firmamenti
9mo ago
I still think buying Greenland is an actually cool idea and wish we would have done it.
firmamenti
10mo ago
I think the way that Christians see “coming for your children” is what the trans activists are doing. That’s why it seems so bizarre to me that they are trying to claim both at the same time. “We’re coming for your children” seems like it could practically be the header text of every pride event.
(I’m paraphrasing this is not an actual quote):
“We are coming for your children, but don’t worry we aren’t going to sexually assault them, we are just going to cut off parts of their body, mutilate others, give them hormones which will irreversibly sterilize them, and convince them that you, their parents, are trying to commit genocide if you try to stop us XOXOXO”
firmamenti
5mo ago
I think the strongest evidence for the fact that they are not secretly aliens or demons or inter-dimensional travelers in contact with us is that the people who supposedly know keep on with their lives.
Allegedly members of congress know of all this, and yet they still continue seething and coping about January 6th, Ukraine, late term abortions, etc. if you knew for a fact that biblical demons were in fact interdimensional intelligences phasing through our existence, would you still put on your suit every day and go to work to argue with people?
firmamenti
5mo ago
but existing homeowners are a powerful bloc.
Build new cities, then. It is incredibly frustrating to me to hear any blame for all of this garbage placed on the people that currently live in the places people want to go. How are people unable to see that this is the exact same argument that allows for massive immigration in the first place?
Hey bro, just decrease your own quality of life so that some people who don't currently live near you can live near you and get some of that quality you are currently enjoying.
No.
firmamenti
5mo ago
I feel like there is a cycle here:
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Programmers make a thing which is capable of repeating that it is sentient.
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Programmers want to inflate their sense of importance, and their position of importance within society. They spin elaborate science fiction stories about a “escaping” super intelligent AI.
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They refuse to elaborate.
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Alexi Friedman refuses to ask them to elaborate
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The marketing people, seeing the attention the programmers are getting, want in.
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They hear the stories from 2, and repeat them for the same reasons, not realizing that they were being marketed to by the programmers.
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The programmers and marketers now end up in a sort of martingale situation where they just keep double down on each others claims.
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The board of OpenAI decides to Take Action to prevent the marketing thing from happening.
Guys, I’m sorry if we deceived you. The AI is not going to “escape”. That doesn’t even make sense. Literally if there is a problem just stop paying the azure bill and Microsoft will shut it off.
firmamenti
10mo ago
but it remains a problem
The delta between abuse within the Catholic Church and in public schools is well documented, and supports the (in my opinion obvious[1]) conclusion that your children are less likely to be abused in a Catholic school than in a secular one.
[1]: It seems like the obvious answer that a Catholic organization, which treats the family, and especially children, as the most important part of society and worthy of the most protection, would be a safe place for children. The (false) idea that Catholic priests are somehow more likely than anybody else to abuse children (in reality they are less likely) only had staying power as a meme because of how counterintuitive it seemed. "Man bites dog" and all that.
That’s what everybody who settled this continent did. That’s what my ancestors did, and unless your family moved here in the last 150 years then that’s what your family did too. They moved out west and founded new cities because they were unwelcome and unable to make a living in the existing ones.
If they did stay in the eastern coastal cities they experienced absolute hatred by the people who lived there and they settled/formed new neighborhoods in undesirable parts of town either in industrial areas where they worked, or on the far exurbs.
Maybe your city is different. In my city, nobody is demanding new high density housing be built on currently barren undesirable land, they’re demanding that nice neighborhoods bulldoze houses and build condos.
firmamenti
6mo ago
One thing they should do is just change the branding. The hideous blue can is now associated with Dylan Mulvaney, and honestly it looks like ugly walmart aesthetics anyway.
Bring back the 1990s era silver can.
firmamenti
9mo ago
I think that Joe has an outrageously inflated sense of himself and his family. His entire career has been full of fits of compulsive lying about his academic accomplishments, his family history, his political and personal activities, and the activities of the people around him.
I think that it's both: he wanted his kid to be a successful power broker because he wanted to maintain this idea of "The Biden Name" meaning anything other than lying and corruption.
It's the reason that his grandaughter isn't allowed to use "The Biden Name" and is getting paid off with some of Hunter's paintings: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/hunter-biden-daughter-ex-stripper-receive-fathers-paintings-settlement-states
Somebody in this family thinks that there is value to their name.
firmamenti
6mo ago
The government is dysfunctional. Being efficiently dysfunctional is not a good thing.
The reasons that Matt Gaetz etc. ousted McCarthy was because some of the terms he agreed to to get their votes he ended up violating. The main one was that they wanted to split "omnibus" bills into specific limited scope spending bills.
I say good.
I think the Liz Cheny/Mitt Romney/GOP Neocon wing of the republican party are being childish.
I also find the Democrat language around this annoying. If they care so much about getting the government running, put together a few people to vote for Jim Jordan and be done with it.
firmamenti
7mo ago
Some of the people replying here seem completely out of touch with the right wing. I have no idea where they are getting some of these ideas.
The right doesn't like the war in Ukraine because they don't feel like it serves the vital national security interests of The United States. They suspect that it is a handout to the defense industry. As far as why they don't support this when they did support the war in Iraq/etc.: they talk pretty extensively about how the Cheneys lied us into this war, and how Ruper Murdoch (and fox news) helped. They feel betrayed by this.
They talk about it all the time.
Tucker Carlson, who was previously one of the (if not the) most popular host on cable news talked about this extensively.
I don't think it's complicated.
I am not on the left, so can't comment on why they seem to support it so strongly. My suspicion is that 4 years martingaling[1] the claims about Russian interference in our elections have built Russia and Putin into something resembling a Marvel comic villain and/or the nazis.
[1]Martingale betting strategy is just that every time you lose, you double down. Eventually you win and you win big. This applies to compulsive lying in: every time you get caught in a lie, you just double down and make the claims even more fantastic. Conspiracy theorists do this. It's basically how you get qanon.
firmamenti
7mo ago
My wife and I recently binged this show and absolutely loved it. Hugh Laurie is a treasure.
We had similar feelings to what you have articulated here. Also: this show is where I learned that “gypped” was a derogatory reference to Gypsies. The later plots where the cop is trying to get house in trouble is very reminiscing of The Shield in that it portrays a Good Man who is willing to do Bad Things in service of Good and is surrounded by dumb fake good people trying to stop him.
Here’s some fun trivia: house’s motorcycle when first introduced is an Aprilia RSV Mille, but is later is Honda CBR 1000RR with a “repsol” graphics package. Both absolutely bad ass bikes.
firmamenti
8mo ago
I think “environmentalists” being anti nuclear is a perfect example of what OP is talking about.
They’re anti nuclear because that would actually fix the problem, and remove their source of meaning.
To give a charitable interpretation to what Pope Francis is doing at that "pagan ritual" (better Catholics here please correct me).
The Catholics basically believe that other religions of the world might be somewhat directionally correct, but imperfect. This is what allowed The Church to integrate so many "pagan" practices (like traditions around Christmas) into the religion, and was a major contributor to its spread. So a Catholic encountering some pagans in the 5th century or whatever might say "well, yes, I can see that you are trying to approach and understand God, but you haven't gotten in quite right. God revealed something to you here, maybe, but we've discovered or had revealed to us a lot more; you are in fact worshipping the same God, and there might be something useful here, but we're a lot further along in our understanding. You should convert to Catholicism and we'll share what we've learned with you."
Basically Pope Francis is watching this ceremony the way I might watch my child explain an idea about how to make a racecar. I'm happy that he's trying to think through the problem, and I don't want to discourage him, so I'll entertain it; but my actual hope is that someday he grows up.
I don't know I have my gripes with Pope Francis (leave the latin mass alone); him watching some native american dance thing is pretty low on the list.
firmamenti
9mo ago
The paintings are also worthless unless Hunter is the one selling them.
Just absolutely deranged that a judge allowed this.
firmamenti
9mo ago
Just re: the strike. This seems like it has a sort of “Bud light” quality to it. Is the quality of work coming out of holywood really so much greater than other parts of the world that it is irreplaceable? Warner brothers etc really can’t just go to a foreign country to make their TV shows and movies?
It seems like Hollywood actors, in addition to being some of the most unlikeable people on earth, are also some of the most replaceable. If they want to strike, then good for them. But also now they’re going to have to compete Europeans and Canadians. It kind of seems like the audience are the winners here.
The core difference I see between people building normal relationships, and people attempting to build “polyamorous” relationships is that the poly people aren’t really.
Sex with my wife is certainly a property of my relationship with her, but it’s more of a manifestation of our relationship than it is the point of it. We have sex with one another as a result of the rest of it.
If I had to guess, I’d say >70% if my peer group engages in polyamory. I can think of 0 of them who are in long term stable relationships. But I think that make sense. The thing my wife and I are building is just categorically different than what polyamorous people are doing. The depression these people seem to almost always experience I think results from incorrect expectations about what they’re doing.
There is probably a comparison to be made here to the trans movement. The cycle is: a trans person engages in surgeries and drugs, but doesn’t get the results they imagined or were promised, so they become an activist who insists that the answer is to target younger people with more surgery, and more drugs. Of course this also doesn’t work, and the cycle continues until the answer becomes that the whole of society is broken and we need to completely tear down all of the structure of the world and rebuild it from scratch (which of course will also not work).
I see this behavior with poly people. You are not creating relationships in the traditional sense, you are creating transaction agreements, and when this doesn’t result in a relationship, the answer becomes bizarre activism, thinly (or not so thinly!) veiled attacks on your outgroup, or angry rants on social media.
Again I think that there is a comparison to the trans movement here in that poly people want to redefine various words to try and make sense of their behavior. This is where the attempts to redefine words (which just so happen to align with mean ways of talking about their outgroup!) like trust and jealousy come from.
What’s especially sad and insidious about this to me is that when these things reach their obvious conclusions (not working), the answer is to double down and recruit people, instead of warning them off of it.
As a broader comment: there is definitely something interesting there. Is there a name for this? It’s like “no I didn’t ruin my life I like this actually and we need more people to do it!”, and then a cycle of escalation that seems to end in “all of society is invalid”. This pops up all over the place in the culture wars.
firmamenti
6mo ago
I have a theory that this Bud Light backlash isn't just because Dylan Mulvaney is trans, it's because he's hideous. If Bud Light had partnered with Blair White (https://instagram.com/p/CpIx5-lJFCX/) for instance, would the backlash have been the same? Somehow I doubt it.
I mean seriously look at this: https://tiktok.com/@dylanmulvaney/video/7102974306036010282?lang=en
Or this: https://tiktok.com/@dylanmulvaney/video/7285860156548795694?lang=en
firmamenti
7mo ago
Somebody elsewhere in this thread linked to a youtuber who seems to be an expert on tunnel warefare. He just posted another video talking about tunnels and countermeasures and countercountermeasures: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mMaQn6eBroY
Really good stuff. Here are some highlights:
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The tunnels are huge
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It costs about $1/meter to dig the tunnels, and takes about a month to do 1km. Labor is cheap, they've been working on this forever, and there are probably a shitload of tunnels.
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The tunnels are huge, and elaborate (at least where he is), there is plumbing, electricity, etc.
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Tunnels are insanely easy to defend. You can just sit at one end 100 yards away from the entrance ,and shoot anybody who comes through the door.
Anyway, this video seems very high information density, and if you go through the guys history, he does legit seem to be an expert on this topic. Gives some insight into what this war will probably look like in Gaza.
firmamenti
7mo ago
Apparently some left wing organizations are revealing themselves. Here is an X account claiming to represent “BLM Chicago” implicitly (but very nearly explicitly) declaring their support for the terrorist attacks: https://x.com/BLMChi/status/1711793142742073573?s=20
My questions are:
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Who actually runs this account?
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Have they tried to articulate what they actually mean by this?
I’ll be honest that my opinion of BLM, especially after the 2020 riots, is quite low. This seems to fit a little too well into the right wing hatred of them.
Ok the other hand: are there any stories in Jewish folklore about creating a monster and then having it turn on you?
firmamenti
7mo ago
Something I have found interesting about this is that there appears to be a substantial amount of people who are simply unaware of what actually happened here. I think there is such a saturation of "Israel punched Palestine! Palestine punched Israel!" that people have disconnected from it. What happened over the weekend is an evolution in terror attacks. To compare it to 9/11, for instance: 9/11 had the goal of killing as many Americans as possible, but whatever this is going to be called appears to have the intent of torturing as many Israelis as possible. If Hamas had blown up a building with 1000 Israelis in it, I don't think the response would be the same.
Hamas specifically targeted a music festival full of young people, especially women. They paraglided into this music festival and started mass raping the attendees, and killing the others. They then took some of the dead bodies of these women that they had raped back to Gaza, where they were paraded around to chants of "Allah Ackbar". They flooded into Sderot, and started going door to door executing people, and again raping and kidnapping others. There are videos that Hamas has posted online of them taunting (with the implication that they will eventually torture to death) a young boy about 8 years old.
There are reports (admittedly this is a terrible source) now that they kidnapped children and decapitated them.
I haven't seen anything like this (although I don't go seeking this stuff out. Maybe it's common and I don't know about it). I have heard stories about stuff like this on The Anti Humans, a podcast by Martyrmade about the horrors of WW2 (https://martyrmade.com/19-the-anti-humans/).
Raping people as a weapon, decapitating children, indiscriminately murdering kids at a music festival - this is all inhuman behavior. These are not people that are available for negotiation.
firmamenti
8mo ago
I don’t know where you guys all live, but there is a near constant stream of modded cars, side by sides, and crotch rockets going by my house all the time.
It’s actually very annoying.
(I live near a university)
firmamenti
9mo ago
I'm not sure I'd consider this a "conspiracy" outside of the most trivial sense of the word as the FBI, and law enforcement in general, tend to be loathe to reveal details on active investigations or even if there is an investigation going on.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=hXjLqhtnIRI
If you're the person that Biden is bragging about ordering the firing of, is this a conspiracy? It sure seems so to me.
What happens in these states if Trump wins? They’re claiming that Trump is ineligible to be the president. Will we see some sort of president in absentia?
This seems like pretty naked secession behavior. Legitimately terrifying.
And just because we’re really beyond words meaning anything: how is this not “disrupting an official proceeding” -> an insurrection?
To an outside this seems absolutely insane.
I remember a job I did in NYC once building a stage for a music festival. It was something custom we had built at home in Texas at our shop, then shipped to NYC to assemble. When we got on site, it was explained that the venue had a contract with a union and we were required to use their workers. This means every cable that was plugged in had to be plugged in by a union electrician, every piece of stage had to be assembled by a union carpenter, etc. It was madness. I cannot overstate the uselessness of these people. Absolutely the laziest, stupidest people I have ever met, and who seemed to be constantly on break.
If these are the same types of people working in auto factories, then it doesn’t seem like any of the automakers would be at any loss to simply fire them all.
How long can the strike go on before the company is allowed to just fire everybody?
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