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Texas is freedom land

9 followers   follows 3 users  
joined 2022 September 05 17:27:40 UTC

				

User ID: 647

netstack

Texas is freedom land

9 followers   follows 3 users   joined 2022 September 05 17:27:40 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 647

It’s iconic, but I can no longer hear the line as anything other tha

Uncle Sam, put your hand
Down the backofmy pants…

No; what gave you that impression?

I figured it was something like this explanation. But I’ve been blissfully ignorant of this particular Main Character of Twitter.

it would be very symbolic

How do you mean? I find it hard to see the parallels between invading Ukraine and bombing Iran, other than both being terrible ideas. Russia’s invasion is of no particular historical significance to either US or Iran.

It is fascinating to see how something that was absolute NO in traditional rules of war "Generals do not take pot shots at each other" became normalized in the rules based order.

I doubt that Yamamoto or Nelson saw it that way. Decapitation strikes were historically limited more by capability than by “traditional rules.”

The rest of your links feel more like shotgun-spread booing. Wow, those outgroup members sure are icky today!

I’d say a combination of 1, 3 and 4. Social media does make otherwise-invisible relationships a matter of public record. Conversely, the plural of “tweet” is not “data”, and the existence of a story is itself invisible until it hits some critical mass.

Then again, I hate and resent this topic for a different reason, so maybe I’m just extrapolating.

Guards is great. Men at Arms is even stronger, IMO. Unlike some of the other sub-series, they transition pretty smoothly into more complex novels as the cast matures, so basically all of them are worth reading.

I’m personally fond of the Moist von Lipwig novels, where a con man is placed in charge of the postal service and then the central bank. But it’s been a long time.

Well, I finished A Canticle for Liebowitz. I was not expecting the mutant murder wasteland sections to be the least bleak parts.

I am very glad that we don’t live under the same pall of nuclear holocaust.

Shit, I’d say I’m unusually interested in linguistics, and I don’t think I understand formal grammar.

willing to notice what she actually wants

Our culture is so fixated on individualism that the contrarian pseudoreactionaries are reinventing women’s lib. Respect.

Are you asking about tactical ballistic missiles like the Iskander?

If that was trivial, we'd already be living in the singularity and/or matrix.

Oh, yeah. My first run I skipped the tutorial and didn’t realize that SLs were either vehicle or infantry, no overlap. I picked 4 inf. Got butchered in the first mission, and thought “this is tough but it’ll be worth it when I find an APC or two.” Oof.

Applying modern tabletop wargaming to an xcomlike is such a good concept that it outruns its supply lines. There’s just not enough content to explore the whole idea. I want air support and field engineers and Foxhole levels of bespoke armor variants. I want faction cooperation that goes beyond the stuff you bolt on your ship. I want the Menace not to show their whole hand in their first mission, and I want their campaign presence to add the kind of decision-making you get from leaving countries to burn in XCOM. It’s not there yet, and that’s a shame, but I still had a lot of fun with my one campaign.

I watched it and now I can't explain either.

Whoops. I was trying to gesture at the conditional probability P(M|E). If P(M&E) was constant/dropped, but P(M|E) went up, then yeah, P(E) must have dropped.

I don’t know why it dropped. Maybe the walkability scores really worked, and following them is enough to dodge almost all crime. Seems unlikely. Maybe law enforcement drove most criminals into hives of scum and villainy, and now word of mouth is enough to keep tourists from visiting Skid Row. Maybe COVID killed all the criminals first. Any number of stupid reasons.

But people aren’t acting like P(E) has improved, are they?

I am tempted to argue that this is a media phenomenon. That if people weren’t getting pictures of immigrants piped to their phones 24/7, they wouldn’t feel like P(E) was so high. I’m aware that this flatters my own biases, so I’ll try to discount it, but surely something like this is possible.

If the murder rate stays constant, but “rate per potential exposure” gets worse, someone is getting exposed at a higher rate. the people who are getting exposed must be making up the difference. Who? Shouldn’t it be strictly easier to tell which neighborhoods have turned into death traps?

I thought it was If It’s Worth Your Time to Lie…, but that’s actually about moving the goalposts.

Yes and yes.

Perhaps necessary, but certainly not sufficient.

Yeah, I’d say our material conditions are pretty close to the best in history. No, Newsom and Chomsky probably didn’t have much to do with it. I’d probably agree with you, in a general sense, that intellectuals consume rather than produce material goods, turning them into something else. I would say that such professions are the privilege of a ridiculously luxurious society.

But why those two? Why not the Clintons or the Bushes, political dynasties who went to Harvard and Yale? Why not Kennedies and Roosevelts, Vanderbilts and Carnegies and Rockefellers and Rothschilds? There are uncountable examples of wealthy, connected families with elite educations and real impacts on material and societal conditions.

Is Elon Musk “elite human capital”? Why not? He got his degree from the same school as Chomsky, and he’s made a hell of a lot more material difference out of it. How about other governors, like Ron DeSantis?

I don’t think there’s a convenient line around people like Newsom and Chomsky. Certainly not one which maps to Khesterex thinking. Conservatism, in the sense of cautious introspection, is not unique to elites; utopian idealism does not make one a populist.

On the other hand, if the Motte is your idea of a blue space…maybe we’re speaking a different language.