Mewis
1yr ago
Twitter wasn't a tool for progressives to evangelize to others - it was a tool for them to evangelize to themselves, which is just as dangerous.
Mewis
1yr ago
They were punished lightly by the standards of authoritarian countries, but are those standards particularly important or relevant?
People execute with the military and the information they have, not the military and information they want to have - Putin would hardly be the first leader to be undermined by the incompetence of others. I would be reluctant to say that Putin's war failed because of his personal failings. I don't think, for example, that the US war against Saddam Hussein was successful because of some awesome talent on the part of GWB.
Mewis
1yr ago
There's no reason why the UK can't bounce back. Many of our problems are entirely self-inflicted - the addiction to cheap labor, the highly restrictive planning system, the lack of investment, the total aversion of the government to supporting industry, and moronic environmentalism. Whether we will choose to stop sabotaging our own future is another question entirely. If the previous years are any indicator, the answer is no. Neither political party shows any interest in restricting immigration, investing in infrastructure, reforming the planning system, or supporting industry.
Mewis
28d ago
"recording a video in public while being Palestinian" is not a crime, last I checked.
There is no way to "passively" prevent someone from going where they please, and if that place is a public place, you have no right to do so. You also have no right to claim a public place, and in doing so deny it to your ethnic, religious or political enemies.
Mewis
2mo ago
Why not simply bring down the force of law on these petty criminals for the crimes they are actually committing, rather than this chicanery about nudging social media?
Mewis
2mo ago
The referendum didn't fail because of some ultra catholic silent majority - it comes on the heels of large wins for abortion and gay marriage in referenda. Most people are still good liberals. The fact is that these amendments were half baked from the start.
Mewis
3mo ago
Somehow the richest and most powerful society in the world, one that executes a hundred million cows a year, can't figure out how to execute humans because uh, it's messy.
Mewis
5mo ago
Some things are nearly identical (I couldn't identify the difference between store brand and Uncle Ben's rice, for example) but other things, particularly processed foods, do have a noticeable gap. Offbrand cola is disgusting, for example.
Mewis
6mo ago
My take is that though 'tough talk' is in vogue these days, the usual bromides of 'just self improve' or 'don't be a pussy' or whatever are not necessarily a spur to change. They may, in fact, serve as a defense against change. And I suspect that the change you are defending against is actually getting a girlfriend, and you use these horrible events like your friend getting stabbed or your own feels of unworthiness to avoid doing it. And of course, it is not hard to find unpleasant people on the internet who will join in on this. It's human nature to seek to identify others as inferior, and to hate them for it. I guess I understand this kind of behavior because I engage in it myself. It's easier to tell myself that I'm lazy, small, weak, unattractive and disgusting than it is for me to go out and talk to other men. And I sometimes seek out negative reinforcement on the internet, which is never in short supply in places like Reddit.
I don't really have a solution. But I don't really believe that tragedy and ambulances are inevitable features of having a relationship.
Mewis
8mo ago
Smallpox has been extremely important throughout history, but I neither respect it or would welcome it's return to relevance.
Mewis
11mo ago
It can very faithfully copy the style and such details, but it has no understanding that making shit up is not what is wanted, because it's not intelligent.
That's really not accurate. ChatGPT knows when it's outputting a low-probability response, it just understands it as being the best response available given an impossible demand, because it's been trained to prefer full but false responses over honestly admitting ignorance. And it's been trained to do that by us. If I tortured a human being and demanded that he tell me about caselaw that could help me win my injury lawsuit, he might well just start making plausible nonsense up in order to placate me too - not because he doesn't understand the difference between reality and fiction, but because he's trying to give me what I want.
Mewis
1yr ago
I mean, if you're strangling someone to death, I think that they would flail about whether they're a 'good guy' or a 'bad guy'.
Mewis
1yr ago
Every military is like this to some extent. Few enough major wars are fought that nobody really knows whether Taiwan, China, Korea etc. will hold up in a hot war. Just look at Russia's performance and how one of the most feared military machines turned out to be mostly hollow due to decades of rot.
People think of the Chinese government as being hyper-efficient and centralized. It's not. The central political committees have limited power to set policy for the rest of the government - because there is just too much of the latter to efficiently control. That's why China builds huge ghost cities or spaffs billions on totally unfeasible BRI initiatives. This is not to say that the PLA suffers from the same dysfunction. It might do, or it might not - just as in January of 2022, nobody knew, even in Russia, that the Russia military was so severely unready for war.
Mewis
1yr ago
Well, aren't Canadian broadcasters obliged by law to piss away some fraction of their budget on French-language shows to appease the Quebecois? That seems like a pretty huge blow to their competitiveness.
Mewis
1yr ago
Nuclear does have tail risks, but those tail risks are not really that significant. On the whole, you probably get more exposure to radiation through breathing in slightly radioactive particulates from coal burning and mining than you do from nuclear power. The fact is, there is no such thing as perfectly safe power. People die from air pollution, they die from mining rare metals for solar power, they die in steel mills making wind turbines, they die on oil rigs and on dams. And, if the predictions regarding climate change are credible, many people will die from that too.
Second, what's up with nuclear waste? Specifically, if the waste is really a nothing burger, as I see argued often, why do I see (other) experts talking about how to communicate how bad it is to people ~10k years in the future. What are those other experts thinking and why are they wrong?
Because this is what politicians and environmentalists demand as a way to make nuclear power uneconomical. But the fact is that even if we decided to cordon off a few square kilometers of some worthless desert, that would be nothing compared to the huge areas that need to be mined to supply coal, or the areas needed to generate substantial amounts of solar power, or the land flooded when dams are built.
Mewis
1yr ago
It's not that their desires are invalid - it's that they're nobody else's concern or worry. Trans dysphoria is presented as some crippling pain - to the point of motivating suicide. But if all it is is a paraphilia, then the urgency of 'helping' them diminishes. It's no skin off my nose if someone else can't get their rocks off, and I feel no need at all to play a role in their sexual roleplay. After all, there are many unusual paraphilias. There are furries out there, sadists and masochists, and any variety of fetishists. But furries don't get to come to work dressed as their fursona (unless they work in IT).
Mewis
2mo ago
Why is there no in between?
I've noticed a pretty big pattern these days among fitness YouTubers. More clickbaity videos, more collabs with other creators that are popular, more shilling of exercise apps and products. It's not necessarily bad content, and a lot of it comes from people who are genuine and respected. I just think that's the ecosystem they live in now. And I couldn't say on the back end exactly how they're financially incentivised and rewarded, but clearly they are being pushed in this direction.
Mewis
3mo ago
I mean, having friends and family that can give you a room is doing a lot of the work here.
Mewis
4mo ago
There's a very good Tanner Greer post about this. Wang Huning identified the defining feature of the US in the 80s as techno-optimism, not liberty or democracy. But that's a quality that has been lost and inherited by the Chinese. If someone proposed building a bridge over the Pacific today, it would be China, not America.
Mewis
7mo ago
The issue is that money serves as both input and output in the system. The reward for providing goods and services to others is money to demand goods and services from others - those that get ahead in the market gain the power to distort the market in favor of their own preferences. It mostly works, but sometimes it doesn't. In the end, capitalists don't want to be capitalists, because it's hard - they want to be feudal lords, collecting rents from others.
Mewis
7mo ago
It's that nature of Americans to strive and struggle even when everything is handed to them that makes them such a force to be reckoned with. Isn't that amazing? The ability to never be happy, to be so totally indifferent to success AND failure, to possess such an invincible armor of narcissism.
she's the only one who really understands the (checks notes) star wide receiver on the football team
As Gone Girl (a contender for National Book of 21st Century America) put it - what's the point of being together if you're not the happiest?
Sorry, I don't credit this whole 'everyone before 1950 was a toothless withered crone with 800 diseases by the age of 22 and wore nothing but filthy rags' narrative. Because that's just not how people live.
If you look at totally primitive hunter gatherer tribes on remote islands, guess what. They have colour and culture and ornament. Even when they need to go to extreme lengths to make and maintain those things. They find a way, because people always find a way to express themselves, even in poverty. Would dirt-poor medieval peasants really be willing to spend what would have been a very large amount of money on dyed and colored clothes according to the fashions of the period and location, even knowing their clothes would just be grey rags in two months? I doubt it.
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