Rex
20d ago
I just bought a new PC after not having one for nearly 10 years. I went sort of nuts getting games: Total War: Rome; Dyson Sphere; Ultrakill; Satisfactory, Elden Ring, EU4, Monster Hunter World; Trails of Cold Steel 3 (difficulty mod); Cyberpunk; Witcher 3; and a few others I cant even remember. Kerbal space program too. Its my first go round with that and its not too bad. I wish the career mode had just a little bit more...production? I dont know, it seems like the edges are unsanded.
Noting has really drawn me in. My go to at the moment is Elden Ring, im maybe half way through a replay on that in advance of the DLC coming. I was really hoping Dragons Dogma 2 was going to be good since I really loved DDDA, but it seems to be a bust. I;ll wait till the DLC comes out and hopefully they get a hard mode.
As an adult, I really need complexity or extreme difficulty in games. Stellaris is really evergreen for me and I havent done a campaign in a while. I might download a new version with all the DLCs and give it another go. That game can really suck me in.
Rex
1mo ago
I've seen people make the argument that the liberal ideology is universalist. Its not enough for California to totally conform to leftist ideology - the whole country must conform. Better yet, the whole world. I dont know how to square this with cultural relativism, but now that I think about it, that's not something you hear a whole lot about these days despite the fact that I recall it being a big part of the political conversation from the left about 20 years ago. The universalism of the left does ring true to me. It seems to me that they cannot tolerate pockets of red tribe anywhere they might exist.
Rex
3mo ago
I’m suggesting that the nypost article about the report is a routine psyop. A journalist who either 1) sees which way the wind is blowing re:China and writes a clickbait article, 2) is following a general policy that was implemented by a IC asset in the media and explicitly designed to shift our attitudes on China, or 3) is a bonafide IC asset following specific instructions to write this story.
I’ll assume my first post was unclear. Hopefully this helps. And to be clear, I think it’s likely option 2 or 3.
Does this sound outlandish or convoluted to you?
Rex
3mo ago
Ok preface this saying I think GOFR should be banned for all the reasons listed in these replies.
That said, these kind of stories strike me as IC psyops designed to paint China as an enemy. EcoHealth Alliance, Fauci, and the rest of the government (including that same IC) are just as much to blame as China. And given that these people are opening out of the USA, we theoretically have more recourse against them than China.
Is China continuing GOFR? I have no doubt that they are. But this story sounds like bullshit for all the other reasons listed in the replies as well.
Rex
3mo ago
I’m suggesting something beyond the status quo. A continuation of more videos being released, more government officials making statements, perhaps a formal declaration by states.
That’s my whole point. I suspect that there is perhaps no sequence of events that could happen that would convince the Science crowd that NHI exists.
Rex
3mo ago
After occasionally reading NHI/UAP posts on X and 4chan, and of course in here when it comes up, I’ve had a thought that I’ve not seen expressed.
The conventional take is that any disclosure will have earth shattering ramifications for the religions of the world. That evidence of NHI would result in people doubting their faith, their religious leaders, and their belief that humans have some primacy in the universe. Basically that it would have catastrophic results for religion.
I expect the exact opposite would happen. I expect that materialists, “Scientists”, the “IFL Science” crowd, debunkers, and Atheists would be the ones that will be least likely at accept a new paradigm.
Religious people by definition are more open to metaphysics and they’re also quite used to a world where we have beliefs in opposition to the mainstream. I have no doubt that any NHI as a concept would be integrated into existing religion without all that much trouble.
As for the Science crowd, the existence of NHI would necessarily mean that the story they’ve defended for their entire lives is either wrong or incomplete. We’ve seen how that’s worked out on other topics recently. I expect no amount of evidence presented would ever be enough. I supposed that this would depend on exactly what is being disclosed and what beliefs are violated. Learning that FTL travel is possible would be quite different from the inter dimensional travel that’s been suggested lately. It would also depend on the exact mechanism of disclosure. If TPTB were to get the prestigious journals and community influencers on board first and in a systematic way, people would just get their normal software update so that’s they’re on the right side of The Current Thing. No different than if the Pope told us Catholics that NHI were fully in communion with the Church.
Long story short: I believe the conventional thinking that NHI would kill religion is severely outdated. Perhaps this was true at one time when religion was the dominant societal meme. No longer.
Rex
4mo ago
He’s been allegedly walking around NYC for the past 6 months harassing Russians as well. This dude literally lost his mind over The Current Thing. I wonder if we’ll be having a conversation about how the MSM encourages stochastic hate crimes?
Rex
4mo ago
50k more than were there in 2016.
I’m not sure what your point is. Is it hopeless? Maybe. Likely. But what have we got to lose?
I trust trump more than desantis. And Nikki Haley might as well be a democrat in my opinion.
Rex
4mo ago
First, there are reports that certain Republican orgs have been doing the work to assemble a large list of mid level staffers to install in the federal government for the next president. See NYT article. https://archive.ph/0uVQq
This should have existed in 2016, but clearly that was not the case.
Second, trump has an EO ready to go to reclass a huge percentage of federal enployees as contractors, making them much easier to fire. https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2022/07/trump-reelected-aides-plan-purge-civil-service/374842/
Third, a trump term would distract my political enemies and forestall whatever terrible agenda they are planning to implement. The dystopian liberal democratic order is coming for all of us in the west no matter what at this point. I’ll take four more years of wailing and grinding of teeth from the establishment as a nice sideshow in the meantime.
Rex
5mo ago
You are right about the Republican Party and perhaps even the Republican base (depending on how you define that). It would have described me 10 years ago when I considered myself a republican.
I don’t know if that is true of Republican voters though. I vote Republican out of necessity but loathe the party. I suspect you comments do not ring true to a significant portion of the MAGA voters out there. My parents will never give up on loving Israel. 60 years of propaganda is extremely sticky. Myself, my peers. There is no mystical allegiance there. They’re shitty allies and a waste of money.
Rex
5mo ago
Reading your post, I gave it maybe 50:50 odds of being true. Reading the cspan source below, I’m adjusting that to 99:1 odds of being untrue.
Aside from the reference to the current battle in the first sentence, this has every buzzword from the standard Ukrainian narrative I’ve read a thousand times over the past two years. Russians executing their own soldiers. Human wave. Untrained. Under equipped. Massive RU casualties. Etc. I see nothing of value here.
Rex
6mo ago
I’m no expert, but I heard Jocko’s take today and it seems he was more surprised at the overall coordination of the attack as opposed to individual tactics. Multiple teams attacking by truck, gliders, and boats across a decently wide area. All hitting their targets within a few hours. It seems like that level of military sophistication and coordination is beyond what many thought Hamas was able to achieve.
He also suggested they may have some more heavy weaponry such as AA guns and rockets.
Rex
6mo ago
No. But it allows the NYT, “the paper of record”, to publish:
The guilty plea entered by Mr. Epps showed that he was being held accountable for his crimes and undercut the narrative that he was being protected by the federal government.
No doubt the DoJ or some other government organ explicitly directed them to publish this. We just saw last week that this is exactly how it works. No doubt some federal official will now quote the NYT saying that this clears up the Epps saga. It’s the same playbook from the Iraq War, Russiagate, and I’m sure many other examples.
Rex
7mo ago
Rex
8mo ago
Is it the Atlantic that first published his identity and ethnicity? There seems to be a trend of mainstream legacy media outting public personalities that publish under a pen name. BAP, Libsoftictock, Scott. They clearly have an axe to grind here, even though they hide behind the some notion of journalism and a fig leaf of newsworthiness. What is there to be done? Nothing. Its asymetrical. Add it the list of reasons I find journalists lower than lawyers and slightly higher than pedophiles. I hope to one day be introduced to a journalist so that I can laugh in their face when they tell me their profession.
Rex
8mo ago
Thanks for answering. I’d suggest that cynicism does seem warranted after the past few years.
Someone downthread suggested that there’s not a lot of difference between the superstar researcher and the median researcher. I really have no way to know if this is true or not. Your response talks about all the benefits of university research. I’m not suggesting that there is zero benefit to university research. I’m just highly skeptical that the marginal benefit of this spousal hire policy is realy worth the cost. Of course academics will defend the policy. From the outside though, it sounds like bullshit.
Rex
8mo ago
What exactly is a superstar researcher? What kind of deliverable or output do they produce?
The cynical side of me is thinking that there really is nothing of value being generated here. That it’s just another mechanism to funnel more tuition, endowment, and federal funny money into the hands of friends and allies.
Rex
8mo ago
When you eat nutritious foods for a long time, your body starts to crave nutritious foods. Your appetite changes. If you go on a low carb high protein/fat diet for long enough, cake starts to taste disgustingly sweet. Most people dont commit to it long enough to notice this. Or they are following bad diet advice (e.g. egg whites, skim milk, etc)
Rex
8mo ago
This is okay with me. A motivated fight against the deep state, even if it’s fruitless, is what I want. Trump had some plan late in his presidency to reclassify thousands if not tens of thousands of government employees to contractors so that they could be more easily separated. If this is the only thing he accomplishes the whole thing will be worth it. Fighting traditional conservative battles is not going to change the direction of this country.
Rex
8mo ago
I had a very different take on this. Oppenheimer from almost the first minute is shown as murderous, arrogant, a philanderer, and ethically questionable if not an outright monster that is more focused on his own accomplishments than the the implications of his project. I dont know how anyone could leave the movie thinking he was a good man. There were no good men or women in the entire movie.
Rex
8mo ago
I mean the youtube critics I follow. RedLetterMedia, Critical Drinker, etc. I generally have contempt for anyone who gets listed as a critic on RottenTomatos. Audience reviews are a mixed bag but increasingly manipulated such that i dont put much weight on them. The YT shows are generally entertaining for me, however their take on Oppenheimer reveals that they have been so habituated to superhero movies that they are unable to really judge a movie that outside of a particular genre.
Rex
8mo ago
I may be bringing my own personal baggage but I think the movie has a very cynical take on scientists, Oppenheimer, and the US government. Literally half the movie is about some deep state worm “manipulating procedural outcomes” to fuck over Oppenheimer due to a disagreement on policy/personality. If there is a villain, it’s the USG. My takeaway is that the rot we see today was fully functioning as early as the 60s. Likely well before that. It’s a bitter pill to swallow for the “IFL SCIENCE” crowd and I think it explains a lot of the mid reviews.
This guide is really good - you dont really spoil things but give some nice context. I think im going to get this tonight.
How did you guys hear of this? This is really under the radar but looks awsome.
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