VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
15hr ago
I think it'll be hard to explain to the next generation, but the effects in The Matrix were absurdly groundbreaking. But they also were groundbreaking enough that pretty much any movie with a VFX sequence will copy some of its visual language. If you've seen a bunch of modern action movies, though, and then watch The Matrix, you're going to feel that a lot of it is just playing to standard visual tropes that have been done well, maybe even better, in lots of movies. But the thing is, most of those were new in 1999, and you won't appreciate it unless you can compare it to the zeitgeist of 1998 cinema -- without a lot of effort, you really have to have been there.
I'd compare it to The Beatles: I wasn't around when the originals were published, and I find it hard to appreciate the novelty that my older friends and relatives attribute to them because very few features in their catalog haven't been done better (and with better recording and mastering) by other artists since.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
The "leads to genocide" observation is hardly exclusive to white people, though. See also: Japan/China in WWII, Rwanda, any number of sectarian feuds in the third world. Realistically, it seems like it was largely the norm or at least not uncommon among almost any group with the power to do it until largely-European philosophy eventually decided it was a morally repugnant idea (to which I'd agree).
Sometimes it seems like "genocide" only applies if European-descended folks (er, Volks) are doing it, otherwise it's just "sparkling ethnic cleansing" or something.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
The term antisemitism came into existence from Germans trying to justify that This Time it wasn't just dumb, bigoted Judenhass (literally "Jew-hatred"), and they had good (pseudo)scientific reasons to dislike them. Bringing other semitic peoples into it implicitly validates Nazi race science like talking about related Aryans in India.
Although some seem to be trying the This Time approach again, using "anti-Zionist" as the new label. Maybe in a century someone will claim it applies to Zionist Mormons in Utah.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
And artillery shells being depleted is a real issue against China, the logistics here are sort of fungible, and spending a lot of resources resupplying Ukraine is going to demand we replace that (we have to be prepared to fight more than just China, a military's job isn't only to prepare for the most obvious threat), and the resources that go into replacing those assets, plus their losses, will eat up resources that could go into the Pacific.
This seems plausible, but there is a claim the opposite direction that the Ukraine conflict gives the US and its allies cover to invest heavily in war materiel production while still notionally in a time of peace without large domestic or foreign suspicion about warmongering or wasteful spending. In 1941 the US benefited heavily from having already tooled up for lend-lease production and broadly expecting to get dragged into the conflict eventually. Designs for aircraft and tanks that would only get fielded later in the war were in development, and Iowa's keel was laid before Pearl Harbor.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
the theory hides behind ... the science in order to try to gain legitimacy as a "grand-theory of why the world is the way it is"
Many such cases: this is a generic problem, IMO, with several branches of science, maybe even every branch with immediate political impact (also economics, epidemiology, climate science, [group] studies). I don't think you're wrong that this even happens to HBD folks who are probably diametrically opposed to plenty of those other examples.
I don't know of a generic strategy to counteract this human failing: my first recommendation would be to reject claims that "the science is settled": the scientific process is never truly settled. But if you go too far in the un-trusting direction, you'll start questioning the concept of childhood vaccinations or jet fuel melting steel beams.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
I think your idea here is plausible, but I have trouble seeing how you'd isolate nature from nurture here for these axes without some industrial-scale twin studies that seem implausible.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Christianity is particularly attuned to women’s petty intrasexual concerns, with its emphasis on female promiscuity.
I think this is far more complicated a topic than a single sentence can do justice to, but the Christian tradition, as much as it would like to attribute everything to Jesus, wasn't written in stone at the Ascension or Pentecost. Most of the "emphasis on female promiscuity" parts I can think of are from Paul, and were written a bit later.
I'd also point to the context of family matters in Rome at the time: Augustus rather famously enacted some policies that encouraged fidelity and "family values" before Jesus was born (and were continued on and off again with later emperors), and it's difficult to fully extract the existing Roman cultural context from the Christianity that took off there.
but plenty of civilized countries like to play that game.
"So there I was in a pub in Belfast enjoying a lovely Imperial pint and watching the local match, when my accountant back in Boston called asking about retirement contributions. I got lots of weird looks at the bar when I said 'I want to contribute as much as I can to the IRA', and you'd think the room went cold."
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
I went to a smaller school that often had take-home essays and even exams (up to the professors, more common in smaller honors classes). While cheating might have happened somewhat, it is possible IMO to instill a culture that expects people to follow the rules even when they aren't being watched closely. But it was occasionally enforced by expelling violators.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
PP seems to show up in lots of anecdotes about cross-sex hormone prescriptions, especially for trans minors with relatively few questions asked. As far as I can tell (see SCOTUS thread) those are rather controversial. But I can't say what fraction of their business that is.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
You could do far worse than Terry Pratchett, IMO.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
public high schools in the US average around $19k in per student spending, no correlation between spending and outcomes.
Is that true across public schools? I've often wondered if the extra funding thrown at Title 1 schools that typically underperform actually makes the correlation negative, but I've never found an actual dataset.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
IIRC around the end of the first Trump term, we got perilously close to dueling national injunctions for "must continue DACA" and "must immediately halt DACA", which isn't a sustainable way to run a national judiciary.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
The Federalists were absolutely right
The Federalists were against adding an explicit Bill of Rights, and only chose to do so as a compromise. The Anti-Federalists wanted to enumerate the rights, and I think have ultimately been proven right.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
In real estate, when you have a claim, even a weak claim, it represents leverage, and you can get your counterparty to negotiate and give you something for it. You never let it lapse for nothing.
This is somehow the most logical explanation I've heard for 2020, and I hadn't heard of it before.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
The Jet A open air burn temperature is 1,030 °C, considerably less than the melting point of even lower melting point steels.
True, but the theory isn't that the beams melted, it's that they weakened due to the temperature. Structural steel loses half its room-temperature strength at 500 °C, and the chart I can find doesn't go much past that. Structural factors of safety are high, but not that high, and it's unsurprising IMO that they'd fail at "extended structural fire" temperatures, which is why we mandate automatic sprinklers in such buildings these days.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
Who is stealing detergent?
A while (a decade or more, now) back, there were a series of articles about Tide being used as street currency for drug sales. I'm uncertain if that is still true, or even was ever particularly common, but it probably is at least known to store managers.
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/01/14/why-would-drug-dealers-use-tide-as-a-currency
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
Nobody has argued about embryonic stem cell research in a while. Although we have had left-coded arguments about HeLa cell line research.
Younger commenters seem to consistently under overestimate how long the South has been "Deep Red" territory: the legacy of the Southern Democrats held on at the state level well into the '90s. I am frequently amused at local Blue commenters in my Red state complaining about (perceived Red) state laws and policies that were actually enacted by the Blue team 40 years ago.
Was Manchin the last of that breed? He just left office this year.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
I bet 'perceived crime rates' includes observations of crime-adjacent activities that wouldn't ever be measured in 'actual' rates: the appearance of ubiquitous graffiti (see pictures of 80s subway cars), or of loitering ne'er-do-wells in the park isn't necessarily a wrong perception about crime rates.
You don't have to fully endorse the broken windows theory of (causing) crime to accept that frequent observations of broken windows can cause a true perception of rising crime rates.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
This would be an interesting case if some state decided it wasn't going to recognize marriage at all.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
I will at least observe that Red states have been, even in this era, pushing back on the prevalence of online porn. Pornhub, notably, has blocked a number of states that have passed relevant legislation to require age verification. It's Very Possible Nowadays to circumvent such things or find sites that don't care about (American) jurisdiction quite so much, but it is happening.
Notably, though, the argument is less "this content is sinful", and more "this content is demonstrably poisoning the relations and sexual health of our children".
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
It missed its chance to be the one and only 10th Amendment precedent.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
I think Putin's stated goals of destroying the idea (the meme as it were) of a distinct Ukrainian identity is, under the more expensive definitions, considered "genocide", but I will concede that it's a much less central example than "industrially kill them all" or just "evict them from their lands and ignore the obvious implications" that people would typically point to in WWII.
I would posit that the smartphone has observably reduced the need to store specific data because it's much easier than it used to be to load it (I'm old enough to "search the Internet", the kids these days "ask AI") on the fly when necessary. Lots of encyclopedia facts are useful to know on rare day-to-day occasions ("Which rivers empty into the Aral Sea?"), but I think in practice things are "better" (for some definition of "better") where I can pull up that fact at hand, which maybe a generation ago sometimes required referencing my shelf of encyclopedias or a trip to the library. And maybe I can use that mental space that was previously holding the population of Iran or the specifics of red-black trees for something that is more useful to me today [1].
I recall hearing from a historian a while back that the most numerous book on US Navy ships in the 1980s was a dictionary: has ubiquitous spell checking (and sometimes-wrong autocorrect) lost us something of value other than the "character" built by having to thumb through the dictionary to spell right? That one feels similar as a technology question, but I'd bet you have fewer takers for "the good ol' days" before spell check.
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