Templexious
Stuck in time
User ID: 2308
Would there be interest in a book review or summary of kantian philosophy and/or john locke's treatises? The goal would be to relate them to our current political situations under my own personal lens.
I find them to be incredibly prescient, even hundreds of years later, and the online material which covers them is only what can be gleamed by browsing wikipedia, and therefore rather shallow.
Templexious
8mo ago
Because a border wall increases the marginal cost of trying to cross the border, and allows the country to begin to get a handle on its own internal affairs.
You'll never get illegal immigration to zero, that doesn't mean "do nothing" is the correct approach. Unless you're from the WEF or similar globalist group where no borders is the entire solution.
Templexious
3mo ago
I find the need for "steelmanning" of trump to be silly.
He's running for president. People like him for what he stands for. They can vote for whoever they want, it's a republic with tinges of democracy.
I will be voting Democrat because I don't like Russia/Putin, but that's the extent of my reasoning for my presidential picks. I understand and see why people like Trump, and to say that he's being unduly attacked because he doesn't "fit in" to the establishment is not a lie.
They're very clearly trying to pin him to the wall for things that would be relatively minor scandals with a few fees and a public apology and then it would be over with any other ex-president. It's really satisfying to see how hard the establishment strains at gnats to pin him to the wall, when we know that they've gotten used to letting people like epstein go around as an open secret.
Templexious
7mo ago
This was an exceptional read and summary, and would love to see more posts like this on the site.
I have long since memory-holed how much of a shitshow the ongoing war against the second amendment in the US has become.
Templexious
11mo ago
The Tea Party Saga is one of the most interesting bits of recent political history. It provided the emotional oomph, revitalized the power of the far right bases while also giving Christian Nationalism social legitimacy among the south.
Considering the 2008-2011 election eras had so much going on, it's almost worth a look to revisit those years and show how bald-faced the democrat party were in the dirty tactics they used in order to establish power. While you see on democrats side, people crying about the right wing being conspiracists or whatever, a close examination of the events of 2008 - including the Democrat takeover, and the resulting fatalism of the conservative party, as the republican fat cats were happy being the performative losers while letting the democrats steamroll over them...
The way the Dems shat on then-Senator Palin for 2007/8, spreading some of the nastiest misogynistic shit about a woman who chose to have kids... And then watching democrat voters justify the shit they said about her after the fact.
As we gear up for a new election year, it's going to get downright dirty.
Templexious
7mo ago
Keep in mind also that Tim Ballard was married. I'm sure his wife didn't exactly consent to him trying to sexually proposition the women who went with him on these trips.
Unfortunately, as Quantumfreakonomics notes, she has not spoken on the issue, and she is most certainly a victim.
Templexious
9mo ago
It's not an incorrect take.
Jason Aldean is a city-centric "country" artist and tends to be rejected by most rednecks, his audience was usually 16 year old girls who've never left suburbia or cityville. The kinds that Bo Burnham make fun of in his skit about country songs.
Artists like Colter Wall, Ryan Bingham, Cody Jinks and Cody Johnson tend to be considered more "true" country.
In like manner, Fascist politics give the feeling of “momentum,” “going there” and “moving towards,” an exciting sense of fatal direction.
I question the foundational assumptions which undergird this argument. Marxist and Communist and even liberal and neoliberal ideologies, which have varying claims of "the future is ours!" and "we will win in the future!" and "the world becomes more liberal over time!" have all made the rounds.
Every ideology and every movement makes claims of inevitability. Sure, Landianism also has a tinge of being darkly enlightened. "Our god, our religion, our ideology is better than YOUR ideology" is a key ingredient of every system of constructing national, social, individual, political identity.
Society will progress. Society will regress. Time moves on, and yet there is an idealized past being attempted to move back to, or an idealized future. There is no ideology that exists which doesn't also make meaningful claims about the future and its own inevitability. Latestage capitalism evokes this idea that capitalism will fall over because it's in the last stages of metastization. And yet. And yet it still hasn't fallen over.
Templexious
5mo ago
50k potential federal employees turning over every time a president changes would be a pretty massive change in how the government runs. It would make for excellent fireworks.
Templexious
9mo ago
Books aren't expensive enough to justify them anymore.
This claim is going to need an in-depth number of citations showcasing that all books that libraries host are still available and purchasable, and their prices, and comparisons with past prices, all adjusted for inflation, as well as the average income of the parents who send their kids to a particular school, also adjusted for inflation.
The justification for tearing down institutions needs to have some measure of scrutiny.
Templexious
4mo ago
Tangentially to this, toward the end of the bush years, there were media reports on msnbc and cnn that basically questioned whether or not bin laden even existed.
No one else remembers that, but good to know people still believe that he existed.
Templexious
8mo ago
If you fire an entire group based on this heuristic, then congratulations, your factory no longer runs. If you can extract profit from the factory and people still buy the product for cheap, then you aren't losing anything by having some excess.
Some vague morality points, perhaps.
Templexious
9mo ago
It's a sensible cost-cutting move on the whole. School districts tend to accumulate a mass number of redundant organizational administrative staff if allowed to over the years.
The main problem is that in schools like this, the libraries tend to be a refuge for the well-performing, high-iq students, so placing the high-iq students in the same room as the students who regularly and routinely misbehave is a problem.
If a student is regularly disruptive, one must wonder if they will be able to function in society.
Templexious
4mo ago
That mitt romney article reminds me of one from the bush campaign where they claimed that the John Kerry kids were awful and rude and used slurs and a bunch of other bullshit.
His kids at the time were two-four years old. People will write literally anything during campaign years, so long as it makes the other side look bad.
Templexious
5mo ago
It's not a particularly surprising reaction, no.
Nor is the rolling over and acting offended that people reacted to IH the way that was entirely expected and predictable?
"Ah yes, these edgy jokes we used caused the expected reaction. Now, we will be offended on IH's behalf toward the people who took the bait."
It would be bad bait if no one took it, no?
Last time, I had "lost" 4 lbs. That was a weight measurement snafu: turns out, my home scale is consistently off by about two pounds, so it would be correct to say that at the time of the post, I had lost two pounds, not 4.
However, since beginning semaglutide, I have lost approximately 12 pounds. The number of calories I managed to avoid eating thanks to sugar reduction is more than 500 kcal/day. I'll not detail the experience in too much detail, but current conclusion is that the vast majority of my weight loss comes from being able to cut down on the soda.
I will note a few extra details: Loss of interest in bread. Not terribly strange, considering most bread is a vehicle for sugars. But everything from subway, to hot dog and bratwurst buns, to regular sliced bread. White bread now has the same palatability as low-sugar sarah lee's wheat bread. Naturally, I have swapped over to Sarah Lee's. Miracle Whip is nasty now, though regular, low-sugar mayo is still good.
If you are struggling with weight loss, especially snacking + sugar, Semaglutide is a miracle drug.
Templexious
5mo ago
Most of the argument is about where the line should be
The number of arguments which boil down to some form of sorites paradox is very annoying.
Templexious
4mo ago
The thing is that the romney campaign didn't reciprocate with those punches, and instead held their tongues.
Templexious
5mo ago
this individual
"this individual"-ing Nick Bostrom is a hilarious way of wiping away his work in promoting effective altruism and longtermism.
Templexious
7mo ago
I've leveled out the weight loss at roughly 26 bmi, 28.5% body fat, and 30 lbs of fat loss since starting the semaglutide shots.
The goal was to slide off the shots and maintain the diet, but to hit my goal (another 20 lbs of still remain) I've added in some more exercise than just the dumbbells and short walks. I've always hated cardio, but the immediate social gains of having lost this much weight are so noticeable that i'd be a moron not to start doing more.
I've picked up a copy of p90 and the insanity workout video series and will be half-assing them. The goal isn't to be bulky, it's to lose the chub. We'll see if, through winter, I'll be able to maintain everything I've lost so far.
Templexious
9mo ago
In an attempt to better manage my weight, I have gone on semaglutide.
This stuff is straight up magical, and its efficacy has caused my opinions around personal health management to shift dramatically.
Where I was drinking at least 32 oz of sugary soda a day and unable to stop, those impulses have basically disappeared. I fill up faster, but that primal urge, the association of high fructose corn syrup, is gone.
I am not even on max dose, but have already lost 4 lbs in less than a month. I fully expect the entire usa to be on semaglutide or analagous in the near future. The monthly price of not being morbidly obese seems that it will come to about 500$/month, at least until competitors come to town.
Templexious
11mo ago
After lurking here, I find myself relatively confused. You're the first person I've seen attempt to disambiguate between progressivism and wokeness. What is the difference between wokeness and progressivism, in your mind?
Templexious
5mo ago
I was wondering if anyone would call me out on the use of whence. Congrats! 🧐
Nursing homes are in aggregate a symptom of a social disease- end of life care for the elderly and the infirm is atrocious.
Society has kicked families out of their homes, and left the elderly out to dry, while simultaneously sucking up adult children's time that would be spent caring for the elderly in their last years.
The problem is that historically, we simply didn't have the technology to keep them all alive, usually, when elderly would spiral, they would spiral relatively fast- infection, diabetes, cancers, all things that had no cure in the ancestral home. In the current era, we just wait for them to decline, and while we have cures for the most major diseases, we have nothing to help the elderly live more fulfilling and yes, even economically-productive lives. They are shoved into a heartless building where they play bingo on Tuesday at nine am and wait for god to come knocking, with the very occasional visit from what remains of the local evangelical churches activities.
Yes, there are problems in nursing homes, but no, there's no incentive to solve it, one way or the other. The country seems locked in indecision on this particular issue. The AARP is the largest focus group in the US, and as a bloc, holds a stranglehold on the younger generation's ability to help them solve their problems. Young and middle-aged voters are similarly out-of-sighting and out-of-minding the entire problem- shove the elderly into a nursing home and visit once a month until they die-if you're nearby. Maybe do a task that the nurses haven't gotten to. Then move away when offered a raise or a new job in a new state.
Ol' granny's got 5 years still left in her, nevermind that she can't make her way to the toilet any more, but her son Kyle is 50 years old and still in his career and living in tennessee, five hundred miles away.
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