"Looting as praxis to demolish late stage capitalism" is centrist now?
I am beyond frustrated at dealing with "nothing is ever leftist" deflections. It never seems to matter how far an institution falls into embracing leftist dogma, you will always be told "that land acknowledgement where they called you a settler colonist of Turtle Island whose whiteness is violence isn't real leftism according to this week's redefinition."
NPR has objectively moved so far to the left that its current editorial positions would look like cringe parody to its 2014 listeners. It doesn't matter that whatever progressives you hang out with have gone even more mask-off re. "settler children get the bullet too" (see Ian Golash and the hezbollah-flag waving demos); a fringe demographic of online leftists is not allowed to dictate where the center is.
I don't really understand. It may be an obvious econ 51 point, but it clearly needs to be stated when the current regime is talking about imposing price controls on food, opening state-run grocery stores because the private ones have been driven out of business, and all kinds of absurd (power-seeking) economic policies.
Musk fits an extremely profitable niche of being competent enough in different areas to coordinate investors with management with engineers.
Again, this may seem like a simple "business 101" thing, but you just have to look at his competitors like Boeing to see how neglecting it causes horrifically embarrassing failures again and again.
The ongoing Starliner Titanic disaster with astronauts stranded on the space station couldn't be a better example. It's not that Boeing engineers are retarded, and it's not that they've been given an impossible task. It's not even that the Boeing CEO is a mad scientist imprisoning people in space to torture them with terrible movies: it's that basic management practices are being ignored.
Most of the dysfunction in this country is due to neglecting very, very basic truths, and the people in charge clearly aren't capable of acknowledging them, let alone dealing with them.
Musk and the rest of the PayPal mafia somehow can see what needs to be done and do it, which is apparently a superpower in this world of Pump Six (and other stories)
I find this sort of false equivalency incredibly obnoxious. We have institutions that are 99.5% leftist, run by Democrat apparatchiks, and every leak or FOI document reveals quotes like today's "I don't want to hire white men for sure."
Is there any equivalent evidence from the other side? Any CNN execs caught emailing Trump: "jawol mein fuhrer, I have leaked the debate questions to Biden to throw him off his guard, your victory is assured!"
Or just insane conspiracy theories about how JournoList members conspiring with the DNC were actually Republican triple-agents all along? Literal stalinist levels of frenzied deflection against randomly chosen "wreckers"?
Just the act of labeling leftist zealots "blue maga" shows it's a tactic to hurt your enemies while making excuses for the now-revealed misdeeds of your own side.
The weirdness of qanon boomers is extremely different from the weirdness of the left, and conflating them is just a trick to criticize individual leftists without ever admitting the problems of leftism: "They're bad because they're just like the enemy!", rather than "woah our revolutionary ideology goes absolutely off the wall retarded at the slightest inconvenience, why is that?"
The more I read from deboer the more I dislike him intensely. A pretty intelligent mind capable of truth-seeking that's been deliberately turned to producing demeaning propaganda.
This is just the usual "haha we've made it impossible to enforce the law, better give up and let us do whatever we want forever."
The same argument could be (and is) made for bike theft: the value of the bikes stolen in a 6 month period is far less than the cost of catching and prosecuting the bike thieves. Better just to give up and let it happen, right?
This argument is of course only deployed by people who approve of the criminal element in question. Even if the math wasn't incorrect, it should be rejected as a bad faith manipulation attempt. There should be a sudden brutal crackdown on both the criminals and the anarcho-tyrants supporting them, and when we are finished with them the problem will be solved. The long term reduction of bike theft by obliterating the theft rings, fences, and their leftist enablers is worth far more than the few months of stolen bikes the criminal accomplices would prefer to compare the enforcement cost to.
The cost of fare enforcement will decrease as over time, so why not use the cost of fare enforcement in Tokyo as a baseline for our cost comparison? But the value of enforcing law on the lawless (and their supporters) is what really matters.
So I recently noticed that my state has quietly removed the word "mother" from every official documentation I've seen, replacing it with "birthing parent" or some other euphemism. Iirc Colorado has already switched its language the same way, as have most Dem-run states.
Wasn't it only a few months ago we were told this was an insane conspiracy theory and only a few weirdos would ever try to abolish "mother"? Now it's been done so neatly and without fuss or any sign of resistance. Things that only last year would have sounded like insane paranoid delusions just... Happen with unanimous support.
What is there to even say? The insanity keeps coming so fast they hardly need to gaslight you any more. Has anyone here been "corrected" for saying the M-word yet?
Twitter.com/Artiah669/status/1778933764984320157
It's been a real thing for years. The call is "NORMALIZE X", where X is a deformity, mental illness, obesity, etc. it's the natural result of "representation matters.".
You can see it in all the comments: "Damn apparently every character needs to follow strict societal beauty standards rooted in white supremacy" etc. etc.
Once again it's only a conspiracy theory when outsiders notice what the insiders celebrate.
Even that dev who was recently making excuses about how face modeling is hard snuck in an "and actually it's good to challenge cis hetero beauty standards and we're doing it deliberately" towards the end.
"a math class aide repeatedly called B.W. 'Whitey'... A teacher asked him if he 'enjoyed his white gospel music', a teacher told B.W. 'i will not have a white man talk to me about gender issues!'"
But these were of course not based on race in any way, says the court. Fuck this clown country, it needs to burn, because there's nothing left to salvage. How many billion dollars would the payout be if a teacher asked a black kid "hey darkie, where'd you steal that bike?"
Is it brave to have HR waste hours of everyone's time with a degrading struggle session as a preparatory bombardment for your triumphant return? To me that seems like only seeing and valuing other people as your obedient audience...
I don't really know what to say. You're clearly smitten with this guy, but to me the story sounds like a typical case of mid-life crisis autogynophilia from a successful guy who wants to feel inherently valued for something, rather than just for his job skills.
SteveKirk
1yr ago
Diverted uncounted billions of dollars to leftist activism to give sinecures to hordes of useless college graduates, putting fringe "critical theory" activists in charge of university hiring, science funding, and formerly apolitical NGOs with massive endowments and prestige.
I don't know what goals you think they had other than "all power to us, loot the system for our ingroup"
How can people still pretend the institutional takeovers of 2020 just didn't happen?
Credentialism + nepotism is also a major factor on the creative side. A lot of the industry jobs are going to people because "I met they/them at calarts and followed their Tumblr askblog about obese superheroines with vitiligo, that's definitely the sort of person we need for Concord's character design team." I'm not kidding, that's literally the life story of all but two people I know doing art for games and cartoons, and those two are old guys.
Same with translation/"localization." It's a tiny industry with cliques of professional bullies getting away with hiring all their discord buddies and circulating blacklists, because there's literally no oversight.
It works without pushback because there's still no counter to the superweapons they developed. HR having a "Cluster hiring" policy literally gives them a party cadre within a few hiring cycles, and then you're fucked. And what do the old guard do except shake their heads and say "well I'd never hire or reject a candidate for political reasons."
Yeah, we used to hear that a lot from Google guys in 2012 who are no longer Google guys.
TL;DR: as nybbler likes to say, you can't pick up $20 off the sidewalk when there's a troll with a club making sure nobody touches it.
I would have grudgingly found it admirable if he'd reduced everyone's sentence based on pure conviction that the death penalty is invalid. That's what the pope would have had him do.
But leaving a few on there is just evil gloating that they don't oppose the death penalty, just want it applied by an NPR opinion poll, and only as vengeance for crimes against party-aligned ethnic groups.
SteveKirk
11mo ago
The "dangerous alt right conspiracy theory misinformation to fully confirmed in the NYT" process is getting compressed down to a few hours at this point.
SteveKirk
1yr ago
I just saw "child safety guidelines" from a pediatrician visit which said not to allow your child out to play from 11AM to 3PM, because of the sun.
Didn't anti-sunlight safetyism peak years ago? Why has the advice continued to get crazier? Is this pediatrician a lone vampire groomer, or is the whole AMA like this?
It wouldn't make me so angry if the children in question weren't pasty obese maggots who desperately need sun and exercise. The doc made a choice to ask "so, are they being exposed to the evils of natural light? Oh, they sit inside and play Minecraft, eating Totino's™ Pizza Rolls™ all day? Good, good, check that health problem off the list. Now, are there any guns or motorcycles in the house? Because they can lead to dangers like going outside and doing things."
I'm not a parent, but everything I've seen of education and child-raising recently has been throwing up giant red flags. How are motte parents dealing with this stuff?
SteveKirk
8mo ago
It's flattering to think that he's involved in the community, but I expect most of these guys read articles that go viral among the VC set. Think this is how most of Scott's famous articles came to be widely known, rather than through dedicated fans.
I don't care if it's not real though because it would be fucking hilarious if it was.
It became mandatory to savage Kipling (I think) after WW1, and by the 30s he was just the dead horse you ritually beat to show you had Correct politics in the English department: "Kipling is a Jingo Imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting... It is no use pretending that Kipling's view of life can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person" etc. etc.
His reputation never really recovered, and it wasn't anything to do with the quality of his work.
temporary tax break on essential items during the holidays
These ideas sound right out of the UK in the 50s and 60s: micromanagment flailing from one crisis to the next while the economy goes to pieces. But what possible reason does Canada have for doing so poorly? They didn't lose an empire or cripple themselves in a world war!
I'm starting to think Trump wants a go at Canada because his real estate shark senses are telling him there's cheap blood in the water.
Hey neighbor, I heard you were having trouble making payments on your home, so I went to the bank and arranged a Christmas miracle. And well... You have five minutes to get out of my new house. I'm such a nice guy I'll even lend you $3.50 for a bus to the homeless shelter.
SteveKirk
9mo ago
"DA is also trying to determine if the shooting was a hate crime"
This is every parody of Massachusetts rolled into one ball of insanity and malice.
Is there an insulting mass media propaganda campaign insisting he isn't?
It's the same as biden's senility. The worst part was the lockstep lying in the face of what we could plainly see, which was then abandoned the literal second their political objective changed.
It's the difference between a used car salesman lying to you (expected, almost charming), vs realizing the mechanic you brought with you for advice is also working for him (creepy and sinister).
Then you turn to your wife who's had her heart set on this car at any price, and as you look into her pleading coal-black eye slits you remember you don't have a wife. All three of them start chanting in an unspeakable language as the stolen flesh melts from their faces, and the sky outside is red redredredredred.
In a final moment of sanity-shattering realization, you understand you will be walking out of there with a 19% financing agreement.
That's the basic sensation of watching CNN for five minutes. Or seeing a still frame of that Anderson Cooper(?) lizardman wax model robot.
The sensation of being under bombardment by the American media makes me jealous of the countries that just get regular bombed.
Still find it hilarious that people went through years of debate over whether antifa/BLM was being treated with kids' gloves as regime foot soldiers. And now the whole thing's been put to rest by a conflict between antifa and a group with even more political power behind them.
The government-backed mob gets to do whatever they want, and the people they do it to get rounded up and arrested. And I say this as someone with literally zero sympathy for the Hamas supporters it's happening to this time: analyzing how "crime" is used as an extrajudicial enforcement tool by the total liberal state is more important than arguing for a side.
I should do a book report on Schmidt's Theory of The Partisan, because nobody else has come close to describing how regime-backed mob violence works as a political force.
There's been so many examples in the past month. "Just stop oil" being escorted by police while their victims are arrested, Portland antifa burning a dozen police cars without any sign of an investigation happening (the website they used to claim responsibility is still online!), and now this.
It all reminds me of the old story from the UN human rights investigator in Yugoslavia, hearing stories about how the police would come round to confiscate guns from a town to clear the way for "unaffiliated" militias to commit massacres the next day. And of course the closely related Existential Comics vision of a "police-free" society ruled by leftist gangs..
Is this the future of ethnic and religious conflict in modern states?
You military recruiters have gotten really clever, but we're still not going to join.
We all know how this works now: you sign up because of the recruiting video about jumping out of a helicopter with a flaming sword to deport giant Mexican dragons, and then you end up marooned in some desert for two years jerking off under a Humvee for $9.50/hr
SteveKirk
7mo ago
we had a professor banned from teaching first-year mandatory courses because he donated to the Republican party in 2012,
Do you have a link for this? I want to use it next time the "there's no discrimination, conservatives are just too stupid for academia" card gets played.
Do people really not remember
Your last and biggest black pill to take is "no, they literally don't remember anything the TV doesn't remind them of every five minutes"
Good news: it's a suppository.
There won't be any cognitive dissonance because there's no cognition, and there's no use waiting for it to kick in any moment now, even as the propaganda ramps up to new heights of hysteria.
The number of lies spread about this case and how uncritically large parts of the population accept them have made me even more cynical. I didn't think that was possible.
It's been like watching people blasted by a firehose of bullshit and respond by puking what they swallowed into each other's mouths.
The messaging apparatus is shockingly effective, and I'm not sure if it's possible to do anything about it under our existing legal system.
And even if you do fix the problem at the source by abolishing "the innocent project" and their media accomplices, how do you even arrange your society recognizing that so many people are just blank canvases for propaganda?
However, they had a financial incentive for doing so.
His girlfriend never claimed the reward. She came forward after he was arrested because he had promised to kill her and her family if she told anyone.
"The prosecutors now think he's innocent"
No, a leftist 5th columnist elected in 2018 with no connection to the original case tried to ruin the already won case. You'll be shocked at who funded his campaign (no you won't)
Lies and liars make me angry. Any I notice go on a permanent list of irredeemable monsters. Every lie told about this case is so blatant and malicious I can't see any explanation except that they don't care about truth or even acknowledge the concept of it, and their only goal is to unleash murderers on the innocent.
We're now in a situation where both the public defenders and prosecutors are bought by the same leftist billionaire, and the entire justice system is a circus of sociopathic procedural manipulation to achieve political outcomes. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
I think the envisioned future is the EU as a patchwork of federated states ruling over the end of history. Each has its own elite class which sends representatives to the superstate bureaucracy while ruling over its ethnically fragmented domestic underclass through anarcho-tyranny and therapeutic authoritarian institutions.
In this scenario the armed forces are only used for domestic repression. Foreign relations are carried out entirely through financial manipulation and funding mercenary armies (a continuation of England's foreign policy of the last five centuries).
The limited loyalty needed for its janissary soldiers can be guaranteed by allowing them to rape and loot the natives with impunity, while offering some limited protection to whichever native groups give most support to the regime; an all-pay auction that maximizes their exploitation.
At least this is the vision of steady-state tyranny you can see e.g. Burdensome salivating over. If history doesn't end as planned such a regime probably wouldn't be capable of surviving perpetually, but the Ottomans lasted centuries with that kind of system until events caught up with them.
Left work late the other night to find a druggie going through in my car in the parking lot. First time that's happened, but should have expected it from seeing them stagger around after all the shops are closed down.
I'm assuming it's the fentanyl stumble, because sometimes you see them standing in weird positions staring at nothing, but maybe someone more versed in modern druglore can correct me.
The level of crime here is still low, but the jump from "literally absent" to "a general background level" has ruined the high trust that made this community great.
There are no more open cash boxes at vegetable stands (the last one got smash-and-grabbed a month ago). A friend had all his plumbing gear stolen out of his truck (you can't even fence that stuff locally!). I never used to carry a gun here, but started recently. I never used to lock my door while I was out, but started after my neighbor's place got ransacked. When I was a kid I used to leave the keys in my truck like everyone else, in case a friend wanted to borrow it.
All the petty crime here is carried out by dysfunctional scum who were attracted by the scraps thrown to them by do-gooders. Some of them were deliberately recruited in "rehabilitation schemes" and dumped on us when they inevitably failed. Those responsible quickly moved on to providing "safe drug use supplies" for their former charges at the local community center. All taxpayer-funded, of course.
In fact, I know all the people responsible for importing this biowaste to our community, and they all live in newly-built mansions down long driveways with automatic gates and security cameras.
Meanwhile I have a lot of my net worth in equipment that basically can't be secured right off a main road, relying on the fact that until now nobody just wandered in to steal your stuff.
It might seem stupid to complain about when we still have basically no murders, but it enrages me that we lost something precious, and it was deliberately inflicted on us by smug pricks who will never face any consequences for it. They won't even gain anything from having done it to us, other than the joy of seeing us suffer while they remain comfortably immune.
Not sure where I'm going with this, but like Goodguy's personal story the other week, it's a general reflection on the inadequacy of crime statistics to capture its impact on communities.
And a growing appreciation for the importance of meting out consequences in an equitable fashion.
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