crushedoranges
No bio...
User ID: 111
crushedoranges
4mo ago
'legitimate victimhood?'
Are you like, the edgy version of the Republican boomer that says 'Democrats are the real racists?' 'Wokes are the real oppressors?'
If you define wokeness by that parameter it means on some level you've functionally accepted the priors of critical theory and therefore are not particularly based in any aspect. Cringe indeed.
crushedoranges
7mo ago
I would point to Jefferson and the anti-Federalist papers as to a non-progressive ideation of equality. Namely, that if we're going to have a republic, it'd be better if everyone was a gentleman-farmer. If the height of American society was somewhere around the wealth and property of the English landed gentry then the distortions that come with the hyperaccumulation of capital would not occur.
But that didn't happen, and if it ever was real then it was definitely squashed after the civil war. The bourgeois won, and with it, the idea of independent democratic experiment-making died too. The American federal government made very sure that landholding elite classes could not resist industrial capital for a reason. And once you have carpetbaggers funded by out of state capital to run for offices everywhere, you no longer have local government, or local politics.
Obama and McCain's electoral contest was the ultimate contest of carpetbagging, neither of them being born in the United States proper. If you want local government, you want local elites.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
I actually do make things: I'm a writer, but the content I make is perhaps too spicy for here, being 4chan-adjacent. :P
crushedoranges
11mo ago
Union leadership has been captured by socialist activists and politicians as to be completely alienated from their working-class roots. There's a reason why unions are marginal parts of the leftist coalitions now - outside of regime-adjacent bodies like teachers and civil servants, blue color labor has little real power. If they did, you think that NAFTA would have ever flown?
crushedoranges
1yr ago
History belongs to those that show up. In other words, when your population will be half seniors by 2080, you're not a competitive Great Power, no matter how much automation you have.
To put a blunt point on it: no matter how many Chinese boomers have a boner for aggressive foreign policy, they can write checks that their youth can't cash.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
At the simplest level of understanding, inflation is the consequence of too much money chasing too few goods.
Since none of us are Scrooge McDuck, we don't have a need for money: we want the goods that money represents.
An NrX solution would be to appoint Jeff Bezos as a Czar of logistics with the intent of increasing supply. I would nationalize all food banks and related charities, and import German managers from Aldi to coordinate them. I would create biblical-scale, Josephian government granaries that are needlessly large - seven years worth? - enough to convince even the most ardent hoarder that there is a lot of goods to be had.
I would also enlarge the strategic fossil fuel reserve and convince oil companies to invest in extraction with a fixed, contracted price. Housing is more difficult, but the creation of a state-based stockpile of common building materials - ensuring a stable price for construction - would also work, too.
The best thing about all of these agencies is that their mission is very defined: and can be phased out when the need passes.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
How many smart actors are in political betting, anyway. I think it's mostly wishcasting by feverent partisans. It's best used as a gauge for enthusiasm of the core base. Ceremonially igniting your cash on a bonfire to signal faith in your tribe is worth something (and if you actually win, bonus!)
I bet in antiquity, people would watch the smoke rising from the temples to gauge which Babylonian cult was on the ascendency. It's much the same here.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
Just because the Argentinian state is a known bad actor does not make any proposed alternative inherently better. I can point to any amount of rugpulls, from the original MT.Gox to the very recent Polaris to demonstrate that crypto is not safe.
I would ask you to assume good faith, that I am informed and I have good reason to believe in what I do. Then make an argument, if you believe I am wrong. For the same reason, I assume you have no position in cryptocurrency and are arguing purely on its technical and utilitarian merits.
To do otherwise would be a great conflict of interest.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
Blue Tribe has an anti-conspicious consumption bias, partly for Gaia-worshipping, and partly because flaunting wealth is very Trump and anything that can be remotely considered to be Trump is bad.
But surprise, surprise, that doesn't stop anyone from using wealth to flaunt status! You may notice a certain lifestylism by those who proclaim themselves liberal and socialist and egalitarian. Hobbies like travel, as you said, can cost an absolute fortune, while the person in question looks like a scruffy pleb. 'Minimalist' lifestyles that rely on the labor and effort of a half-dozen people, behind the scenes. Showing off the install of the solar panels on your house. Long hikes on the Appalachian trail (with equipment worth thousands of dollars.)
It turns out it is quite expensive to look authentically working-class. Blue Tribe elite try their darndest to not look like what they really are but like everything that exists, it is a commodity, sold at Whole Foods, the North Face, and your local gastropub.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
I'm all for it, but stuffing yourself in a obscurantist cubbyhole is a bad way to keep abreast of the trends of popular culture. Being aware of what normies consume is a great way to ascertain the valence of what is allowed to be believed.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
It requires a certain mindset that is obsessed about map-painting and an interest in history.
If you read those books and then proceed to completely ignore their lessons and substitute a vague Fukuyamist neoconservatism, of course you wouldn't learn anything. I would say that the American political establishment have a desire for both lengthy wars and wars of ideological vagueness and impossible aims (what does spreading democracy even mean, in an ethnically divided country?) that both books warn against.
If, on the net, reading those books turns you into someone who disagrees with the ghouls in the State Department, then it's a net win.
crushedoranges
7mo ago
There is some marginal benefit to being the child of a rich person. (Otherwise, there would be no mechanisms to preserve elite status over generations other than by gene transfer.) I think if people were given the choice of being the only child of a Sub-Saharan African or the hundredth (thousandth?) child of Elon Musk, they'd choose the latter every time.
My point being is that it doesn't matter how affluent the society as a whole is: so as long as hedonic escalation is a thing, people will always resent and have jealousy for people more well off then them (even if, relative to everyone else, they are wealthier than everyone on the planet.) We are nowhere near that state in the modern day: the ones with the greatest chip in their shoulders against the 1% are the fantastically wealthy American underclass.
crushedoranges
9mo ago
The world is moving closer and closer to a monoculture, of which societal differences are obliterated from the twin forces of capitalism and social media. What justice would such a society have? It would be permanent and immutable, and if you dislike it even in the smallest part it will be imposed upon you.
The relativist stance is descriptive of a reality that is fast disappearing. Current academics feel no shame of imposing their morality on the distant past. It is post-modernist babble that is completely unhelpful to the vital question of what is right and good.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
On Reddit I made a doomerpost when Trudeau declared his state of emergency. I pulled cash out of my credit union and waited. I'm certainly not uninformed of the problem. I even went to a convoy political meet-up quite recently.
And even in this self-selected audience of people who this is immediately relevant, I heard nothing about crypto. Crypto did not stop the chilling effect of the government declaring martial law. These are relatively affluent blue and white collars and they're keeping their money in relatively traditional investments (gold, real estate, small business) and not crypto. They still bank at Scotia, BMO, etc, for Christ's sake.
And it is because the benefits vastly outweigh the negatives. You can talk all day about things you value but revealed preference shows that most people do not hold the same interest in the technology or in the concept of decentralization. People want to know if it's convenient, cheap, and safe in the real world. If you are a normie with no idea of what crypto is you would have been better off trusting the system because political and free speech rights are secondary to, you know, making sure you don't lose everything to a rugpull.
People who prefer trustless systems are, on the whole, one part tech-libertarian and nine witches.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
I am of the opinion that stupid people, trusting people, and old people should be allowed to keep their money. It is not reasonable to transfer the burden of 'educating oneself' onto the general public when it comes to investments and finance. When a state turns the deposits in their national banks into worthless nothing, it is of course a wrong thing. It is also a wrong thing when sleazy cryptoscammers run off with all the investor's money.
It's not a young man's game anymore. A careless idiot degenerate gambler who loses his inheritance by blowing it on a shitcoin is highly unsympathetic. But you read the bankruptcy documents of these shams of companies, and you see the pure despair of the investors. They are men and women in their fifties and sixties, who were sold hopes and dreams of financial independence. They are ruined now, and it is unlikely they will find good employment: they will be working now until the day they die. You read about marriages falling apart, people losing their houses. These desperate, foolish letters begging the judge to be pushed to the front of the creditor line, when the truth is that there is no money at all. All they have are the worthless tokens on a server they can't even withdraw from. So much for the promise of a decentralized currency!
There is no protection against this, in the technology, in the services that have sprung up around it. It is as safe as a screaming buzz saw for the unwary. It is not their fault: they were deceived, by advocates who were full of themselves, who gladly pumped them up - but dumped them, and called them witless fools and rubes when they lost it all.
So I find it hard to argue on the 'merits' and 'technicalities' of cryptocurrency when it has created so much human suffering. You may be able to ignore it, but I can't.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
Is cryptocurrency a significant contributor to capital flight? It's hard to believe, when it can be legislated out of existence by the whim of the legislature. Is Russia using the technology to bypass western sanctions? Surely, if there is any use case for crypto, we would have seen it boom if it was an effective way to bypass Western capital controls.
In my view, it's a solution in search of a problem: nearly everything its advocates say it can do is already done and on a far more economical scale.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
But you didn't use your childhood games - which are arguably about as legitimate as a base of identity as any of these frauds - for financial benefit, for a political soapbox, to lambast the why-tie on their various political and social sins. It is on a grand scale the same crime as forum sock-puppeting, but with actual stakes. They are using the trappings of another ethnic group that others sympathize with for clout and platform.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
It's why I believe that Trump isn't a blathering moron and is, at worst, a clever amateur who is intelligent enough to see the end result of policy that its own proponents have cleverly ducked around. If abortion is murder, then why not arrest the mother? We arrest infanticides and infant abandoners, don't we? That it is politically unpalatable and bad optics is one thing, but perhaps it is a natural consequence of unpopular policy.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
The term 'newhalf' is workable. Although it refers to pre-op or non-transitioning ftms, it's suitably gender-neutral to be flipped about to 'reverse newhalf' to gain the same meaning.
Honestly, Japan's fetish porn community comes up with perfectly functional technical terms that aren't dripping with ideology, so perhaps we should outsource this to them in general.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
Japan comes to the rescue: just call them futanari and be done with it. :P
crushedoranges
1d ago
But, seeing as it is functionally a non-universal principle that must be adjudicated based on arbitrary definitions of oppressed and oppressor, isn't it just post-hoc rationalization? (Adolf Hitler, great advocate of social justice: taking from the Jewish bourgoise oppressors and giving to the German proletariat.)
crushedoranges
12d ago
They're perfectly fine games. (Paarthurnax and Trevor are my favorite characters from each, for vastly differing reasons.) They're just open world games and are considered inferior to their predecessors by auteurs. To a certain degree, they're right, but they exaggerate it for memes.
crushedoranges
30d ago
Your point would be better if Yud was a prophet in the wilderness, but instead, he's an influential idiot who has influence in the development of LLMs (and whatever AGIs emerge from their development.) It would be like having a board member on Intel who wants to make their chips hotter and slower. He's past the point of contrarianism: he's a Yuddite.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
Alberta is the standout but Saskatchewan and Manitoba are no slouches either: as global warming progresses the US agricultural zones slowly creep northward. All of our Ukrainians have historically lived there, as well.
I am puzzled that you believe natural selection is an all-encompassing concept that includes human efforts at selective breeding. It is not a prescriptive term. Humans are not predisposed to select favorable traits from flora and fauna: in fact, it is a social technology that arose from cultural, not biological origins. Insomuch as the word 'natural' is used, it is to distinguish from human and non-human effect on selection pressure. If you object to the anthropocentric viewpoint that puts humanity above nature as a privileged observer, then say so. But that doesn't make natural selection any less valid. It is not a just so explanation that you may have encountered in the softer social sciences, like evo psych. It is also backed by voluminous research and math and hundreds of thousands of papers (literally, the entire field of modern biology.)
If you believe that natural selection is tautological because it is obvious, then you work against history. It was not obvious to the ancients (although parts of it were certainly guessed independently from agricultural folkways) and even in modern times it was denied for ideological reasons (creationism, lysenkoism.) No one is in love with Darwin, as you claim. Of all the theories on the diversity and variety of biological life, it has proved to be the most useful and applicable to science and industry.
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