VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
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User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Hypothesis: the Internet (social media more specifically) have made it much easier to become a political partisan with no need to join "organized politics", without which there isn't an IRL grounding and it's easier to find your own personal circle jerk that pushes you extremism. Local political groups are less likely to align with such numbers with such extreme views: the couple dozen most extreme people in your town have nothing on the top hundred in the entire Anglosphere.
I guess one way to check this would be to look at whether it applies equally to small nations with language barriers versus the US. But that's a small dataset and probably pretty noisy.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I don't think they'd be dumb to be concerned that this will kick off congressional hearings and summon them personally to testify under oath about the practices of their site. Not saying that it will or that they deserve it, but if it the killer was, say, a site moderator (low, but nonzero chance) or frequent poster, it seems possible.
Not to mention that corporate leadership are public-ish figures (see Brian Thompson), so it makes sense to cool it for self-preservation a bit too.
And also a third possibility, which I'll assume charitably is the most relevant: that they see the killing of political speakers as abhorrent.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
It's easy to play "no true Scotsman" here: all the politicians and almost all the big pundits on both sides have said reasonable things in the last day. Honestly I've been a bit surprised at some of them.
But that isn't everyone: there are plenty of terrible takes on the Internet, some by even marginally-famous ones. I struggle to quantify it (open to ideas!) but it feels like shitty takes are coming in larger numbers from people much closer to the establishment on the left (universities, trendy blue city bars mentioned in this thread, popular internet sites) than the reverse: the likes of David Duke, Alex Jones, and Nick Fuentes are seem thoroughly disconnected from any sense of real power like that.
I'm sure that can be argued indefinitely, but IMO that means it's a good time to step back from the details of this particular case and try to come to agreement on what "your fellow travelers are, in aggregate, worse than mine" even means quantitatively, and then how we might address that before deciding which way to point it.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
as the people who know how to use them cycle out and the next generation cannot be trained.
I feel like if this statement were completely true, Iraq and Afghanistan would have gone a lot differently.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I suppose by that line of thinking, assassinating Kennedy got us deeper into Vietnam, memory holed the Bay of Pigs, and to the moon in 1969. At least the last one feels like a win?
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I'm not pretending that e.g. Timothy McVeigh weren't ideologically motivated terrorists.
IMO McVeigh is a terrorist, but it's complicated because I'm not sure what the correct response should be to the government murdering 86 people, including 54 women and children, without much remorse. Koresh wasn't a good guy, but the lack of a government investigation to doing so seems at least parallel to the perceived lack of concern for the Floyd incident. If I squint enough, the responses of "choosing violence against the system" at least rhyme a bit.
Not that I would endorse violence in either of these cases, but the abstract "how to hold one's government accountable?" question in answer to an atrocity maybe does rightfully call for violence at some point: "When in the course of human events..."
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Malignant narcissists for the last few decades have been focused on school shootings, but they are starting to shift to politics (bad)
I recall musing after the Butler, PA incident that "at least politicians are harder targets." Maybe I was wrong and hoping that the modal case would be single-death-to-Secret-Service-countersniper. The broader set of political targets isn't really a "hard target", is it?
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I can't think of the last time a shooter in the U.S. actually got away with this sort of act.
I don't think they have ever found who placed the pipe bombs at the RNC and DNC headquarters on January 6 5th (the night before).
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Prediction: the man who shot Kirk has no history of political activism as part of the Democratic Party or any organised centre or far-left group.
To loosely spitball an idea that's been kicking around in my head for a while: maybe (some of) what we see as "partisan fraying" is actually happening mostly in cyberspace (it's an old word, but I think it applies here), where it's easy to un-person someone on the other side: "oh, that a troll/bot/foreign psyop, ban them." (see "words are violence") The virtual version (aspect?) of our culture really is fraying at the seams because there never was a notion of "national unity" in the borderless cyberspace. This bleeds over into meatspace mostly from people who can't see the difference: I think you have to be terminally online to accept "X is genocide" to logically precede "so we should kill X supporters" as reality. And political activism still has a huge meatspace component: you go to conventions, protests, volunteer to phone bank or go door-to-door that filters out someone radically, terminally online enough to actually choose violence.
But I could be very wrong.
ETA: Surely there are some limits on legitimate political organizations accepting purely-online contributions. Otherwise it seems a matter of time until "your so-called phone-bank volunteers that you never vetted in-person were actually call center workers in [foreign nation A] getting paid by [foreign nation B]". The JIDF et al already get looked at pretty askance.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
the romantic notion that Science™ can be trusted as a process seems to completely wrong. Science is only as a good as the people doing, and the people doing it at the moment don't seem much good
Nullius in verba the motto of the Royal Society. Of course these days, even they would tell you to "Trust The Science."
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
but cheaper computers aren't really available and
My cheap Chromebook (under $200 in 2024 dollars) is a much more capable machine than any of the machines in this Gateway 2000 catalog from 1995 that started at $1799 in 1995 dollars (75MHz Pentium, lol). It lacks a CD and 3.5" floppy drive, but supports WiFi and Bluetooth and has a comparably sized display. It's almost certainly faster emulating that Pentium than the original.
"missing white woman syndrome"
I'm not sure the implied criticism by this is wrong: the media really does spend disproportionate air time on "cute" victims (Natalee Holloway got a lot of press coverage). See this thread happening now, and not for Debrina Kawam who was lit on fire and killed by an illegal immigrant: the latter was homeless at the time. (Or a recent stabbing murder on a bus in my city. Or the guy arrested recently for threatening bus passengers with a machete.) There really is less media coverage of crimes against Black victims for what I see as complex and circular reasons: for better or worse, nobody really cares about murders in "the hood" and they're hardly rare, so there is comparatively little advocacy for actually stopping it (similarly, "gun violence" advocates care a lot more about school shootings, and seemingly almost not at all about inner-city gang violence) --- and what advocacy there is ends up ineffective IMO partially because it politically ignores some of the causes of that violence, although in the past it's maybe swung the other direction in being callously ham-fisted. I don't think the problems here, or the solutions to it, are easy. And so the cycle continues.
IMO the headline-worthiness bias of "man bites dog" really does the world a disservice by skewing perceptions of the world. If you only follow the news and don't go outside, you'd think dogs were really at high risk of man-bites.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
IIRC at least some journalistic style guides recommend against calling a death "murder" unless a trial court has ruled it to be such. Otherwise it's just spicy homicide "killing". There are ways to kill people that are merely manslaughter, and ways in which doing so with intent still not be considered a "murder" (self defense, the death penalty).
It's relevant that they also generally say "accused" for libel reasons even when the case is expected to be pretty open-and-shut.
Only putting direct quotes between quotation marks isn't a fundamental law of the universe, after all, and nobody cares about those standards of precision.
Style guides vary, but maximal precision in quotes, er, string literals is the domain of software engineers. The Jargon File has some relevant pithy quotes:
Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if “Jim is going” is a phrase, and so are “Bill runs” and “Spock groks”, then hackers generally prefer to write: “Jim is going”, “Bill runs”, and “Spock groks”. This is incorrect according to standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them.
For example, the American convention is to move punctuation to within quotation marks. It probably capitalizes without annotation the first word of a sentence even if it was quoted from within a sentence. I can see a weak argument for "correcting" capitalization from a written quote: if it was said aloud, it'd have been ambiguous anyway.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
IIRC the reverse: "my factory in flyover country that needs real experts won't be able to compete with the coastal tech companies hiring entry-level JavaScript developers."
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
IMO the horror stories of deflation seem oversold for modest values of deflation (let's say low single digit percentages). I understand the theory, but there have been market sectors with drastic deflation in the last few decades (computers!) where you really could defer a purchase 12 months for a drastically better product, and yet they still sold like hotcakes and the market was considered "booming".
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
"you know if you shoplift you don’t pay taxes right?"
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the IRS expects you to declare the value of stolen goods (not returned within the calendar year) as income.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
A month later I flew Tokyo to Bangkok on Thai Airways. This 7 hour flight cost me only $301. I sat in the cheap seats in the back, but it was an empty enough flight that I had an entire row to myself.
I'm not familiar with Thai Airways specifically, but a number of national state-owned airlines are run at a financial loss as a prestige effort. It's easy to have empty rows on new-ish planes when you don't care about making money but do care about the appearance of being a "modern country" with the airlines that entails.
SK has a 50% higher obesity rate than Japan, and Thailand a fully 100% higher obesity rate.
For all of the comments about carbs being unhealthy for the last decade, I often think of how Japan, generally considered to have a healthy populace, must have a distinct lack of rice and noodles in the local cuisine.
/s if unclear.
ETA: Also a glut of cheap local produce.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Now I'm thinking of the especially high-sensitivity 'industries.' Who is maintaining nuclear arsenal? Building fighter jets and tanks? Keeping your government's communications and networked systems secure?
I often see people bemoan the seemingly small number of American citizen engineers at tech companies, but I can say that of my friend group going through a highly-ranked engineering school, if anything most of the eligible candidates have ended up working in defense or adjacent spaces. Most of these places keep a low profile: "don't put that you work here currently on LinkedIn" is something I've heard, um, a few times, and few at Lockheed are bragging about GitHub followers or making the Hacker News front page.
You go to work, do reasonably cutting-edge radar/hypersonics/robotics work for 40-ish hours, get paid reasonably and stably, and you don't talk about it otherwise, which I think unintentionally skews the narrative of engineering more broadly (a bit).
It's that the H1B program is used to bring in employees at below-market pay, rather than paying the native citizens market rates for their work.
I guess I'm not enough of an expert on economics and immigration law to feel confident this is a good option, but why not auction the H1-B visas, rather than a lottery? The government chooses the highest N salaried applications and collects an extra percentage payroll tax on such visa holders. I have heard complaints that this would probably drop them all in high-cost-of-living areas, but it seems easy enough to adjust for that.
Maybe I'm missing a reason why that wouldn't work that isn't "existing H1B body shops have too much political power."
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
The Women's Christian Temperance Union was pretty powerful at its zenith. From what I can gather of the zeitgeist, it aligned with the Progressivism (the original one) of the era pretty well.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
History has shown the executive has some flexibility on what stays open and closes in government shutdowns --- see Obama fencing off normally-unstaffed NPS facilities like the National Mall or Mt. Rushmore.
I would at least be slightly concerned about Trump running with it as a massive expansion of the DOGE cuts without accountability for the failures. Something like "Oops, this means we have to cut all [nonessential] grants to universities. Guess who gets to decide what is essential? Would be a shame if we couldn't catch up on budgeted spending within the fiscal year."
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I think the Internet as a global coordination platform here is undersold: it's so much easier to run a nationwide campaign on any issue today. In 1990 you'd do what, post letters and long-distance phone calls? More expensive in money and time than starting a subreddit, Facebook group, or even newsgroup or email list.
On the plus side, it's done wonders for semi-niche hobbies, though.
Even without algorithms, there is a huge bias between posting and lurking, too.
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