sansampersamp
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User ID: 751
sansampersamp
1yr ago
You could have looked harder
That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
It's difficult for me to think of a lower status take than consternation about, say, the casting decisions in the Little Mermaid remake. There's a few layers to that -- the content is for children, and these live action remakes are kind of shameful to have any investment in even before getting to the politics that is easily read as a kind of adolescent, race-fragile myopia.
With low-status, I mean something a little more subtle than just oppositional to the general social mores that might define my own social circle (or how I might ascribe that to a kind of cosmopolitan hegemony writ large). There are plenty of subcultures which define themselves oppositional to the dominant culture without degrading themselves in the process. There are orthogonal axes here that signal a kind of noble worthwhileness outside simple questions of alignment, and these takes seem to me to naturally occupy whatever the distal pole of magnanimity and taste is.
The ensuing conversations can accordingly be less of a debate and more of a slightly embarrassing condescension as if one is explaining social niceties to a child -- not a particularly productive frame for bringing others to one's worldview. What can be read as conciliation or reluctance to gore sacred cows, from one side, may simply be efforts to find tactful ways to bring an embarrassing conversation back to a kind of civility.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I'm not sure what the import of what felons were historically able to do is -- historically most of any kind of person would not be able to vote, if anyone could vote at all.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I think she's been building an interesting thesis with Envy/Opulence about the difficult relationship the left has with material success -- both on the aesthetics of wealth and how social mores may have developed around flaunting (and then how those aesthetics are reappropriated and recontextualised). Confronting the extent to which snark about McMansions or Fyre Festival or Trump or what have you is some Nietzschean cope (I may not have wealth, but at least I have taste) among the intellectually left/online is imo a pretty interesting observation, as is extending that to a critique as to how our current online moment is so toxic in general. Someone needed to update Distinction for the very online era and she's well-placed to do so, even if her take is a tad nihilistic.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I see 40% voter turnout for the 2018 midterms, which were a record high. I'm not sure what's projected for these ones.
We compel eligible people to vote here in Australia, and overall I'm a massive fan of it. Part of that is that politicking does not need to drive turnout itself, so ironically the half-panicked "please vote, please vote" stuff doesn't feature.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I don't think Ringo or Weber are particularly popular? The current bestselling sci-fi book published in the last year is Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith, per Publishers Weekly (Adam Christopher). Behind that, Becky Chambers and Silvia Moreno-Garcia are shipping the most volume for non-star wars sci-fi properties published in the last year. This hardly seems like there is a lot of volume on new books from 'politically incorrect' white male authors. Closest thing is maybe Ernest Cline with Ready Player Two last year?
As most producers and consumers of fiction now are women, by a fair margin, I don't find this too surprising.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Straightforwardly expressed by Weber, a basic necessity for a state:
A compulsory political association with continuous operations (politischer Anstaltsbetrieb) will be called a ‘state’ insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force [Zwanges] in the enforcement of its order. Social action, especially the actions of an association [organized action; Verbandshandeln], will be spoken of as ‘politically oriented’ to the extent in which [if; dann und insoweit] it aims at exerting influence on the leadership [government; Leitung] of a political association [organization; Verbandes]; especially at the appropriation, expropriation, redistribution or allocation of the powers of government [Regierungsgewalten].
I've always found these kind of myth inversions (with respect to the traditional Christian Eden myth) compelling, particularly when they tie a liberatory progressiveness to the gain of knowledge. Stealing forbidden knowledge from the gods and paying an inordinate price for doing so -- that is real sacrifice. The self-sacrifice at the core of the Christian tradition has always felt a little insincere by comparison -- as if one is not really sacrificing, just placing downpayment on their eternal reward. What kind of real sacrifice is positive sum for the sacrificed?
Eve's choice to steal knowledge from the gods can easily be recast as a Promethean act along these lines -- to make away with the fire and to bear whatever punishment comes. To take pride in what could be built with one's own hands, instead of resigning oneself to an easy half-life of providence. The Romanticists felt this keenly (though they often cast Satan as the Promethean rebel instead). Goethe:
Cover thy spacious heavens, Zeus,
With clouds of mist,
And like the boy who lops
The thistles' heads,
Disport with oaks and mountain-peaks;
Yet thou must leave
My earth still standing;
My cottage, too, which was not raised by thee;
Leave me my hearth,
Whose kindly glow
By thee is envied.
It's fairly natural for feminists to pick up the thread of this kind of myth revisionism, which I find similarly compelling, e.g. Vashti or Jezebel, or the Atwood or Emily Wilson take on the Odyssey.
Despite its overwhelming pessimism in other respects, I thought the lone triumphant spark flickering in the heart of Three-Body Problem trilogy was similar -- humanity is comically outmatched by the Gods, but we're stupid or naive or brave enough to spit in their face anyway and to hell with the consequences. I have a lot more respect for an Abraham, who, knowing that God is real and all-powerful, and against whom resistance is truly utterly futile, refuses to kill his son.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I'm not making any contention about the past demographics of the industry. Tired claims of entryism or institutional capture depend on there being a mismatch against revealed consumer preferences. Said mismatch does not exist.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
That's not the correct way to calculate your posterior. The probability that hydrate plugs are to blame given that the pipeline has indeed blown up should be very high.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
And more flexible setbacks, and mixed-use, and less arduous parking minimums, etc etc. Even if you think the position is too minimal or cynical, the net result is certainly not an expansion of state power.
I'm fairly confident it was someone in Nato or aligned with them, just pointing out that there's a bit of 'worst argument in the world' going on calling it an attack on state infrastructure when that infrastructure was not in use and the government had standing political commitments to not use it again.
The practical function of "covert" means state actors can let norm violations slide without undermining the norms. Sometimes it is in your interest to pretend not to see something. Ukraine equivocating as to whether it directed the helicopters that bombed Belgorod is another example: everyone knows they did it, but Russia and the US can pretend otherwise if a frank accounting of the facts would trigger responses they actually don't want to or can't follow through with (e.g. US constricting arms shipments, Russia escalating).
A military would sometimes burn their boats after landing on enemy shores to impress upon all soldiers that the only way back is through (Cortés, famously). Everyone may vocally say they'll cooperate at the outset, a good way to get them to commit to that is to just burn the defect button.
I'm not sure the pause is particularly well-rationalised as Ukraine suddenly hitting on a well-defended position so much as logistics needing to catch up and forces recuperate while the crossings are better supported. I'd expect a push to the Luhansk Oblast border within a couple of weeks.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Honestly thinking you can opt out of status games, or that obstinate refusal to 'play' doesn't impact how you and your arguments are perceived, is just cope. There's an autistic tendency to conflate a social illiteracy with the kind of practiced sprezzatura that seems effortless on the surface level, or writing off deviations from the norm (a real and valuable thing -- see the 'basic' sneer) as essentially the same.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Here it is copied from the PW letter, units are for the four-week period ending 22-7-30 (I have removed titles not published in the last 12 months):
| Title | Author | Publication Date | Units |
|-------------------------------|----------------------|------------------|--------|
| Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith | Adam Christopher | Jun 2022 | 11,409 |
| A Prayer for the Crown-Shy | Becky Chambers | Jul 2022 | 6,009 |
| Star Wars: Brotherhood | Mike Chen | May 2022 | 5,747 |
| The Daughter of Doctor Moreau | Silvia Moreno-Garcia | Jul 2022 | 5,731 |
PW would be pulling from NPD Bookscan like everyone else, but unfortunately I don't have access to them
sansampersamp
1yr ago
The recurring theme seems to be that it's a less than optimal way to counterbalance frictions in the voting process that don't exist in countries with more efficient elections. If there was much less on the ballot to vote on, and if polls could be provided with sufficient density on a weekend, the case for universal mail voting would be less likely to stack up.
Related to the point around 'dramatically increasing election funding' per @urquan below, a lot of what reduces the number of polling places on the margin, is the cost of hiring venues for each new location. Moving elections to the weekend makes it vastly easier to cheaply expand polling places, because you can use basically every public school at cost, which are already ideally distributed across the electorate.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
apologies for misreading your reddit post then
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I agree that it didn't come out of the blue on 2016, though I'd consider the view that it is largely a reaction to 2012 to be an agreement that it is actually quite recent.
For all the hay made of The Party Decides that became fodder for Getting It Wrong come 2016, to actually drop the conspiratorial lens on all the DNC leaks paints a picture of an astoundingly ineffectual institution.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
On what point? That 2016 was a significant inflection point or that centralised control under the dems were not also weak (but perhaps stronger than today). Your linked post largely agrees on the importance of 2016 (even if painting it as the apotheosis of an ongoing trend) and doesn't address symmetries or lack thereof.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
This may have been the case a decade ago, but I'd be interested in anything showing that it still holds empirically with increasing polarisation on density and education, and decreasing polarisation on race.
Of course, I'd expect anyone cheerleading about voting for the sake of voting to benefit their own politics on average, because people cheerlead to their own social networks which usually are in political alignment with them.
As a mod there -- some would? I think most would reject the dichotomy. Being against a corporate tax and for a land tax or carbon dividend, against most land use regulation, for some form of distribution and universal healthcare, against student loan forgiveness -- you'd lose a bit too much information to sum it up that pithily.
(referring here to the ideological core of the sub, i.e. the flaired DT regs -- the drift-in commenters commenting on random posts are obviously more diverse)
Pinochet support was a bannable offense on day 3 of the sub going live, if I recall correctly. To the extent the subreddit polarised against republicans since 2016 (which is true, and justifiable), that particular stance fell outside the sub's overton window from the start.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Some real work has to be done to flesh out exactly why Putin ordering the use of nuclear weapons makes that preference cascade less likely, not more.
sansampersamp
9mo ago
openmeteo has good keyless apis for such things
https://open-meteo.com/en/docs#latitude=44.0029&longitude=-69.6656&hourly=temperature_2m,dewpoint_2m
sansampersamp
1yr ago
To put some numbers around it:
The internal cross-section of the pipe is approximately 1m2, so each bar of pressure differential will push a plug with 100kN of force. That's enough to shoot 10 tons of hydrate at g-like acceleration. Sounds difficult at the best of times.
Also the plug is stuck until it isn't. When you depressurise you move back across that phase diagram until the solid sublimates, which happens radially from the outside, in. The plug is stuck until it shrinks from the walls enough to move (upon which you don't want it to move) and can be melted and cleaned up with pigging and glycol.
Contrapoints is an odd example for trying to paint online left content creators as mainly serving vacant, vibes-based parasocialism. There's a lot of argument construction in her vids, and she posts far too infrequently compared to the people you usually think of as living or dying off of relationship simulacra.
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