DradisPing
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User ID: 1102
DradisPing
15hr ago
People online also say that Bohemian Rhapsody is about AIDS. There are just a lot of people really into analysis of lyrics who don't do a lot of research.
Dave Grohl had a great quote about people overanalyzing Nirvana lyrics that went something like "Sometimes Kurt just made up lyrics on the spot to fit the music. I watched him do it."
There's so much nonsense in analyzing fiction / lyrics / poetry, but people are having fun. It just gets annoying when they start lecturing you about media literacy.
DradisPing
16hr ago
I'm looking to read:
"America's Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights Hardcover – Nov. 23 2020 by Bertram Levine (Author), Grande Lum (Author)"
The DOJ CRS was created by the civil rights act back in the 60s and by statute is immune to most FOIA requests. This is one of the first insights into the organization.
I'd also be interested if anyone has a detailed review or analysis, because I don't think I'll have the time to read it properly.
DradisPing
1d ago
There is no evidence that Epstein ever met Robert Maxwell beyond hearsay by anonymous callers into a popular Epstein grifter podcast that they 'supposedly' met in London in the late 1980s.
"According to Hoffenberg, it was Robert Maxwell who first introduced his daughter to Epstein in the late 1980s."
It's hard to establish exact dates for things this far out, but at a minimum we know that Epstein was dating Robert Maxwell's daughter Ghislaine around the time of his death. It's more likely than not that they knew each other.
It's also notable that the headmaster at the Dalton School while Epstein worked there was Donald Barr. Barr worked for the OSS (CIA precursor) during WWII and was also former AG Bill Barr's father.
DradisPing
5d ago
So it's the intersection of a few things.
The first major one is overspecialization in our society.
The typical person writing modern movies was super into pop culture in high school. Then they went to film school and studied screenwriting. Then they tried to break into the industry.
As a result they have very little life experience outside of school and Hollywood. They haven't even read a lot of fiction recreationally. There's a joke that comic book movies got so popular because nobody in Hollywood will read anything without pictures.
With significantly older generations it was common to go into the military for a couple of years either due to the draft or get your draft obligation out of the way. Then they'd try to be a real novelist. After failing at that they'd go into screenwriting. Those people are all long retired.
As a metaphor lets talk about being a commercial illustrator at an ad agency. It's a perfectly good career, but anyone talented should really dream of being a fine artist when applying to schools as a HS grad. Some people have even made the jump from commercial illustrator to fine artist, like Banksy. Similarly going straight into screenwriting shows a lack of love for the best examples of writing.
The next problem is the schools themselves. They have the same problem as architecture schools, where what the schools teach students to value isn't popular with the general public.
Basically all screenwriting grads want to write Barry. A fine show, but it's not for everyone.
Next by their nature a large production is a mix of interest and opinions. Disney makes a lot of their money off of merchandising. They care more about toy sales than having a plot that makes sense. Additionally people at the studio like to get their ideas in for ego reasons.
Mufasa specifically was probably seen as a cash grab movie. The writers and the studio just wanted to get it out and get their money.
DC movies are interesting because the live action movies are just seen as cash grabs for Warner Bros. They want merch money to spend on the movies they care about.
The DC animated movies are different. For western animators who want to do action adventure movies they are some of the most exciting jobs to work on. So they attract top talent who want to make them good.
There's also just a highly chaotic aspect to making a live action movie. Things like casting affect the script but are entirely out of the writers control, so there are always last minute rewrites, then the director shoots what he thinks he needs, then they have to edit together a movie out of whatever was shot.
DradisPing
11d ago
Even by 2000 if you dove in to the numbers it was obvious in the band of countries running from Hungry to Estonia that things had dramatically improved. A lot of people hadn't updated their priors about how bad things there were in the 80s, we only started to get the real numbers in the 90s.
Certainly in right wing circles it was well known.
The former Yugoslavia was seen as it's own weird thing with a lot of ethic tensions we didn't understand.
Part of the problem was that the left was too successful in casting things like HBD and culture being deep as unthinkably racist. They were extremely taboo on the mainstream right.
To put things in perspective, ousting the Soviets from Eastern Europe was largely successful. It was still highly taboo to talk about the problems in places like Zimbabwe and South Africa.
As a result it was impossible for anyone on the right to assemble an argument about how removing Saddam wouldn't result in a democratic revolution.
You'd sound too racist to be on TV.
Liberals from a more cosmopolitan background often have the attitude of "everybody knows X, it's just not polite to say it". But Republicans from small white towns frequently don't know it. They're going to go along with poor decisions if you don't let anyone tell them.
Edit:
I seem to be having some communications difficulties with this post. Back in 2009 or so HBD blogs were the only places having discussions about things like cousin marriage in Arab cultures leading to clannishness which caused problems when trying to impose individualist democracy on them.
I'm not even endorsing any particular theory. I'm just saying that the limits on public conversation made it difficult to fight a bad idea.
DradisPing
13d ago
I've been musing an effortpost about this, but I think that law and order has been an incredibly negative influence. It completely messes with peoples sense of how common things are in society and what the problems are with the justice system.
A crime and law drama that conformed better with the realities on the ground would be a good thing.
DradisPing
14d ago
I mean you should keep that in mind. Getting called into a meeting with your manager because GenericUserIsRetardedError showed up in a stack trace for an end user isn't fun.
DradisPing
14d ago
I see it more as a rejection of Cuomo than any great socialist uprising.
My takeaway is that it's just over for white boomer Democrats. They can keep their current jobs but won't be able to win nominations for any new office.
Ezra Klein had some good articles talking about the progressive theory of power and how it causes problems for city administration.
These are more for background than supporting my argument.
Basically the problem is that progressives are completely dedicated to the idea that billionaires and greedy corporations are the ones causing all of the problems.
However at the city level the problems tend to stem from:
-
Disorderly elements. eg low level criminals like shoplifters, people with sever substance abuse problems, or severe mental illness.
-
Left wing organizations trying to tack on fees to everything to get paid.
Progressives are completely unable to acknowledge that either of those groups cause problems. The idea that left wing groups are just being greedy rent seekers goes against their whole world view.
So you get ideas like government owned grocery stores. During a past attempt to tackle "food deserts", in I think Detroit, a grocery store complained that shoplifting was putting them out of business. A city councillor told them that lossage was just part of the price of doing business in Detroit. So the grocery store shut down the location.
I don't think the solution is really any fundamental social change. The issue is that people on the center left like to play defence for the farther left and hide the crazier elements of their philosophy from the general public. The progressives think that the media hides their beliefs out of some conspiracy against them instead of an attempt to protect them.
There needs to be a documentary series on a major streaming service that, as fairly and calmly as possible, shows what progressive populists believe and what the problems with it are. Right now it's being taught in colleges as the absolute truth with no analysis.
DradisPing
14d ago
Huma Abedin is a very different case. It's pretty obvious that she was raised to be a sort of foreign agent -- her parents are Muslim Brotherhood activists and they moved to Saudi Arabia to raise her right after she was born in the US.
Most women chasing after Alexander Soros are in it for the money. She was in a better position because she wanted access to power and thus could easily pass all tests about being in it for the money.
DradisPing
14d ago
Monogamy is a huge time saver. A spouse can help you with all sorts of random life crap.
Bezos got married young and doesn't want to learn how to do things like plan dinner parties with his friends while in his 50s.
Sure he could hire personal assistants and prostitutes, but he's got a company to run and it's just easier to have a wife.
DradisPing
14d ago
The US has long been a little weird about ID.
The right was always worried about a communist takeover of the federal government and wanted to make sure they could disappear and live under fake names without too much skill needed. I'm using communist loosely, there are a lot of possible left authoritarian governments that people on the right would feel the need to hide from.
The left really did have a bunch of radicals living under fake names. Some for longer than you'd think -- Sara Jane Olson of the Symbionese Liberation Army wasn't caught until 1999.
After 2001 there was a lot of interest in tightening things up, but by that point there were a lot of illegal immigrants, and neither party really wanted to shake things up too much.
So the US government is a lot worse at identifying individuals than you'd expect. Systems are designed not to work with each other or report obvious problems. The IRS goes as far as setting up their computer systems to allow for people filing taxes with stolen SSNs.
I don't know specifics about e-verify, but I've heard it was mostly designed around making congress look like it's doing something.
DradisPing
17d ago
Mitch McConnell has announced he's not running again, so Kentucky is open for 2026. McConnell has a replacement planned but Mitch is less popular with his electorate than Trump is.
Lindsey Graham is also up in 2026 but is planning to run again as far as I know. South Carolina.
They've both been thorns in Trump's side and aren't very popular in their states. However they both have the state primary apparatus locked down and could engage in shenanigans to stop an unwelcome competitor.
In theory Eric Trump has the access to money and connections to make it a real fight.
DradisPing
24d ago
Natalie looked hesitant. “Yes,” she said. “The conservative media shilling for Russia unnecessarily is sort of a symptom of the Covid backlash. Because we don’t trust the authority on that, we’re going to not take their words on anything. Do I think Putin’s a great guy? No.”
This stands out particularly as a straight up fantasy take.
The MAGA base doesn't see it a "shilling for Russia". They just stopped having a problem with Russia when communism ended and see the policies popular in DC as incredibly antagonistic for no reason.
DradisPing
25d ago
Why does Silicon Valley feel the need to build a lobbying strategy for the Vatican?
They want to get people on board with AI alignment. Right now there are two major groups working on it - SF leftists and Intelligence Community linked government people. There's a lot of distrust of both those groups.
Getting the Vatican to inspect their work and say that AI at least isn't designed to be evil would be a step forward for a lot of people.
DradisPing
1mo ago
It's early so things are still confusing, but there are reports that he was in 11A. That's right by the emergency exit. He opened it and jumped out before the crash.
DradisPing
1mo ago
From https://paulgraham.com/taste.html
Line drawings are in fact the most difficult visual medium, because they demand near perfection. In math terms, they are a closed-form solution; lesser artists literally solve the same problems by successive approximation. One of the reasons kids give up drawing at ten or so is that they decide to start drawing like grownups, and one of the first things they try is a line drawing of a face. Smack!
To get good at drawing you have to happily suck at it for years. There are a lot of things like this. Drawing is a special case because we tend to not be aware of how much time someone spent practicing.
DradisPing
1mo ago
The chronological or purchase order make a lot more sense to me. The only issue I can see is that I might not remember buying some of them.
DradisPing
1mo ago
So I've been getting an ad on Xitter for a tiny bookshelf with a whole lot of fake books you can organize. Then you can dump it out and organize them again.
This blew my mind because it never occurred to me that this was an activity people enjoy.
I just assumed that people who alphabetized their CDs (dating myself here) just never did the math on how often they actually search for a random CD by name.
Does anyone good stories about seeing a product that made them realize their failures at modelling the minds of others?
DradisPing
1mo ago
Antibiotics are interesting because bacteria do develop resistance to them, however that resistance fades over time.
So it's possible that penicillin was discovered multiple times but abandoned when it mysteriously stopped working.
DradisPing
1mo ago
I don't think he's actually particularly pissed at Harvard specifically. It's really the combination of a few things.
- It's the most sacred institution to DC people.
- If anti-Trumpism has a Westpoint, it's Harvard Kennedy School
- Harvard administrators are unbelievably arrogant and will be unable to present a sympathetic defence in public
- The Trump base has zero sympathy for Harvard and love to see them get put in place
- Harvard isn't what it used to be at the administrative level. Claudine Gay isn't up to the standards of Harvard 30 years ago
- Harvard admin doesn't seem to grasp that a lot of their behaviour over the past few decades is explicitly illegal and they only got away with it because the feds were on side. There's no case law protecting them.
- As the most prestigious school they make an obvious target for all of Trumpism's issues with academia.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Also the market. They can use early robots in Disney's films and parks until they are ready for the home market.
DradisPing
1mo ago
There's a strong bias in the US around not viewing white on white conflict through an ethnic lens. The differences in geography, religion, and ancestry would be enough to label the conflict as ethnic if it were to happen in a different country.
Red tribers already see DC as more of a colonial occupier than their elite.
Also the US civil war is seen as the template for a civil war. But that was a war of secession, specific regions had military organizations and used them to try to separate from the national government.
Proper civil wars (an attempt to change the government) are more of a sliding scale of actions by locals.
It'd be more of smaller scale disruptions followed by either an attempt for the feds to regain legitimacy or a brutal crackdown.
DradisPing
1mo ago
I'd expect that it's like a conservation easement. The rights are transferred to the HOA before the first sale, so you never have the full title to the land.
It is 100% true that Mozart wrote a song entitled "Lick me in the arse" (Leck mich im Arsch).
I like to bring that up in discussions of high culture. I no longer get invited to classy parties.
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