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.
firmamenti
1yr ago
actual prostitute who literally sells her body as a commodity apparently has no respect for it or and is whoring this out on the internet.
Wow this is really compelling stuff. A girl in the internet talking about her bobs and vagene? Sounds like she isn’t like the other grills!
firmamenti
10mo ago
I want to make sure I understand this, but first I’d ask you to stop using Reddit drama language like “the trains”.
There must be ground realities that we can agree on to be able have a discussion, right? Like for instance: trans people exist? If somebody claimed that the existence of trans people was an elaborate psy op and that none of them were real and they were all holograms, it would be appropriate to say “you would have to be suffering from some sort of paranoid delusion to believe this.”
Or no? The point that I’m making here is that the people claiming both that they must come for the children and you are a bigot to stop them, but also that they aren’t coming for the children and you are a bigot to suggest they are, are trying to create a sort of insane (in the technical sense) delusion in people’s minds.
Again this isn’t consensus building. This is a description of what I perceive these people to be doing.
you asking me to link to examples of my supporting points
This stuff has been well, well discussed here, hasn’t it? Are you disputing that these things are happening at all?
What about this is infuriating?
Also: this is an extremely low effort post. Please don’t post like this.
firmamenti
7mo ago
I’m saying that constantly referring to them as “the invaders” instead of The Russians is performative.
Ukraine is prey now and their “resistance” to Russia’s invasion is going to lose them their nation, not keep it.
As soon as Americans have had enough of Zelensky’s adventure, it’s going to be over and he’s going to be left with a generation of lost men, every western investment bank salivating at helping The Ukrainians rebuild, and a bunch of destroyed cities.
He’s doing that to be antagonistic. He said not to say “trains” (which I don’t agree is a Reddit thing but whatever), so I stopped, but he kept using that term.
I don’t think it’s an odd request. Im asking him not to be unnecessarily antagonistic.
Here’s another example of him misquoting me, then arguing with his own misquoting: https://www.themotte.org/post/499/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/102514?context=8#context
He’s doing this, presumable again, to be antagonistic.
(But this is way off topic sorry to anybody reading along. I does get annoying when people mischaracterize what you say)
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
1yr ago
Why can’t these people just fuck off and leave everybody alone? If you want to live by a grocery store, then do it. If people want to live in suburbs, then let them.
Stop trying to impose your pet ideas on everybody else.
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.
firmamenti
5mo ago
The “cease fire” people are the same people who were calling for a “no fly zone” over Ukraine.
I believe Israel has been seeking a ceasefire for about 20 years now. In fact, I’d say that their entire response here is because Palestine continues violating the various cease fires being implemented.
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.
It’s the bizarre (tacitly, selectively enforced) rule the mods have about post length. Effort posts are great, but a lot what is happening here is becoming the sort of illusion of effort by making things 10x longer than they need to be.
Certain mods don’t even make an effort to hide their desire to enforce ideological or social adherence and use the implied thread of banning as a way of quenching discussion about things then don’t like.
It’s very sad to me. SSC CW roundup threads were good, and I understood why they were eventually moved to TheMotte. I also understand why themotte moved offsite. At this point it seems like the experiment has failed, though. There just doesn’t seem to be the sort of rich discussions here that used to happen, and I really do think it’s the mods putting out the sparks of those conversations because they either disagree with them, or because the poster hasn’t written some pointless chatGPT style fluffed up 8th grade level essay on the topic.
My suggestions
-
Stop metaphorically resting your hand on your ban hammer because a post is “low effort”, when it is in fact just short.
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Mods looking out for their pet topics of internet friends should be a bannable offense.
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Bring back the BLR, or do a second weekly CWR thread that is for people who like more discussion; allow bare links there.
Can somebody please steelman the case for libraries at all? Certainly there was a time when writing things down on dead trees was important, and publishing a book was an important way of contributing to the collective knowledge, but that just isn't the case anymore.
The libraries should be removed from every school, certainly the people with "library science" degrees should be removed, and the space should be used for something more in line with the original intent. Every school should get a few H100s, make a more advanced computing lab, put a CNC mill in there, etc. Libraries should basically be very well funded makerspaces at this point, not shelves of useless books.
I guess I get a library as a sortof throwback to something that was needed a long time ago, but at this point books are like vinyl records. Cool, and I love them, and dream of having a massive library in my home some day, and I am a compulsive book buyer, but...not really necessary for a school. In addition to that, it seems like L I B R A R Y has become some sort of cultural importance for the left, where scary book burning or book bans has become somehow meaningful to them.
Get rid of the libraries. Replace them with materials science labs or something cool.
I get it. Putin is the bad guy. Russia is the bad guy.
But in the real world: Zelensky has no path to realistically expelling Russia from the land they want, short of dragging the rest of the world into WW3.
If you really want to game it out: Zelensky has every reason to try and escalate this conflict. His best option is to drag my children into a war so that he can take some land back from Russia. The problem is: I’m not willing to send my children to their death so that Zelensky can have a little bit more land in the northeast of Ukraine. I’m also not willing to risk an all out nuclear conflict so that Zelensky can have more land in northeastern Ukraine.
Lock Zelensky and Putin (the bad guy Russia is bad Russia invaded Ukraine Russia bad) in a room together and demand that they hammer out a peace deal. That IS going to result in Russia keeping some of the land they’ve taken. In exchange Ukraine gets to keep a couple of hundred thousand young men alive.
As far as what is a nation: The United States is a nation too. It is not in our vital national security interests to escalate a regional conflict to the point where we are sending our children to their death. If Zelensky wants to continue his national suicide then go for it, but I’m not funding it anymore, and if he succeeds in escalating it to WW3, no promises he doesn’t end up on the other side when the US has gamed out her interests.
firmamenti
9mo ago
don’t bring up anyone’s hypocrisy/the church’s corruption, rampant pedophilia/the inherent idiocy in believing in god.
Dear the motte, boy is my outgroup sure boo. They are so boo, and one time they tried to enact their boo upon me, all I wanted to do was:
stay balls deep in my excellent wife/[their daugher]
Unbelievably low effort post. Reported. Please put this type of thing in the low effort culture war thread.
yofuckreddit
Or keep it there on /r/atheism.
firmamenti
7mo ago
I am commenting on the Vice article, as well as the more general culture war climate where failed attempts at courting women are treated as some form of sexual impropriety.
Also you and the other person that commented something similar: you are both apparently falling into "wait, which side of the culture ware is firmamenti on here? Who is he accusing of being a wokie?" - this is bad form. I would highly encourage you to try to get yourself out of that framing.
firmamenti
1yr ago
I'll admit that I'm typically pretty sensitive to these sorts of things, and while they are obvious in this show, the show is good enough that they're ignorable.
This show is really good. I think towards the end of The Walking Dead, there was this idea that audiences simply didn't have an appetite for zombies anymore, and that's why people were so hard on that show. No, actually, it's just that TWD became horrible.
I will say that everybody on that show seems to be a lot gayer than is statistically reflected in society, and while I love to complain to my wife about how annoying it is that writers will just lazily make characters gay as a way of making the story more dramatic, I ultimately don't care.
My thoughts on the most recent episode: I actually didn't pick up on the CW angle of the rapey cult leader. I know plenty of of protestants who seem about a half a step away from fitting into that archetype.
firmamenti
7mo ago
A union is a way to force the C-Suite and investors to share some of the massive amounts of wealth
Isn't that supposed to work by developing a skill that the "C-Suite" wants? (The people making the most money on these companies, btw, are not the "c-suite", its' the investors who own the company)
that they hoard (and ultimately waste on trifles).
How does one "hoard" money?
firmamenti
10mo ago
Does the parent comment contribute anything other than “boo outgroup $[nonsense gpt quality restatings of my outgroup is boo]”?
Oh come on...
It's beautiful. People living in some horrifying hellscape, and still managing to find humanity there. Nick Offerman's character made a literal refuge for himself, and eventually somebody he cared about to live in. His work, and his masculinity is what kept them safe. We need more of this, not less. I agree that it seems a little tedious to make these characters gay, but...gay people exist. Slightly autistic sexually confused (I mean because it was implied that Offerman's character suppressed his homosexuality and never acted on it) dudes are the exact type of person I'd expect that have elaborate zombie preps.
My critique for the people who think that telling stories like this is pointless: what is the point of the broader story? None of it is real. It serves no utilitarian purpose at all.
"Some dude and a kid go to Montana" - is that really the whole story? I don't think so.
firmamenti
4mo ago
Something that has always annoyed me about "satanists" is that in the Christian mythology, Satan is literally a standin for evil. It's not "here are some things, and the ones we think are bad are the ones Satan likes", which would allow the atheists to be like "no you were wrong, the things you don't like are good, actually!".
Within the Christian framework, the very concept of evil stems from Satan. It's darkness, absence of love, absence of joy, eternal torment. The way that you experience this evil might look like fun (hookers and blow), but the order that these people seem to want to have is reversed. It's not "we looked at hookers and blow and decided it's evil" it's "the very embodiment of evil is leaking into our reality and it is manifesting itself as hookers and blow."
Evil -> hookers and blow.
Not: hookers and blow -> evil.
So when these people say things like that they are "satanists" who believe people should be allowed to do hookers and blow because restricting them from hookers and blow is oppressive or whatever, they're just...wrong about the order of operations here. Maybe an argument could be "hookers and blow are not actually a manifestation of pure evil. WE are the pro hookers and blow group and think that hookers and blow is good". It is just completely nonsensical within the Christian framework they're trying to work in to try and say that Satanism could even possibly be interpreted as anything other than a pointer towards "true evil, regardless of what you might currently think true evil looks like".
I wish I could say I hated these people, and I wish I could get riled up to want to smash this statue because it embodied something I am theologically opposed to, but it doesn't. I hate this stupid statue because it is cringey. I would feel approximately the same as if people wanted to put up a video game or marvel avengers shrine in the capital. A funko pop of a video game character would probably have more validity than this absolutely cringe "baphomet" statue..
firmamenti
6mo ago
“Because the Gazans are violent sociopaths” is the obvious answer. What I am asking is what the people who call Gaza an “open air prison” give as an answer.
firmamenti
1yr ago
Because a massive bank lied to them and because incompetent federal regulators didn’t catch it?
Should they just have already assumed the government was made up mostly of completely useless rent seeking tyrants? Keep in mind a lot of them are pretty young and may not have figured that out yet.
firmamenti
1yr ago
Being involved in theater doesn’t make you a theater kid, and you can be a theater kid even if you are not involved at all in theater. I wouldn’t take it too personally.
Do you see yourself as better than others? And wish to impose your beliefs on others? Do you imagine over dramatized revolutions yet oppose gun ownership, and associate fitness with something negative?
It’s the kids who were in high school asking for more homework, tattling on other kids, and sneering at anybody who liked sports. If that was you, then yeah you’re a theater kid.
There are however many right wing and even far right wing artists. Anybody who doubts this should spend some time at burning man interacting with the people building the art there. They’re the most libertarian of libertarians.
Here is this post, but I asked chatGPT to simply make it longer.
In the future, it may be a good idea to filter all posts through an LLM so that they fulfill length requirements:
The recent passing of Senator Dianne Feinstein has indeed marked a significant moment in the political history of California, as it not only reflects upon the substantial tenure of a seasoned senator but also kickstarts the gears of electoral machinery to fill the now-vacant seat. This unfolding situation beckons a thorough examination amidst a myriad of discussions among political analysts, potential candidates, and the general electorate in California and beyond. Reflecting upon history provides a lens to understand the forthcoming political scenario. Unforeseen Senate vacancies have often led to midterm or special elections, the instances of Martha McSally's election in 2019 following John McCain's death, and Edward J. Markey's election in 2013 post John Kerry's resignation stand as testimonials to such historical precedence.
Delving into the legal framework, California law mandates the Governor to announce a special election within a fortnight of the vacancy, with the election to be held between 112 and 140 days post-announcement. This relatively brief yet crucial timeline sets the stage for an intense period of campaigning for potential successors and a whirlwind of information dissemination for the voters. The succinct period earmarked for campaigning necessitates potential candidates to hit the ground running, mobilizing support and articulating their policy stance to the electorate. This period also challenges the voters to sift through the information, analyze the policy propositions of the candidates, and make an informed decision on election day.
The political ambiance is already abuzz with speculation regarding potential candidates who might vie for the vacant seat. Names like California Secretary of State, Alex Padilla, and Los Angeles Mayor, Eric Garcetti, have been floated around in political circles, albeit it's still early days. The political ideologies and past performances of these potential candidates could significantly shape the narrative of the election, and subsequently, the ideological leaning of the elected successor. The spectrum of political ideology that these candidates represent could potentially sway the policy trajectory that California embarks upon in the forthcoming years.
A predominant part of the discourse centers around whether Feinstein's successor will embody a more progressive or a traditionally liberal stance. Although sometimes used interchangeably, the terms 'progressive' and 'liberal' encapsulate different political ideologies. Progressives often advocate for more radical reforms, pushing the boundaries of traditional policy frameworks to address systemic issues, while liberals tend to favor a more moderate, incremental approach towards policy reform. The dichotomy between progressive and liberal ideologies is not just a semantic one, but reflects a deeper ideological chasm that could significantly impact policy formulation and implementation.
Several political analysts have delved into this discussion, reflecting upon the growing ideological divide within the Democratic party, both at a state and national level. This debate is not confined to California but mirrors a broader national dialogue concerning the trajectory of the Democratic party. The discourse encapsulates various facets of policy debates, from healthcare reform to climate change mitigation strategies, and reflects a broader ideological struggle within the party. Quoting a political analyst from The Washington Post, "The forthcoming election in California is a microcosm of the broader ideological struggle within the Democratic party, reflecting the tension between a growing progressive faction and a more established liberal base."
The impending election is not just about filling a vacant seat; it's potentially a narrative on a shift in California's political ideology. It's about the candidates, their campaigns, the voter turnout, and how these elements coalesce to pen the next chapter of California's political narrative. The narratives that emerge from campaigns, the debates that ensue, and the eventual electoral outcome will collectively narrate the next chapter of California's political saga. Set against the backdrop of a dynamically evolving American political landscape, this election is a testament to the continuous, unfolding story of democracy. The ripple effects of this election could potentially reverberate beyond the borders of California, impacting the national political narrative and the policy discourse within the Democratic party.
In conclusion, the election to fill Senator Dianne Feinstein's vacant seat is not just an electoral event, but a significant political occasion that could potentially mark a shift in California's political ideology and have broader implications on the national political landscape. The discourse surrounding this election, the candidates that emerge, and the eventual electoral outcome will be keenly observed, analyzed, and discussed in the days and months to come, embodying the dynamic nature of the American political system and the continuous evolution of political ideology and policy discourse.
It may also be a good idea to then use a similar LLM to summarize the post. Here is a good summary/higher information density version of the above:
The passing of Senator Dianne Feinstein prompts a special election in California, as per state law, to fill the vacant seat. Historically, such elections like Martha McSally's in 2019 and Edward J. Markey's in 2013 have followed Senate vacancies. Speculated candidates include California Secretary of State, Alex Padilla, and Los Angeles Mayor, Eric Garcetti. A key discussion surrounds whether a progressive or a traditionally liberal Democrat will succeed, reflecting a broader ideological divide within the Democratic party. The election outcome may signify a shift in California's political ideology, potentially impacting national political narratives and the Democratic party's policy trajectory.
And then a very good description. In my opinion this is the best example of what a high conceptual information density top post should look like, and while help facilitate the most useful discussion:
The passing of Senator Dianne Feinstein triggers a special election in California, with speculated candidates like Alex Padilla and Eric Garcetti. The election sparks discussions on whether a progressive or traditionally liberal Democrat will succeed, reflecting a broader ideological divide within the party, potentially impacting national political narratives.
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If anybody wants help decompressing their posts or repeating the same ideas a few times to fulfill length requirements, chatGPT is good, mistral was also just released and is supposedly really good too.
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