urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
No bio...
User ID: 226
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
To me what’s frustrating is he always has to get in a parenthetical jib at people he doesn’t like, even as he’s defending them. And that always lines up with stuff the woke people are saying. It’s not unique. Like him calling James Damore an obnoxious sexist in the linked article.
I just find it annoying that he attacks people for using social opprobrium to attack people they don’t like, and having to mention their disagreement with a cancelled person even when voicing they liked something about them (like the podcasters with Woody Allen). And then he just does the same thing just at a lower level. The difference between “James Damore is an obnoxious sexist” and “James Damore should be cancelled” is one of degree, not kind. Especially in how he does it, with no reflectivity, just mirroring what he’s heard about the guy instead of actually evaluating what he did for himself.
This thing sounds like something that could be written by a leftist, with just a few words changed. I mean, imagine something like this:
Compared to my early 20s self, I am a lot less prone to ingrouping with the kind of Liberal people who deliberately shut themselves off from the world by retreating to the ‘burbs—people who just want to be comfortable and don’t have a burning desire to change the world. I’ve also lost any protective instinct toward people who stay in a shitty poor area with no opportunities just because they have a sentimental attachment to their ghetto hometown. My experiences have taught me that these people want nothing to do with my vision for the world and aren’t my comrades in any meaningful sense.
Actually, this sounds more believable than the original text. It's certainly more likely to be somewhere in ChatGPT's training corpus.
It's no wonder this man hates the Midwest -- he's basically a progressive activist, just with one or two ideas swapped around! The actual conservatism (and the pragmatism and realism he labels as "smallmindedness") he found there is as alien to him as it is to the woke moralist, and he rejects them for the same reason. They, in turn, reject his utopian vision -- because they're stupid and reactionary and the world is going to leave them behind. They're not on the right side of history. Don't they realize how much work there's been in academia right-wing internet forums about the systemic racism against Black people White people deeply ingrained in American society? Just do another search-and-replace of "smallminded" and put in "prejudiced."
@FiveHourMarathon and I have gotten into arguments in the past about the nature of conservatism, but regardless of where one draws the line between conservative and reactionary, this guy is on the other side of it. This is not the writing of a conservative, desiring to hold on to the lasting traditions that have been gifted to him by his upbringing. This is an ideologue, a radical, someone animated by the same spirit of the age that motivates the Communist revolutionary or the social justice activist. And he has the same smug self-assurance that, if empowered, would drown his neighbors in a lake and call it baptism.
Everything this guy writes is just a massive argument for Hlynka's position -- the strong form, not the way-too-far version he started saying later on -- that white identitarians are schismatic progressives, not really conservatives. I know he made some very strong and silly claims that extrapolated too far from the connection he saw. But guys, this right here is exhibit A.
It also allows them to continue harboring their intense classism and hatred of people like white appalachians and poor southerners. I agree there are some criticisms you can make of those groups -- some of those very hard-hitting -- but the criticisms made by elites are often far more gutteral and contemptuous than grounded and sympathetic. I would not be surprised to hear some references to "scum of the universe".
The real thing that distinguishes this to me, though, is how it contrasts powerfully with the attitude towards other poor groups; I can't tell you how many middle class+ white people I know will talk endlessly and with great care about being respectful towards AAVE speakers, and then in the next breath make fun of backcountry white dialects that are similar in many respects. It's not the kindness or politeness that grates me, but how selective it is. I dislike the sort of smorgasbord contempt you get from some of our more... elitist posters, but I can at least respect the consistency.
Poor white people are the only people you get to be prejudiced against nowadays, and people are eager to use them to fulfill their innate desire to look down on and insult people they see as lower than them. Compare the valence of the phrases "white trash" and "black trash."
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
26d ago
Ukraine is an especially poorly partitioned country where you have entire regions that are mostly Russian speaking, then others that are Ukrainian speaking, and still more that are heavily Hungarian.
This sounds like a "Comrade Stalin threw a dart on a map and put the border where it landed" problem. And I agree it causes tremendous issues of national identity and integrity post-breakup. For the Bolskeviks, obviously that was the point: divide the minority ethnicities, put them in SSRs with people they hate, destroy nationalist ambitions, profit collectively owned return on collective investment.
And then there's Moldova, which just is North Romania, but was divided from the motherland because of dumb Soviet border disputes.
Who wore it better: UK or USSR?
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
This is the most hilarious legal clause ever. If you're guilty of treason you shall suffer death... or be subject to prison for five years and fined $10,000. What a spread of possible sentences!
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
21d ago
I actually found my experience at the selective high school to be more humbling than the alternative -- while I was rarely intentionally elitist towards other students in the younger grades (typically I felt inferior to them), there were definitely a few times where I was like that. Going to the selective school put me in places where I wasn't the smartest guy around. I even met some people who were more intensely elitist than I had ever dreamed of being, who looked down on anybody who struggled with things they found easy, who couldn't even get along with the very smart student body because they thought themselves better even than them. I went from the top 1% of students to the top 20%. Being not the smartest guy in a room helped me understand my limits and be more empathetic toward people not as smart as me. If I hadn't had that experience, I do wonder if I would have turned out like the "I am enlightened by my intelligence" guy.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
7d ago
I'm guessing this will mostly blow over, a relatively small number of contributors and slightly larger number of users will leave, whether publicly or silently. I suspect people on both the left and right will do this, thr left being louder and the right being quieter. Then the project will continue, but with less enthusiasm from evangelists.
The technology has a lot going for it (hence why Anduril wants to use it!) and it'll probably move more into a "used as a tool professionally" space rather than a "get excited about it personally and make it part of your identity" space. I'm not sure any side of their community, such as it is, trusts anyone else. The community will die but I'm guessing the technology will live on.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
20d ago
- You're not as wise as you think you are
- You're a better person than you think you are
- Chasing after truth rather than utility will not lead you where you want to go
- Study technology, not humanities
I was never physically bullied in school, but I was an outcast. This was in the 2000s.
I'm not going to share my IQ or anything like that, so I guess you'll have to take it on my word that I'm pretty smart, in college I was an outstanding student. And maybe it's questionable that I'm "competent," though that depends on what skills exactly you're measuring. But the point of the meme is not that future Presidents of the United States with outstanding charisma are being shoved into lockers, it's that geeky kids who would make good researchers, programmers, or professors are. Those are people who do, indeed, have deficits in some areas, though they are capable of being highly successful in certain socially desirable niches. My teachers throughout my schooling told my parents I was capable of great things; my peers did not think so.
The issue was that it was difficult for me to relate to other kids, and for them to relate to me: I'd make jokes, and they wouldn't get them (my teachers sometimes did, though), I'd make references, and they'd go over their head; I also kind of had a Hermione thing going on, and I assure you that the feeling where students don't like the teacher's pet is still alive and well. The first day I went to the local gifted education program -- and then a selective high school program filled with smart people -- were the very first times in my entire life I felt like I belonged, people laughed at my jokes, people were interested in what I had to say.
The issue with public school is it mixes everybody together. The sorts of assortative social connections that allow people to find others they get along with and relate to are often not present; insofar as they are, it's exactly the sort of cool kids table vs geeky kids table vs goth kids table vs drama kids table stuff the comment you've replied to is talking about. If you go to a school which is a greater reflection of broader society -- so, like, a 100 IQ mean -- it is statistically incredibly likely you'll relate intellectually to very few members of the student body. Perhaps you went to a school located in an unusally well-off section of your community?
I would actually say you have a point in such a situation -- in the selective high school program I attended, I do think there was an observable correlation between a person's intelligence, popularity, and charisma, though there were also many niches where people of various interests could be successful. I recall having several friends who were, to put it bluntly, mathematical geniuses with little charisma.
I'm not sure either side of the story, like @Primaprimaprima indicates (dude, why are we so similar?), tells the whole story of what's going on. I think it's also notable that everything, including IQ, is correlative, and sometimes these correlations break down -- sometimes there are people with high verbal intelligence who suck at fractions (raises hand), or people with incredible endurance who can't bang rocks together, or people who understand computers from the boot ROM to the hyperscaler who can't remember to do their taxes, or people who are incredibly charismatic but lacking in prudence. Everyone, reading that sentence, had at least one real person pop into their head. Maybe someone they know, or at least someone they've heard about. We can talk a lot about correlations, especially when discussing broad social trends, but the core argument for liberalism has always been that correlations break down when talking about the individual. I think school experiences might be one of those situations.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
What I was taught in school (in the 2000s) was that the original plan did include resettlement, which became extermination when the Nazis couldn't find anywhere to put them. This ship was discussed. The article (from the US Holocaust Museum, the source for the "official story" if ever there was one) says:
[T]he German government had sought to accelerate the pace of forced Jewish emigration. The German Foreign Office and the Propaganda Ministry also hoped to exploit the unwillingness of other nations to admit large numbers of Jewish refugees to justify the Nazi regime's anti-Jewish goals and policies both domestically in Germany and in the world at large.
Obviously this has undertones of "they were just doing this to justify their eventual murder" but it doesn't seem excluded from their view that the "anti-Jewish goals and policies" at the time were something other than raw genocide.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
Oh, I don't know either. My girlfriend and I had a chat the other day where we were lamenting that people weren't involved in their communities, voluntary associations are dying out, people are lonely, everyone seems to hate each other. And then we just sat there in shocked silence as we pondered how we had no idea how to fix this. I think we both consider ourselves lucky to at least have each other.
Sometimes I feel like a sane man in an insane world (and other times an insane man in a differently-insane world, I guess that's how it goes). But there's something massively wrong with everything, and the internet seems to be making it meaningfully worse, filled with negativity (even deserved negativity!) and brutal comparisions. I'm certainly part of the problem. I've been on a death-spiral as of late that's consisted of hate-reading people's discussions on modern dating, and the only thing I've gained is unnecessary insecurity about what is really a very happy relationship with someone I love. Maybe that's what's going on -- there are real problems, things could be better, but everything people are engaging with is so harshly negative that it colors their perception of the world in ways that make the real problems seem worse, and even actually positive things that exist seem unstable. And since the problems are deeply connected to social trust and confidence, this acts as a self-fulfilling prophesy that makes the problems actually worse and the positive things that exist actually unstable. Nobody seems to be living in the real world, I'm no exception. I wish I could live in the real world. But how do I go about doing that? Am I so far gone, so deep into the rabbit hole that there isn't any way out? What is the real world? What is real? How do you define real? What is "online"? Do our minds make it real? A Roman official once said to a man he was about to execute, two thousand years ago yesterday: "What is truth?"
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
I find value in therapy, though not therapy culture. I think it works best when therapists work as teachers, helping their clients develop tools they can use to continue to grow after graduating. I think it works poorly when it's simply a way to relitigate problems and complain about them. CBT, after all, isn't actually about relitigating things -- it's about pointing towards the future and finding ways to live that aren't relitigating every anxious thought that comes your way. The way I've heard, rumination and relitigation are strategies you use to avoid actually doing therapy. The whole point is to stand up to the mental bully and move on. The people on the internet talking ceaselesslessly about their problems are by definition wallowing in it and avoiding the kind of clear-headed thinking and decisive action that the best therapists want their clients to do.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
27d ago
I guess my problem with these examples would be, I never looked at any of these as paragons of game writing, even in their heyday. In my youth, Halo was a multiplayer game, people didn't care about the campaign. I've never heard Destiny praised particularly for its writing, I associate it with multiplayer as well. Call of Duty is the Marvel movie of videogames, they've had stories but I've also mostly associated them with multiplayer rather than their campaigns. I don't do horror in any medium, so I can't speak to Dead Space.
But overall, your list leaves me wondering whether you're just looking for good stories in all the wrong places.
We exist on an offshoot of an offshoot of the comments section of a psychiatry blogger who has openly practiced polyamory, and frequently discuss people like Aella, who promote sexual relations with multiple partners as an enlightened and superior alternative to monogamy. These discussions have been had here as recently as a few days ago.
Polyamory is also, as far as I can tell from my experience in it, rapidly becoming normalized in what's left of the atheist movement and the broader "nerdy woke people" subculture. Heck, my mom is an HR director in my conservative hometown, and lately had a job applicant who spoke openly about their poly lifestyle (they didn't get the job, mostly because they seemed legitimately crazy). This stuff is widespread, and I think it's more common in queer dating than straight dating. This is a slippery slope coming from the same people: gay people and nerdy woke people.
Maybe the slippery slope isn't leading to polygamy right now, exactly. But it has been, and is, pretty clearly leading to the normalization of polyamory. I think polyamory is more difficult to translate into the existing legal framework around marriage than gay marriage was. But if it weren't, I would be under no pretensions that Scott, and Aella, and Ozy (was he dating them at the same time?), and all the rest of the crew wouldn't be arguing their hearts out that recognizing plural marriages is a human rights issue (TM). As far as I'm concerned, it's just a matter of time.
Today I asked my local mistral model "What are some alternatives to Hashicorp Terraform?" and received the best answer ever:
TempleOS: TempleOS is an alternative cloud platform that emphasizes simplicity. It focuses on providing a single, easy-to-understand interface for managing infrastructure. This makes it a good alternative for small projects where you don't need the complexity of Terraform or other tools. However, it has a smaller community and limited integrations with external services compared to more popular IaC tools.
This may be the funniest hallucination I've ever seen, lol.
Then it got better. I asked it to tell me more about TempleOS:
TempleOS, also known as the "One OS," is an alternative cloud platform developed by Terry Davis between 1985 and 2013. It was designed to be a single, unified operating system that simplifies the process of managing infrastructure and applications in the cloud.
And as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the people of Israel, they looked toward the wilderness, and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud.
Edit: Okay, I kept going, this just keeps getting better:
Terry Davis indeed named TempleOS as a tribute to his belief that he was building an operating system for an Abrahamic temple. This unique perspective differentiates TempleOS from other cloud platforms and adds an interesting aspect to its history.
I'm just imagining a marketing comparison sheet with "Temple for God: Yes" under the TempleOS column and Ubuntu with "Not a Divine Temple." Move over Mark Shuttleworth.
This keeps generating gems:
TempleOS was not designed primarily as a cloud platform but rather as an operating system inspired by religious beliefs to manage various aspects of a divine temple, including infrastructure resources like virtual machines and applications. Its design and features were not focused on simplicity and ease of use for cloud management per se but rather on managing the temple's operations in a unified way.
The web-based interface was just one aspect of TempleOS, which aimed to provide easy access to its functionalities from any device connected to the internet. However, TempleOS did not gain significant attention or releases until 2013 when Terry Davis started sharing it with the public as a cloud management solution due to the growing interest in cloud computing and the potential applications of its design.
I've heard of pivoting your product, but going from "temple for the God of Abraham" to "cloud management solution" is quite the change.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
2mo ago
This is like the uno reverse card of that male feminist meme where you name a male feminist and it turns out they have accusations of sexual impropriety in the closet. Apparently "name a successful male role model with a happy home life" nets you either conservatives or, occasionally, actors who just follow the Holywood culture.
Maybe we should talk about woke executives? Is Bob Iger happily married?
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
2mo ago
People complaining that it is hard not to say things in an online forum where they don't need to even participate is a bit mind-boggling to me.
I don’t know that this describes Hlynka. But neuroticism is a hell of a drug. I work to keep myself under control, but there’s definitely an undercurrent of subconscious screaming and threat detection that can get activated by online forums.
When young lefties talk about hate speech being violence and trying to purge the commons of hated speakers, I get it. I don’t like it, I don’t agree with it, I think it’s wrong, but I understand on a deep level the underlying psychological impulses that motivate it.
I think following that logic makes the problem worse, and forms a catastrophization cycle that reinforces and strengthens their distress. But I can totally see how “these terrible ideas cause me so much pain, we need to get rid of them” is a train of thought people go through.
And there is pain. I know, when I see ideas that particularly get my gourd, ideas that threaten, if taken seriously, to damage values I hold dear — I know those things can easily make me freak out, become despondent, vindictive, to lash out like a cornered tiger.
This isn’t something I can easily describe to someone not familiar with serious anxiety, not because it’s some secret knowledge or something I’m “special” for feeling, but just because the feelings are so profoundly out of place that I think many people would find it shocking anyone could react in such a way.
I think this describes some of the “I can’t help but post on this forum I hate” phenomenon. People love hate-reading and hate-posting. It’s not helpful, it’s not healthy, but it is gut-level rewarding because of the great salience of threatening ideas.
But encountering a threat, however overblown, makes anyone want to eliminate it. And thus we get censorship, and long screeds whose text rhymes with “fuck you.”
The difference between me and the cancellers, I guess, is I know my emotional response to these things isn’t helpful, and it isn’t anybody else’s problem. It’s mine. And it’s my responsibility to deal with it, and to respond to the world in an intelligent manner. To be slow to speak and quick to listen.
I know I’m an unusual case. Sometimes I like to talk like I’m typical of the zoomers because of my experience of mental illness. But if I’m truthful, I’m not. My neuroticism is way higher than the average even for my generation.
I also… and this contradicts everything I’m saying here, but I don’t think of my struggles as an identity. But I talk to some people who seem like they view themselves as a Certified Generalized Anxiety Disorder Experiencer (TM) and not a person who struggles with anxiety. I’m not a person-first language advocate (I think language games are silly) but I do think there’s a mindset difference there.
I do think we’re doing things that lower the sanity waterline, lowering all boats. And social media is ground zero of this as far as I’m concerned. I’m not sure that exposure to random strangers’ ideas is actually helpful for people who struggle with calibrating their threat detector. I also believe that facing difficult situations is the only good way to calibrate. I just think there’s a balance to be struck between engaging in things that are scary but useful and being a masochist who tries to argue with people you believe deeply in your heart are wrong, and evil.
All I’m saying is, maybe Hlynka was higher in neuroticism than he let on. At the very least, some fraction of “involuntary” posters is explained by what I described.
I truly do not understand how such a person navigates their day to day life.
If we’re talking about the neurotic ones, often not very well.
And for the most part I think what we're seeing with both Joey and Hubes is: they were being a good boyfriend, but they didn't pick you and that's upsetting because they were a good boyfriend. I got the feeling from the little we heard from these women that they would have been perfectly happy with Hubes if he had picked them.
This does definitely sound like the mirror image of the old nice guy meme about men who get mad when they're rejected.
As it turns out, it's pretty ego-busting to be rejected, especially by someone you really like, and think might be a great match for you. It hurts. A lot. I've been there. And it's very easy to turn immediately to the ego-defense mechanism of denial: "I never liked them in the first place." I'm sorry to say that long in my past, I was there too.
I wish we all could just get along, cooperate, be kind to one another, and derive gains from trade. But I'm disappointed in how sorrow so often leads to bitterness, and bitterness to hatred. I'm reminded of that surprisingly pithy Yoda quote: "fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering."
I'm going to disagree with you that Huberman did nothing wrong. I have a strong distaste for infidelity, especially at this scale. I suppose that comes from just good-faith disagreements we might have over relationship structure. And I don't think this is jealousy. Believe me or not, I'm not all that jealous of someone who chooses not to settle down -- ultimately I prefer monogamy and I see in it a lot of profound benefits that, especially as I've considered it in recent months, far outweigh whatever benefit comes from the alternative. And with the specifics of this case, to hide so much of his life from intimate partners just doesn't sound all that appealing to me -- but hey, I really like deep pillow talk!
Sometimes I worry discussions about dating ignore the diversity of considered preferences that exist out there in the world. I'm a man who, for the balance of my life, has preferred and pursued monogamy as a major life goal. There have certainly been moments where I've doubted that preference (as avid readers may recall), but I've always come back to my strong view that being interpersonally intimate with an exclusive partner is profoundly meaningful, one of the most meaningful things we have on this earth. For me, things like sexual market value and dating strategies are means to the end that is a loving relationship. I think this kind of true relationship becomes more than the sum of its parts, where sex and commitment bring forth not only children but the intimacy, companionship, and mutual fulfillment of a life spent thinking not of "me" but "us."
What strikes me about sex-and-dating discussions nowadays is the total poverty of romance. This is the lifeblood of the poets, the essence of many of our highest values! I don't recognize in them the sort of reckless abandon, or even passionate affection, that has characterized my dating goals since the day I first fell in love in my youth. Perhaps love is just rare. But in all these discussions about body counts and marketplace values and sexual relationship priorities, I see little emphasis on the possibility, however remote, that something profoundly great, sublime even, could ever emerge from an intimate connection with one's lover. It feels like a desacralized, mechanistic, optimized, even inhuman approach to life and love. Where is the lover about which the Bard wrote, who could "see Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt"?
Maybe that's just the internet in general -- happy people don't tend to post about their happiness, but bitter people post ceaselessly about their bitterness. And I see little value placed upon that most agreeable of words, "us," and all the value in the world placed upon the darkest and most tempting: "me me me me me me me." This happens not only in people's honest assessments of their current state, but even in their assesssments of what the ideal would look like. Has anyone ever heard of a dating thread where people talk about how passionate they are about romance and how much they want to spend their lives sacrificing and caring for another person? I presume the people who feel this way get eagerly snached up by the first person to realize it.
But nevertheless I continue to believe strongly in the significance of the Third Thing, the love that unites commitment to sex and alchemizes both into something greater and more enduring, about which cummings could write, "love is the every only god."
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
Hey, is it me who gets to be the C.S. Lewis quote poster today? I can't believe it.
This popped into my head from Mere Christianity:
Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God’s eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the V.C. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.
Lewis is talking about God's judgment, but you can really substitute your moral framework here; he's talking about external actions vs internal choices, which is a cross-cultural theme. And I do think there's a tremendous difference between the two.
This is an interesting analysis of the dissident right, but keep in mind that this poll wasn't created by or for the dissident right -- the authors of it have never heard of them and would hate them if they had.
There's the mainstream right, that wants low taxes, libertarian policy, and military might. That's the "GOP Establishment," or as their enemies call them, "RINOs." There's the nationalist right, that wants more manufacturing and less foreign wars. That's the "Trumpist" right, or as their enemies call them, "MAGA Republicans." Then, and only then, there's the dissident right, that wants actual racism. That's the extremely-online version that doesn't exist among conservatives in person. Maybe at those weird right-wing parties in New York, but if you think "people at New York parties" are representative of the right, I'm prepared to offer you a sweetheart deal for the Brooklyn Bridge. I disagree with him on how far he takes it, but I agree with @HlynkaCG totally that the identitarian right in this sense is more of a sect of dissident blue tribers than anything truly red tribe. And I say this as a born and raised red triber from Jesusland (and, if I'm being honest, a pretty hardcore nationalist rightist despite my misgivings about Trump personally).
This poll was created by the mainstream right, with occasional nods to concerns of the nationalist right. The dissident right isn't even on their radar.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
Most would be better if the rule was just have sex with the person whose about your intelligence and attractiveness within a 10 min.walk and marry them for 70 years.
I disagree with your view on elites but I agree 100% with this. This is what people did for a very long period of time, and it's what led to all the old couples I know being happily married for decades. There are multiple stories in my family history of either a guy or girl at age 15 seeing the cute-one-next-door riding their bike and saying, out loud, "I'm going to marry that one." And then it happening. They found an eligible person who met their minimum standards for attractiveness and similarity, and chose to commit to them. By contrast, my girlfriend's mom had an insightful commentary on people in relationships today: "They keey divorcing because they just keep shopping." Stop shopping, stop comparing, stop optimizing, make an acceptable choice and allow the natural human instincts for pair-bonding do their job, and then continue to choose your partner even when it gets tough. That's what love means!
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
2mo ago
As far as I can tell, Captain Marvel only made money because it was sandwiched in between the Infinity War movies. People were hungry for Marvel at that point, the last film ended on a cliffhanger and the excitement was palpable. This was clearly the high point of Marvel's energy in pop culture.
I'm of the opinion that they knew Captain Marvel wasn't going to be very good and sandwiched it where they did to boost the numbers.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
I would also want proportion to the amount of non-violent usefulness for the item, and the amount of necessity for the item in society. No one needs a firearm to get along in society. Yes, it may have usefulness in a law-abiding way, but even the closest thing to a necessity for firearms in society in self-defense -- which involves, inherently, violence. It may be justified violence, but it is violence. Someone who shoots a carjacker is doing the same thing an armed carjacker-gone-wrong does -- using a firearm against a person. And there is no necessity in the 21st century to hunt for food, and certainly no necessity to hunt or shoot for sport.
A car, however -- using a car to run someone over is incorrectly using a car. No one for a lawful or legitimate purpose runs over a person with a car. There is no sense in which a car is supposed to be used to run someone over. There are no sports in which people get run over by cars. There is no such thing as driving through a crash test barrier made of clay for sport. A car, used properly, is not a weapon, it's a means of transport. Firearms are weapons.
And you also kind of need a car to get along in society -- especially in places where public transportation does not exist or is woefully inadequate. It makes a lot more sense to give your depressed teen (with a drivers' license, of course!) access to the family car than to give them a gun. After all, if they can't use the car to go visit their friends, or go to their after-school job, what they'll be doing is moping around the house. And that just sounds like more depression.
Perhaps he could have used the gun at a firing range to let off some stress. But if I were the parents, and actually paid attention to the kid, I wouldn't let him do that without supervision. And I wouldn't even do that, personally. The parents made an active choice to put a weapon in the hands of their depressed, angry son, unsupervised. That's not bad parenting, that's ludicriously harmful parenting. I would even say negligent.
All that being said, it's interesting to me that owning a firearm is a right, but driving a car is a privilege -- yet the former is optional and the latter, for many people, a necessity.
I didn't love FarNearEverywhere's comment at first, but after reading through it, I think she's right. The elements that cause the dating market to be so asymmetric are legion, and not reducible to "women are less horny." If you wanted to somehow genetically engineer things so straight relationships look more like gay ones, you would have to alter the biology of women so throughly that the human species would be unrecognizable.
The solution to dating asymmetry is, and has always been, and indeed was, monogamy as an enforced social ideal, and norms and values that cultivate satisficing and not perfectionism when it comes to settling down. That doesn't mean pushing people to settle with an abusive alcoholic, but it does mean encouraging people to settle down with a homely, but kind and nurturing partner instead of chasing after hotness or status. It also means holding people to their vows, and leading people to see re-investment in their relationship rather than divorce as the solution to cooling off romance or non-abusive problems in a relationship. These are the conditions under which actual love can flourish, and furthermore I think they make both men and women much happier than the current situation, on net. The women get commitment and the men get regular sex.
That goes for men as well as women. Find your 5/10 sweetheart and marry them, damn it.
When I took a class on Spanish colonization in the Americas, this was repeatedly emphasized. It was an astoundingly fascinating class, taught by a really passionate professor. And the core message was that it wasn't the Spanish that swooped in and single-handedly took down the Aztecs, it was the resentment of those subject groups that took them down. Which, as @2D3D notes, is incredibly inconvenient both for people who want to say white people are uniquely evil and, I strongly suspect, for indigenous activist groups in Latin America who want to whitewash (pun intended) the cruelty of the indigenous empires of the Americas.
There are many, many bad things you can say about European activity in Latin America. The other thing emphasized in my class was how terrible the encomienda system was. But what was also emphasized about that was how many members of the clergy were intensely opposed to what was happening in New Spain, including this fire and brimstone sermon against slavery from a Dominican friar:
People like to point to Christianity as some evil thing that made European colonization worse, but amen amen I say to you, it was the only thing that kept it from being even worse than it was. Fire and brimstone, baby.
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