crushedoranges
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User ID: 111
crushedoranges
23hr ago
Good writing is something beyond technical skill and authentic expression.
I would describe it as a religious experience: that you are offering yourself to a divine muse: and you are a conduit for something unearthly. It passes through your unworthy hands and is lessened by its transcription onto the page. Something pure and real, an echo of a sublime vibe that trembles through the air.
It is the most satisfying and furious passion I have experienced in my life, and everything I've done as a writer is chasing the dragon of communion with that mayfly feeling. Words fail to describe its swelling intensity: you can see reflections of it in truely great works. I hope at least some of you get to experience it someday.
crushedoranges
1d ago
what kind of sample has a majority its participants go through a formal DEI training? That excludes almost the entirety of the blue-collar and tradesman, as well as a plurality of the service industry. I hate to go diving into crosstabs to discredit a survey, but this sounds very suspicious.
crushedoranges
1d ago
So, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?
You got 'the antipopulist' literally in your name. Populists don't trust the institutions. Currently, the populists are in power. To not talk about the legitimacy of the system is a bridge too far. It would be like talking about the ancient world without mentioning Rome a single time.
I disagree with Marxists all the time (of which I share virtually no political axioms in common). But I engage with their critiques of capitalism, their attempts of creating alternate economic models. The entirety of the critique of the populists is questioning the legitimacy of the current institutions. You must answer it!
Why do your preferred elites have the Mandate of Heaven?
Or let them eat cake. Let them eat cake and choke on it. Tell the mob that they're filthy plebians and how dare they question their betters. I have heard this sentiment phrased eloquently and not, but the venom is always the same.
crushedoranges
3d ago
I think you're the one that's using the meme incorrectly. The first and third propositions are not the same because the third is too wordy. For the meme to work, the idiot has to come to a gut conclusion and not state an open question. The fact that you have to explain what it means and it is not immediately obvious - unlike anti_dan - supports this conclusion.
crushedoranges
3d ago
If you want to hit politicians for pushing things that are obviously not true then you can throw in the entire left and their belief in intersectional social justice. People hate polished and focused grouped politicians so much that they're willing to give rambling grandpa a chance. The ultimate test of a politician's fitness is the electorate, not whatever gatekeeping standards mostly imagined by the readers of the New York Times.
crushedoranges
3d ago
Trump has always sounded like that. He's definitely slowed down as he's aged, but he has probably the most distinctive cadence in a politician today. I would argue that the only sign of senility I'd take seriously is if he suddenly started speaking normally because that's Trump reading off a canned script.
His opposition's sneers about his dementia were always whataboutism, deflecting from Biden's (obvious) incapacity. In the aftermath of the former president's downfall, it feels like so much vivicarious seethe: 'now it's our turn to throw this attack in their faces!'
But no, that's not how it works. The coverup was worse than the scandal, so to speak. Trump gets a pass on his age because of his opponent's hypocrisy. People aren't that stupid. Trump isn't going for reelection anyway, so if his brain goes out before the midterms Vance is ready for prime time in a way Kamala was not.
crushedoranges
5d ago
Because evangelism by the sword is still quite immediate and present in the modern world and it is a simple pragmatic acceptance of the fact that these beliefs are strong enough for people to die for. (How would a postmodern martyr even look like?)
crushedoranges
5d ago
I have to say that I've been reading your posts with the voice of Maiq the Liar and the feminine pronoun has destroyed the very foundation of my reality.
crushedoranges
11d ago
Haidt's foundations of morality is a good basis for this.
Imagine you are in a kindergarden and you open up your lunchbox and find out your mother has packed you a candy bar, and the kid immediately besides you starts whining to you to share (fairness). But you were given this chocolate bar by your mother, and it is yours (liberty). Eventually, the kindergarden teacher comes over and obliges you to share with the whole class (authority).
Now, I bet you can come up with results where fairness is liberty, and sometimes that does line up. But in many cases, equality to all means coercion to some, and to the conservative mind that is intolerable. It's a difference in terminal values that is irreconcible, but it's not evil. And if experts (authority) are not on the side of liberty, then it doesn't matter how much they know (or claim to know.)
The kindergarden teacher may have infinite knowledge compared to a kindergardener but it never feels great to be coerced to do the right thing. There is no such thing as an expert in moral authority (the absence of the philosophical numina known as God.) The experts, lacking omniscience, are merely imposing their moral preferences on you without attempting to convince you and that is fundamentally against freedom as a value.
crushedoranges
11d ago
If it's a straw man, then it's a very common one: it's a cliche Redditism, at the very least. Blue Tribe will always call their enemies stupid: even Vance is called a Appalachian hillbilly when he is arguably one of the most self-made men of our times. It stems from the belief that their enemies are stupid and evil. You can't possibly be good and smart and oppose what they do.
When Arnaud Amalric said 'Kill them all, God will know his own', there was a recognition that at least some people in the city were good Christians and not heretics. It's an olive branch from the Red Tribe to have at least some tokens within the institutions to have them not recognized as partisan enemies: a university full of gay race communists has no Reds within it and can be attacked without regret or pause.
Well, congratulations, academia: you drove out all the witches, and now Trumpemort is here to destroy you. Universities have lost tax-free exemptions and their endowment because of racial prejudice before: certainly the universities have uncontroversially engaged in such as the Asian lawsuits have revealed. If they're not even capable of denouncing their own radicals then what are they good for? As Pol Pot wisely said: 'to keep you is no benefit: to destroy you is no loss.'
crushedoranges
13d ago
Those extremist strawmen are already well represented in American academia. You can easily find academics who are in favor of open borders, the complete abolition of gender, men not having the ability to vote, draconic gun control, and voluntary white extinctionism. (Flat earthism is the only one that doesn't belong.)
The fact that these viewpoints are tolerated while the slightest bit of pushback to global race communism isn't is strong evidence that this measure is necessary.
You misunderstand: it's not DEI for conservatives, but ensuring that there's at least one witch in every panel and body of importance. There doesn't need to be parity, or quotas, or anything like that. Just the minority report. If you don't consent to the witch, then you're not really in favor of academic freedom: you're a monoculture of our enemies that needs to be blown up and you certainly don't need tax dollars that are paid by witches. If even the smallest of token concessions are impossible to negotiate, it's time to start indiscriminately nuking civilian targets.
After all, it's Hogwarts: School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and not Harvard: School of Progcraft and Libbery.
crushedoranges
14d ago
American pirated versions of gacha games that give everything for free and have all the girls say 'Long Live Great President Donald Trump' would be a cultural victory similar in impact to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
crushedoranges
15d ago
The barn door has been flung open and sent flying a dozen miles by the tornado at this point. Trump really should ask his critics whether or not they'd prefer him to send Reaper drones after illegal immigrants: maybe they can patrol the border and fire hellfire missiles at groups of people crossing the border at odd times of the day.
If the US government can extrajudicially murder you with a drone (Anwar al-Awlaki) who was an actual American citizen, then it's difficult to argue that its remit is constrained in alien nationals abroad.
Granted, the way he was removed was probably not good, procedurally, but once you're off American soil, questions of jurisdiction render that a moot point.
crushedoranges
16d ago
That's a pretty non-von Neumann thought to have, my fellow clone of von Neumann.
crushedoranges
17d ago
Scott Alexander has transitioned from someone with deep insight into a guy who makes obnoxious, Facebook-tier takes that are meant to be nodded to and not thought about. Obviously people care far more about what systems do than what they were created for! Only a pendant (maybe with extremely nerdy glasses) would nasally insist 'it was made with the best of intentions! that should matter!'
Which I would reply: get back to laying the bricks for the HSR to Bakersfield-Tartarus, dude.
crushedoranges
18d ago
It's getting annoying enough that I say there should be a rule that deleting a top-level post is grounds for a permanent ban, but that's probably not a strong enough deterrent.
Rather, the ability to delete a post should not be given to new accounts. I'm not sure if that's possible to do, admin-wise, but it should be considered.
crushedoranges
19d ago
China lacks both interest and ability of being world hegemon, and you wouldn't want them to be anyway. Even a bad American hegemon is restrained by Western cultural mores and ethics: the Chinese have no such limitation.
Multipolarity isn't some sort of kumbaya where everyone gets along and does trade: it's great power competition and world wars.
crushedoranges
21d ago
When all of those Silicon Valley oligarchs came in I was worried that Trump would sell out and abandon his populist roots.
Well, that didn't happen. I suppose it's a matter of perspective whether or not you see it as a good thing or a bad thing.
crushedoranges
22d ago
This is the death blow to the Democratic party nomenklatura: if it goes through then it will be Trump's Great Purge, utterly destroying the federal government as an institution for generations. Even if Vance loses in 2028 there will be nothing left to rebuild. No one will make a career that can be destroyed on a whim every four years. We will see a return to the spoils system where government appointments are cycled in and out with every new administration as payoffs to supporters.
crushedoranges
23d ago
Moving forward, everyone should pepper into their posts the words 'based', 'cringe', 'redpilled', 'pepe' and 'kino' because no LLM would ever use it in their speech. Embrace the skibidi toilet of authenticity!
crushedoranges
24d ago
That was the advent of social media: elites could no longer gatekeep the masses. In previous eras media elites controlled both context and expression so that the political elite could pretend to have a popular mandate (because that is the basis of legitimacy in a democracy). Even in the so called golden era of democratic norms it could only exist because it was tightly controlled.
The masses were never wise, temperate, or well-informed. The current failsons of the western world came into power naively believing in their own liberal rhetoric: and thus, they have no defense against the crudity of the people they ostensibly lead. They can't even muster a defense without twisting themselves into knots as Hanania does, trying to bring forth the nanoangstrom of difference between bad populism and good democracy.
The truth is cold and unforgiven. There never was such a thing.
I'll be happy to defend Trump's foibles and missteps if you'd like to defend the Iraq War. Or the COVID response. Or Critical Race Theory and its formalization into academia and hiring practices. Affirmative action in college recruitment. The replication crisis. Politicians and NGOs openly lobbying for open borders and the immiseration of the working class. Every single brick of the system that held it up that is gone that you don't want to defend.
And my answer to that is: I don't know. I don't know how to fix the system. But a good start, in my mind, is getting rid of everyone responsible. And it seems like you're standing in the way... for no discernable reason at all.
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