firmamenti
7mo ago
The United Auto Workers have gone on strike: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-auto-union-strike-three-detroit-three-factories-2023-09-15/
What happens if Ford and GM simply say: "okay, you're fired"? This seems to have quite a few benefits, mostly that they can get rid of union workers and remove the threat of another strike.
I'll admit that unions sortof confuse me. I didn't grow up around them and have always wondered the mechanism by which everybody gets to quit their job but then demand extra money to come back. Are the people running factory machines inside of Ford and GM (or starbucks, or a hollywood writers room) really that highly skilled?
It should be noted that Tesla is not unionized, and will not be a part of this strike. Do you guys think there is a chance that the government tries to force Tesla to stop making cars during the strike to make things more fair?
I'll be honest about my feelings towards unions: I don't get it at all, and I think I'm missing something. I do think that workers should have an adversarial relationship with their employer, but it seems to me like unions have all but destroyed the american auto industry. I think you'd be insane to not just fire anybody who joins a union on the spot. I don't get how places can "vote to unionize". Why does the employer not simply fire the people doing the organizing? Sure you can all vote to make a starbucks union, but...I just won't hire anybody in your union.
firmamenti
1yr ago
Trump Indicted: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/30/donald-trump-indicted-in-hush-money-payment-case.html
This is a major enough story that I think it goes beyond needing more than just a link.
A Gazan hospital has been hit, allegedly by a missile, allegedly by an Israeli missile: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/least-500-victims-israeli-air-strike-hospital-gaza-health-ministry-2023-10-17/
Here is why this seems incredibly unlikely to me:
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Israel gains nothing from this.
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Israel loses a lot from this.
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Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, etc. whatever amalgamation of actors here are opposing Israel have demonstrated that they are willing to strike their own people.
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Hamas etc. gain a lot from this (politically).
The narrative around this is already forming and I suspect that we will never be free of knowing that Israel for sure bombed a hospital (maybe they did).
This will be a major inflection point in this war. Causalities are approaching 1000 people (started at 500, now at 800)
Edit: here’s also why I’m so suspicious of this. If it’s true that Israel bombed this hospital, it basically evaporates any amount of good will I had for them. The 10/7 Hamas attacks were terrible. This is just as bad. Pull our aircraft carriers back, no aid, nothing. Still send in some bad hombres to get our citizens out, but other than that Israel is on its own, and I don’t want to hear any ridiculous moralizing from any us politician ever again.
Edit2: There are allegedly demonstrations happening in several countries now. Extremely dynamic news environment. Nobody knows wtf is going on. Israel is starting to get their narrative together about the cause of this, but it's way too late for them to get ahold of it.
Edit3: allegedly a video of both the initial rocket launch, as well as the explosion: https://twitter.com/TheInsiderPaper/status/1714379242983846126
This matches up with the very first video of the rocket hitting the hospital, and answers why the guy filming was filming (because there were a bunch of rockets going overhead)
There is a happening currently happening along the Texas/Mexico border which seems to be escalating in an interesting way.
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The state of Texas has been taking measures to secure their border with Mexico. These measures include installing concertina wire (colloquially known as "razor wire") along the border.
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A supreme court ruling said that US Border Patrol (the feds) are allowed to go into Texas against Texas's wishes and cut this wire. As /u/slowboy points out below, it is a bit more nuanced than that. There was an injunction preventing CBP from going to cut the wires, and the Supreme Court overruled it. Interesting culture war fodder: Amy Coney Barrett sided with the majority on this.
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Yesterday, Greg Abbot signaled that he did not have any intention of complying with this.
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Today, President Biden said that Texas has until tomorrow (Friday) to let them in. (Sorry for the low quality link here. If somebody has a better one please share it).
This does seem to be escalating rapidly. I don't see where the offramps are other than Abbot backing down. If he doesn't, what does that mean? Texas National Guard vs the Federal Government sounds awfully close to...I hate saying this, but a civil war? That's not right though since I can't imagine them shooting at each other.
This is also confusing to me politically. The border situation is not a political win for Biden. Even among liberals the cracks are starting to show. Morning Joe (msnbc show) this morning was talking about how there is a border crisis and it's the republicans causing all this illegal immigration by not doing a "Comprehensive Immigration Policy". That's obviously absurd, but it does show that liberals are willing to agree that completely open borders are suboptimal.
Edit: Trump weighs in
This, to my stupid non-lawyer brain, seems way more like an "incitement to insurrection" than anything he said on January 6th. Interesting.
They is currently an 8 month old baby in the UK with a mitochondrial disease which is almost definitely terminal. The babies name is Indi: https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/italy-grants-citizenship-terminally-ill-british-baby-after-104666139
A UK judge has ordered that that the baby be killed. Her parents have protested this, saying that they don’t think the government should kill their baby.
The Catholics have said: give us the baby and we will put the baby in our pediatric Vatican hospital, and the Italian government has said they would cover the medical bills. The Italian government has also said that the family can have Italian citizenship.
The UK has said no, you can’t leave, you need to keep the baby here so we can kill it.
I know this sounds hyperbolic, but…I don’t think it is. Read the article. Absolutely deranged behavior.
I understand that in socialized medicine countries there is some calculation about how much life support will cost, and famously in Canada sometimes this means the government just tries to get you to kill yourself, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. The Catholics are being pretty Catholic about this and just trying to save the baby. The UK government won’t let them and insists that they should just kill her.
Insanity.
firmamenti
11mo ago
The Los Angeles Dodgers, a baseball team are apparently hosting a "pride night" and have invited a group called "The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence" to perform at it.
The "sisters" are of course not sisters at all, but in fact, an anti catholic group of men who dress as nuns and mock catholics.
Originally the Dodgers, a baseball team, after learning that this was essentially an anti-Catholic hate group, uninvited them. However, they recently re-invited them.
Baseball?
What is the fucking point of this? What possible reason does a baseball team have to indicate a sexual preference? And why does this include mocking Catholics?
God this stuff is demoralizing. Is that the point?
firmamenti
6mo 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?
A poster here recommended a book to us all called “Introduction to Christianity”, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (who would go on to become Pope Benedict XVI) a few weeks ago. I recently got a copy of it.
I wanted to share with you all the first few paragraphs from the book, because I found them very interesting:
Anyone who tries today to talk about the question of Christian faith in the presence of people who are not thoroughly at home with ecclesiastical language and thought (whether by vocation or by convention) soon comes to sense the alien -and alienating- nature of such an enterprise. He will probably soon have the feeling that his position is only too well summed up in Kierkegaard's famous story of the clown and the burning village, an allegory taken up again recently by Harvey Cox in his book The Secular City. According to this story, a traveling circus in Denmark caught fire. The manager thereupon sent the clown, who was already dressed and made up for the performance, into the neighboring village to fetch help, especially as there was a danger that the fire would spread across the fields of dry stubble and engulf the village itself. The clown hurried into the village and requested the inhabitants to come as quickly as possible to the blazing circus and help to put the fire out. But the villagers took the clown's shouts simply for an excellent piece of advertising, meant to attract as many people as possible to the performance; they applauded the clown and laughed till they cried.
The clown felt more like weeping than laughing; he tried in vain to get people to be serious, to make it clear to them that this was no stunt, that he was not pretending but was in bitter earnest, that there really was a fire. His supplications only increased the laughter; people thought he was playing his part splendidly--until finally the fire did engulf the village; it was too late for help, and both circus and village were burned to the ground.
I’m sure we’ve all felt like that clown at some point or another. Especially with regards to ideas like “just kids on college campuses”.
Here’s a quote, this one from Saint Anthony The Great, one of The Desert Fathers (Early Christian precursors to Christian monks who lived in Egypt in about 300AD).
“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’”
Anyway I think the relevance to the culture war is obvious here, and could be taken any of many directions. I just read this today and wanted to share. To pull on one culture war thread (perhaps one of the oldest culture war) it is profoundly depressing to me that these parts of our history, especially the history of The Catholic Church, seem to be suppressed or at the very least ignore in modern western society.
Not to be outdone by Bud Lite, Miller Lite has apparently been running their own "woke" beer advertisements: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_NtBQWZqaHo
IMO the campaign here is actually clever, take this "bad" thing, use money to buy it, and turn it into a "good" thing. Whoever came up with this idea: cool idea.
But here's my question: is any of this old "bad" stuff actually bad? Let's look at contemporary things like onlyfans, instagram, tiktok, the hundreds of reddit 'gonewild' type porn forums, etc. It seems to me that many women, given the chance, enjoy wearing bikinis, being sexualized, being lusted after etc. Not all women, obviously, since some women don't like this, but...isn't this trying to strip the pro-sexualization women of their agency?
Aside from that, isn't Miller saying that women belong...in the kitchen? Don't go out to the beach and get drunk and have fun. Wear modest clothing (like the person in the ad), stay inside in the dark, and make things for people to eat.
Also: the claim that women were the primary brewers historically, is not only dumb, it's also wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weihenstephan_Abbey?useskin=vector
firmamenti
4mo ago
George Hotz talks about it here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DdZmZJHEVUc?si=g7z3yB_V_pvqc6-q
To paraphrase: no we aren’t going to give food away, there is just going to be abundant food that’s so cheap that nobody can’t afford it. No don’t start a charity to give away 100 malaria vaccines, start a company to make the malaria vaccines cost $0.01 each and make them abundant.
I think it's just an age thing. Atheism forces you to remain ignorant of substantial parts of human experience. It would be difficult to hold that level of ignorance for a very long time, especially with the internet. I think it's just hard to enforce that level of blindness in the age of the internet.
There do seem to be a few people in my life that never grew out of their atheism phase, but they seem generally uncurious.
Maybe I'm just way off? My suspicion is that there are very, very few atheist rationalists. I don't think that the curiosity involved in rationalism would be able to also support being an atheist. The cognitive dissonance would be too strong.
To expand on this: a religious person asks the question "what if there is no god" and spends a life exploring it. An atheist asks that question when they're a teenager (usually), figures that they know the answer, and then refuses to explore further.
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
8mo ago
There's something so weird about this to me.
Trump was actively involved in discussing and planning efforts to obstruct the certification of the election.
Sure in the most absolutely tortured meaning of the word "obstruct". His claim was that the election as being presented was invalid, and he was trying to use the court/legislative system to elucidate the correct/legal outcome.
This would be like if I got a traffic ticket, showed up in court and argued that the ticket was given in error, failed, and was then charged with "obstruction" for challenging the state.
If every challenge to an election is henceforward seen as "obstruction" then where the hell does that leave us? It seems to make elections a sortof winner takes all battle where the winners take office, and the losers end up in jail.
At this point the optics don't matter. I genuinely believe that Israel could detonate some tactical nuclear weapons in Gaza, killing everybody there, including the prisoners, and would suffer almost no negative consequences for it.
Israel, and by extension the Jewish diaspora, has an absolute grasp on western media and government. During the American house speaker recall debate, one of the congresswomen gave a speech explaining that we should keep McCarthy as speaker because he has done the most to bring other congressmen to Israel. Major American policy debates center around support for Israel, a small foreign country.[1]
The Palestinian terror attacks were a type of brutality I don't think anybody in the modern western world has ever seen before. They were uniquely horrific, and I think this will be remembered as a turning point in modern history the same way that 9/11 was.
Israel is out for blood, and nobody in the west with any real power is going to stop them.
And by the way: good for them. I, a Catholic American, am jealous (although jealous is the wrong word since that sortof implies an animosity, which I have none of) of the power that the Jewish people have. Much of my criticism of The Church centers around not behaving more like The Jews. Why no Catholic equivalent to "Birthright Israel"? Why not make Catholics learn latin anymore? These are good things that people should do.
(Although I don't think they should be nuking Palestine.)
firmamenti
5mo ago
I feel the same way but for the opposite reason. Non technical people who don’t understand the infrastructure requirements of actually running these things are talking about them as if they’re ghosts, or spirits.
It’s not “AGI that escapes the lab and infects all the computers”, it’s: your credit card company starts using OpenAI/Microsoft products to make determinations about debt collection and there are unforeseen edge cases.
You’re not going to have an AGI that somehow worms it’s way into a nuclear computer for several reasons:
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We already have actual humans trying to do the same thing.
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You’d notice the semi truck loads or H200s being unloaded into your building, as well as the data center being built to house them.
So the charge is that he, an adult man, tried to convince adult women to engage in consensual sex with him?
I’m getting sick of this thing where every shot a guy takes which doesn’t land is somehow seen as a sexual assault. Do people realize that women have agency as well, and also engage in these sorts of fantasy? “Oh no I guess I have to sleep in this bed with this big strong man who is out here saving the children for the sake of the mission” is the plot of like 90% of female targeted erotica. “We had to shower together to convince the cartel that we were married” sounds like it was literally written by a female erotica writer.
Human adults have sex with each other. Sometimes there is a period of courtship. Sometimes, and in fact just due to pure statistical reality, most times that courtship fails.
That is not a scandal.
The scandal is that these people just cannot understand that the scandal is the fact that adults want to engage in sexual activity with CHILDREN.
Go to a drag show? No problem. You do you.
Go to a drag show, with children? Problem.
Engage in a gender fetish? No problem. You do you.
Engage in a gender fetish with children? Problem.
Make erotic literature? No problem. You do you.
Make erotic literature for children? Problem.
The scandal is that these maybe actual pedophiles don’t understand the demarcation between “sexual activity among consenting adults” and “sexual activity with children.”
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
Actually Zelensky does need the support of the people funding his stupid war. It’s becoming a major issue in American politics, to the point where people are getting pretty annoyed with him.
Poland recently told him to pound sand, and compared him to a drowning person who is going to take anybody who tries to save him down with him.
Instead of playing war hero, complete with his idiotic green costume her wears all the time, and constantly referring to Russians as “invaders” like some sort of marvel movie speech, Zelensky should be negotiating a truce, or laying out reasonable pathways to ending the war, not making absurd claims like that he, who has been losing his war, is going to push Russia completely out of the LPR and DPR (areas occupied by Russians since long before Putin invaded), and somehow retake Crimea.
The whole thing is absurd. It’s a ridiculous, nationally suicidal vanity project by a former television actor, and an American president who seems to be looking for a surrogate to fulfill the fantasy version of his dead son.
firmamenti
4mo ago
Food waste you mean carbon sequestration? Do your part, don’t eat that tart!
But seriously is anyone really complaining about food waste? I personally haven’t really heard that.
firmamenti
10mo ago
boomers like to drive
God I seriously wish that some of these anti-car people could just spend a month actually living in the "car free" cities that they think everybody wants so they could realize how terrible it is.
People point at some fairy tale version of a Finnish city where there's playgrounds everywhere and people are walking around drinking espressos and beers and wearing scarves and children are laughing and playing with one another in city squares.
It's not the lack of cars that is causing this unless cars is some sort of euphamism and I'm just not pol-pilled enough to understand what you guys mean when you envision a car free city. My city is a "walkable" city. From where I am sitting typing this there are a dozen coffee shops within a 5 minute walk, countless bars and restaurants, shopping, there's a train that goes literally right in front of my house, and a stop for that train a block away. There are 5 parks I can think of offhand that are within the same 5 minute walk from my house.
Guess what? I still drive EVERYWHERE I go.
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I can bike, but if I bike I have to carry a 20lb chain with me to lock it, and even then I worry about the wheels being stolen, the seat being stolen, the lights being stolen, or some other set of things being stolen. ALL of this has happened to me or people I am close friends with. I have had bikes stolen that were locked up, parts stolen off of my bikes, etc.
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I can walk, but I have to take a bizarre circuitous route that avoids: the park, the local drug store, all of the bus stops, all of the train stops, and any convenience stores which are currently being used as homeless shelters and drug injection sites. Even still I've had friends robbed or beaten up walking through my city.
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I could take the idiotic train that our city is so proud of (and everybody who can actively avoids), and be accosted by the schizophrenic psychopaths who are using the train as a refuge from the weather.
The parks are de facto homeless encampments, meaning if I want to take my kids to play, guess where I go? 30 minutes out into the suburbs.
This idea that "boomers like cars and ruined everything by making car centric cities" is absurd and I can only assume is parroted by people who never leave their goon caves.
firmamenti
4mo 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
6mo ago
Has there been any discussion within Israel or within the broader Jewish diaspora about a change in approach to gun rights?
I can't be the only one who realizes that if the Israelis were armed in the same way that The Americans are, that 10/7 would have looked a lot different. Not the music festival, obviously, but the houses/villages for sure. But actually: maybe the music festival too[1]. Just looking out the window and considering the guns that I know for a fact that my neighbors have (I live in the downtown area of a major, liberal American city), there is absolutely 0 chance that Hamas would be going door to door executing anybody in my neighborhood.
It's pretty wild how much Americans are into guns. To the people who aren't aware: gun nerds have kindof moved past just being into guns at this point. Yeah they own AR-15s, but the are also really into training, physical fitness, radio skills, orienteering, and own some pretty fucking advanced sensing equipment. 15 years ago it was cool to have an Ar15, now dudes are (almost commonly) out here with full on panoramic thermal/nightvision, body armor, etc. It's insane.
[1]: Even the yogi far left borderline authleft people I go to music festivals with own guns. Americans really own a fucking shit load of guns.
firmamenti
11mo ago
They’re chemically castrated and physically mutilated. Yeah that’s not death but “we’ve only castrated and mutilated your kids. C’mon they survived the surgery! Relax!” is not offering much in the way of comfort.
firmamenti
10mo ago
How is it not absolutely self evident that the trains are coming for the children? I feel like you would need to be almost literally insane to think otherwise.
If they’re not coming for the children, then what is the purpose of states passing bills to make themselves trans sanctuaries or whatever? Why is pride stuff being put in schools? Who was the one that made the “protect queer children” sticker I saw this morning?
The idea that any person could reasonably say, in 2023, that gender fetishists are not coming for children is absurd. They are very clearly, very well fundedly, literally putting pride gear in major retailers, coming for your children.
The state of Minnesota has passed a trans refuge bill.
From my reading of this (not a lawyer, obvs): previously if a child ran away from home, and was found, the child would be returned to the child's parents. Now, however, if a child runs away from home, and claims a "transgender identity" the state will use its powers to keep the child from its parents.
This seems: absolutely pants-shittingly insane to me? Like I'm sortof reeling from disbelief at this and am still trying to figure out what I'm missing. This also seems to imply that if a child runs away to Minnesota, that the child will be kept in Minnesota away from his or her parents.
Can anybody help me understand this? This goes so far beyond anything that I had even considered in the realm of possibility that I'm sure I must be misunderstanding this.
As a related side note: I am reaching a point where reading things on this topic is becoming incredibly difficult. There seems to be so many seemingly double/triple/quadruple entendre words that its hard to follow.
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