking exactly what people want from the military before they treat it as a political battlefield. Because it doesn't seem to me like Americans really have a consensus there.
Mewis
11mo ago
If you are choked, you will stop breathing, and if you stop breathing for a duration, you will suffer brain damage. If your breathing does not restart, you die. It may have been that after the choke ended, Neely was too brain damaged to be resuscitated, which makes sense since most accounts indicate he was choked for a pretty long period of time (10 mins, definitely enough to kill someone).
The NYT is sad because they want a Republican civil war. DeSantis knows that he needs Trump's voters and supporters, and that he can't afford to alienate them by attacking their perfect prince. But the fact is he doesn't need to. He's far younger and will live to see the end of Trump.
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