netstack
Texas is freedom land
No bio...
User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2mo ago
- You can embed links by enclosing the link text in brackets: “[[1]](https://www.umass.edu/political-science/about/reports/2025-8)” becomes “[1]”.
- A summary of links is not, on its own, enough substance for a top-level comment. Please try to add some of your own commentary, theorizing, etc.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8d ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
12d ago
That might create people.
If you only drive sober, use your headlights, and follow all laws, you can still get in a wreck. When that happens, should you be held to the same standard as a reckless drunk driver?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
27d ago
I was going to make fun of that as spherical-cow thinking by a guy who had never seen naval service, but T-Paine actually had a slightly more complete plan.
Some method might be fallen on to keep up a naval force in time of peace, if we should not judge it necessary to support a constant navy. If premiums were to be given to merchants to build and employ in their service ships mounted with 20, 30, 40 or 50 guns (the premiums to be in proportion to the loss of bulk to the merchant) fifty or sixty of those ships, with a few guard-ships on constant duty, would keep up a sufficient navy, and that without burthening ourselves with the evil so loudly complained of in England, of suffering their fleets in time of peace to lie rotting in the docks.
It’s still kind of like paying truckers if they include at least one anti-tank weapon. America would have a heck of a time getting either to stand up against a serious military.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3mo ago
Confirmed. It doesn’t surprise me. A honeypot this elaborate, and with no obvious enforcement mechanism, would have made even less sense.
Sharing classified information is not generally a crime. Not unless you’ve signed the corresponding SF-312 and accepted the obligation to protect it. What are the odds that anyone in this chat had done so?
In any other administration, this would be a perfectly respectable scandal. Perhaps a little higher up than usual. It’s normally staffers who mishandle communications. Today, though, I don’t expect anything to come of it. Let me make a quick check of which step we’re on in the narcissist’s prayer. Yup, we’re still on “…and if I did, it wasn’t that bad.”
20% that anyone from the group chat faces a criminal charge.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
On one hand, you’ve got a (former?) Trump enthusiast who blew himself up in front of a Trump property. On the other, a self-proclaimed misandrist and nihilist who went 0-1 against a bunch of babies. There’s a common thread here and it isn’t intellectualism.
Hell, they wouldn't even call it terrorism, when George Floyd extremists went around lighting things on fire in protest of a vibe.
Were they wrong? I think most riots belong in a different category from hostage situations, hijackings, and bombings.
many attacks on universities I regard as quite warranted
Please tell me you mean political attacks rather than terrorist ones.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
20d ago
I saw one of his tweets shared in a random (very left-leaning) discord server. I had no idea how to explain that he was legitimately unhinged.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2mo ago
I’m…not sure there’s enough here for a top-level. What did you take away from this? Do you think this guy is right? Is that a good or a bad thing?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
13d ago
Just finished Stormlight and really enjoyed it. Yes, people will point out stylistic/prose issues, and they'll be absolutely right. But Wind and Truth succeeded as the plate-spinning, world-expanding, every-new-detail-an-entire-sequel-hook kind of book I was looking for.
For something completely different, I'm alternating back to Annals of the Former World, a set of geology essays. I mentioned the first one last year, but apparently never commented on the next two, so here we go:
In Suspect Terrain was a hit piece on plate tectonics. Great premise, slightly confusing execution, because it was really more like a series of reasonable objections to people in the "new theory" hype cycle. I can't tell if that means the main character was stating the obvious, or if she really was a visionary who was vindicated in the next 40 years of textbooks. The coolest part was that, yes, plate tectonics was new in the 50s and 60s. I always kind of assumed it was settled in the 1800s like so much fossil and timeline stuff.
Rising from the Plains, though, was amazing. It's a history of one family stretching back to the westward expansion into Wyoming. At the same time, it's a narrative of how the Laramie and Medicine Bow mountains got where they are today. Outrageous cowboy anecdotes share pages with the solemn march of Deep Time. Part of the charm was having to keep a map open to cross-reference. I highly recommend this one.
Anyway, the next essay up is Assembling California. So far he seems to be coming at the region from both the western fault lines and the eastern Sierra Nevada. As always, the prose has been delightful. Here's hoping it keeps up.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3mo ago
Funny how these TIL posts always seem to update in favor of Russia, isn’t it? No one ever comments “I revisited my strategic assumptions, and it turns out Putin is a huge bitch. Like, tinpot-dictator paranoia. Now I’m more sympathetic to the Ukrainians.” There’s no alpha in agreeing with the mainstream narrative.
But I digress.
Russia’s actions don’t generally look like existential terror. Pushing Finland into NATO? Withdrawing from the INF treaty? (Possibly Trump’s fault, I guess.) Threatening tactical nukes?! That’s not how you deescalate the situation.
Keeping NATO missiles out of Ukraine is a tiny benefit compared to the other consequences.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
25d ago
I’m not thrilled about how AT is putting words in your mouth, but this sort of callout helps approximately never.
Be polite or refrain from responding at all. No one will think less of you for it.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
18d ago
I’m ready for the Pacifier sequel where Vin Diesel takes on his toughest parenting challenge yet: the opioid epidemic.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
23d ago
How much of a window do these LLMs have? Presumably, as a completely new user, I wouldn’t get much out of this prompt.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
Not to beat a dead horse, but that is a less than convincing defense.
This essay is bad and I should feel bad.
I should feel bad because I made exactly the mistake I am trying to warn everyone else about, and it wasn’t until I was almost done that I noticed.
How virtuous, how noble I must be! Never stooping to engage in petty tribal conflict like that silly Red Tribe, but always nobly criticizing my own tribe and striving to make it better.
Yeah. Once I’ve written a ten thousand word essay savagely attacking the Blue Tribe, either I’m a very special person or they’re my outgroup. And I’m not that special.
Just as you can pull a fast one and look humbly self-critical if you make your audience assume there’s just one American culture, so maybe you can trick people by assuming there’s only one Blue Tribe.
Gotta love vintage Scott.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2mo ago
Please review our rules. See also the top of this thread:
Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
This is not a place to rant about how much you hate some group. It’s not a place for framing them in the worst possible light and stoking up outrage. Be polite. Be clinical. Describe people in ways they might reasonably describe themselves.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
We ask that top-level posts have a little more substance. Who is this? What’s it got to do with the price of tea in China?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3mo ago
Reversed stupidity is still not intelligence.
Why not apply this level of learned helplessness to Musk? Surely he’s burning credibility, too.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3mo ago
I’m glad that you took it as saintly curiosity, because I felt like I was risking Reddit atheism. “That’s a noncentral fallacy, baby!” So…thanks for being a good sport. I wish every terminology debate could go this cleanly.
It’s a difficult subject for me. I have close friends who take their transitions very seriously, who are clearly perceiving something that you or I fundamentally don’t. I refuse to hold that against them. I feel like that’s what the average trans debate demands: condemning my friends wholesale on the basis of the craziest nut someone can pick.
You avoided that entirely, and I think I learned something for it. By all accounts, you were right, and “chemical castration” applies to all uses of both (D)MPA and the GnRH drugs. Cancer, criminal justice, gender. The medical terminology has been around since before gender identity was a flagship issue. Even the distinction between “castration” and “sterilization” probably dates back to the California bill.
I want to believe true things. This isn’t the first time you’ve convinced me that my reflexive reaction was wrong. I really appreciate that.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3mo ago
This is a forum for discussing the Culture War. That’s a lot harder when you delete your contributions.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3mo ago
Seconding FC.
You are making it very hard to believe that you’re acting in good faith.
But, since another deletion was somewhat predictable:
Is Matt Walsh going to leave The Daily Wire?
For most of his career as a public figure, Matt Walsh was the embodiment of Con Inc.: self-styled "anti-woke", socially conservative (but not in a way that instantly triggered accusations of bigotry), and most importantly, color blind. For him, "America [was] a set of ideas".
Well, something has changed, because Walsh has been steadily creeping rightward over the last several months and the end product of that transformation appears to be here (and here). The impetus for that video was this interaction between Sam Seder and a right wing zoomer.
We're seeing the right splinter in real time among racial lines in a way that it hasn't in many decades. Which side will win out in the end?
For whatever my opinion is worth, I'd like to register that both Seder and the young woman didn't come out looking well. Seder couldn't articulate a response in real time, but his opponent is likewise regurgitating right wing talking points that she doesn't appear to have put a lot of thought into.
Unrelated, but I thought I'd bring it up just because I was going through his Twitter:
Can you imagine if even one Bud Light warehouse was firebombed or even one Bud Light drinker was assaulted during the Bud Light boycott? There would be mass media hysteria and FBI investigations. Yet Tesla facilities and Tesla drivers are being attacked all across the country by leftist militants and the media ignore it entirely. I've noticed this phenomenon among the right (necessary disclaimer: I completely acknowledge that this is true of the left as well, but they're not in power now so it's not as fun to scrutinize them) to boldly assert the truth of easily falsifiable claims. The "media ignore it entirely" is such a claim: CNN, CBS, ABC, and my favorite, an ominous report from the Washington Post. This story is obviously being covered - maybe more than it deserves to be - so why type something out you know to be a lie or something that 5 seconds of research would falsify? As someone who might otherwise be open to Walsh's ideas, I can't help but take him less seriously now.
Charitably, Walsh must be communicating something other than the plain meaning of his words. In this case, he must mean "I don't think the media is covering this enough", or "the media isn't being adequately sympathetic to Tesla".
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2mo ago
I was going to make this a top-level, but since it’s apparently topical…I was digging through my post history for something and ran into this based on a different @2rafa comment.
Enlisting is an employer of last resort. There were a lot more people at their last resorts in 2008-2012, a lot of people who really needed a competitive paycheck and a comprehensive insurance policy. In 2024, that’s not necessarily the case. We’re coming off a couple years of COVID distortions and zero-interest-rate phenomena. That has a way of making boot camp less appealing.
So, Conspiracy Theory of the Week: Trump is intentionally trying to trigger a recession to bolster U.S. military recruitment.
If the economy crashes, more young American men will choose the military. If it crashes faster than the housing market, even more so. And if it crashes in the midst of a publicized house-cleaning session, well, the new recruits are more likely to endorse the Trump party line.
HHS has already lost more employees than the DoD despite the latter being 10x larger. (Numbers could be off; it’s hard to find coverage that isn’t hysterical about the whole process.) Meanwhile, USMEPCOM is one of the few exemptions to the DoD hiring freeze. Can’t recruit new troops if there’s no one running the stations!
There’s the whole bit where he’s slashing the VA, but this doesn’t actually disprove anything. After all, who hates the VA more than veterans?
This is stupid and I don’t actually believe it. There’s no advantage over simpler theories which don’t assume a 5D mastermind.
To wit, Trump policy is governed almost exclusively by his aesthetic sensibilities, and he’s mashing whichever buttons look like they might steer us in that direction. Military reform is somewhere in the pile. High enough to give the DoD a better deal than DEd or HHS; not nearly enough to intentionally tank the stock market.
Didn't it?
In college I had a part-time job with the facilities engineers. They'd digitized the blueprints for every building on campus, plus the full history of change orders. Before that, they had to go down into the halon-equipped archive and pull out file drawers with the originals. Surely that led to some productivity boost.
A couple years back, I was talking to an elderly woman who had worked in Saudi Arabia in (I believe) the 80s. She did payroll for an American-run hospital system, and oversaw their transition from bags full of paper money to checks. It sounded like a real quality of life improvement for the employer. Employees were a little more reluctant, but today, paychecks are ubiquituous. Except they've also been superseded by faster, self-documenting digital finance.
Then there's programmers. Even mirroring your hard drives has got to be more convenient and more scalable than a couple extra filing cabinets of punch cards. I don't even want to think about how the programmers of yore attempted version control. The productivity gains from digitization were obvious.
I suspect these generalize to most data-based industries. We're just more likely to take the improvements for granted.
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