domain:aerosociety.com
crushedoranges
2m ago
I am frustrated with him. I go to all the effort of taking him seriously, and he gives me, what, a two-liner?
Not to say that there should be a minimum reply word count, but I've found AT to be infuriatingly evasive. He never, ever, addresses the main thrust of my argument, only sniping around the edges with snarky remarks.
He refuses to speak plainly. Honestly, at this point, I wonder why he even bothers. I would argue with him if he presented an argument, instead of constantly updating us on his twitter beefs. But he doesn't.
Unless he's willing to defend himself, he should stop making top-level posts. He has a substack, if he wants to sneer at right-wing dudebros without responding to them. Or whatever ideology he professes. So as far as I know, he hasn't even made that position clear.
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
3m ago
No but I got the David Bowie tarot set for my partner for Christmas. I assume she’ll use it one day and I’ll post on here about it.
She’s into that sort of stuff in the most lukewarm way, which is the best way.
It’s a really nice, and apparently authentic, tarot set.
Goodguy
5m ago
For the record, I do not upvote or downvote people on here, and I would support getting rid of the upvote/downvote system here entirely. It gives me a nice pleasant dopamine hit to see a comment of mine upvoted, and I enjoy that very much, but overall, I feel that upvote/downvote systems make political discussion forums worse, not better. For one thing, they feed into a sense that the people who are writing the comments are like athletes in the middle of an arena, fighting it out to the cheers of the audience. Not exactly something that inspires intelligent thought.
That said, I disagree with your notion that any left-leaning or even just contra-MAGA opinion gets heavily downvoted. I write contra-MAGA opinions on here all the time, and they get upvoted more often than they get downvoted. Sure, sometimes I write something that does not fit the average Motte writer's political opinions and I get downvoted a lot, and I can clearly infer that it is because the downvoters disagree with me. But given that I often write things that go against the local average and still get upvoted a lot, clearly it is more complicated than that.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5m ago
“I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he said. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”
That's deep. Feels like we're getting a rare look at the man behind the mask.
Never wrote a picture in his life. Does he regret that? Is there an artist in there, struggling to get out?
Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?
Better writing than most of what's on AO3.
hydroacetylene
5m ago
She's not that religious and there was always the baptism loophole.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5m ago
And how did we end up with a talentless nonentity of a VP? Because it had to be a Black Woman. The Original Sin was choosing a VP based on identity characteristics, and not based on talent
Sorry, I have to push back about the VP chosen because Black Woman narrative. This is wrong, and absolutely NOT the "Original Sin". It's true that Biden committed to a woman as VP. But the reason Harris specifically was chosen was loyalty. So we shouldn't be surprised that she never stabbed him in the back, because she was chosen on precisely that criteria!! Being Black or possibly the beneficiary of Democratic affirmative candidate action is mostly irrelevant. Extensive evidence here about the process of selection. If you want to play with counterfactuals, the other women in contention were: Elizabeth Warren, Gretchen Whitmer, and Susan Rice. So the more fair question is if Warren, Whitmer, or Rice were VP, would they have spilled the beans, or pushed back against a doomed re-election campaign?
What does that say about the capture of the government by the administrative state, if the elected official in charge of the executive branch seems to be irrelevant?
That the government works fine without the extensive input of the President is a feature, not a bug. The fact that most Americans don't recognize that this has always been the case, even with more attention-hungry presidents, has more to do with how attention-hungry presidents are than the facts of who does the work. The Cabinet and bureaucracy has always done the lion's share of the work. And most Cabinet members, quite honestly, are also at least nominally capable of being president themselves, so it's not as if they are incompetent. And (relative) stability in US governance is partly why the US had such an excellent 20th century (of course far from the entire reason, but it helps a lot).
Ultimately I agree that Tapper doesn't actually want to find the Original Sin too badly. I just don't think there is a smoking gun anywhere. It's a larger Democratic problem, and not even a new one! However, if you insist on identifying, if not a smoking gun, that at least a moment in time that demonstrates the impending problems, you don't need to look any farther than 2016. Hillary Clinton and her campaign is the Democratic Party's original sin. Or, maybe, that Obama decided to make a deal with the devil in the first place? Anyways, nearly every single flaw of the Democratic Party today is visible in nascent form in 2016 already, from the cynical insider takover of the primary process, to the sanctimoniousness of the rhetoric about electing a woman, to the lack of Obama-style vision to help regular people's pocketbooks, to the mistrust of a temperamentally and ethically aloof Clinton herself.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6m ago
First of all, we should probably state that race doesn't really exist.
You can take medical images in various different modalities, you can even mask off either the high-frequency or low-frequency spatial data, and use a machine learning classifier to reliably determine self-described race. Race is real, and it is pervasive.
the_Culture_is_great
7m ago
The implication that a "ghetto boy" is a member of a "virulent invasive species" is both literally false, and metaphorically wrong.
I shouldn't have to explain why it's literally false.
The metaphor is wrong because in the typical understanding, the actions we should take against "invasive species" should be extreme, up to and including eradicating them from the "invaded" area.
You can make a nature/nurture point just fine without bringing these kind of implications into it.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
9m ago
Humans are basically hardwired to care about that sort of thing. For any average human, arguments between people are mostly just popularity contests, not truth-seeking exercises. Even though the Motte might be composed of people who are several standard deviations away from being "average" in that sense, it's still bothersome. If the downvotes happen on posts you also thought were not your greatest, that would be one thing, but having them happen only on posts with a particular type of political persuasion makes it start to seem like a BOO OUTGROUP button.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
9m ago
if you use Ublock Origin
This website also has a built-in custom-CSS feature in the settings.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10m ago
Okay, you are allowed to express contempt for views, but not for individuals. Yes, it's easy to read between the lines how much you hate someone in a seethingly angry post, but nonetheless, personal attacks are not allowed and you've clearly crossed the line into personal attacks.
JarJarJedi
12m ago
Romans did something similar. They didn't have many names to begin with, and starting with fifth child just named them by numbers (Quintus etc.) For girls, it was starting with Tertia. No idea why these numbers specifically.
Another way would be to use names Second, Third, Fourth etc. and when they ask "what about the First" tell them "well, he didn't behave..."
hydroacetylene
15m ago
Indians here do corner stores so much that '7/11(the most popular chain) or casino' is a synonym for 'dot or feather' when asking for clarification. Chinese and Koreans are notorious for owning restaurants.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
18m ago
they'll probably get by without really understanding
Humans are not meant to read; we learn through doing a lot of the time. Most of their education will occur outside the university system because the university system is not meant to teach (which is something nobody will really teach you, and if you're one of those people who do learn this it'll also destroy your patience with it, and that's not something you can afford to lose at that stage of your life: this is why your early twenties should not be spent in education).
I honestly kinda wonder to what extent they get what proportion of their undergrads to really grok it within the four years, or if they still have plenty of clean-up to do in grad school.
Judging by the quality of the instruction I've received from the average university professor, not even the professors actually get it. The ones that do understand it tend not to be academic-types.
These kids have basically just taken ordinary differential equations!
No, what they've taken is a week of differential equations and three months of that being obfuscated by algebra for credential reasons.
hydroacetylene
19m ago
Lol you don't have any theory of mind for conservatives as we actually exist, do you? Conservatives are not embarrassed by going to less prestigious universities. We don't care. University prestige might occasionally matter on non-academic factors(ROTC or the football team are bragging rights) but we just assume undergrad classes are pretty much all the same. Actually someone who went to community college and worked their way through a transfer to podunk state school of commuting would be seen as a hard working self starter, not pathetic for being unable to get into harvard.
There's a red tribe joke- a very bright student from the rural south is visiting harvard. He stops a passing student, asks 'Where's the bathroom at?'. The student answers, clearly disdainful of his accent 'At Harvard, we are taught not to end our sentences with a preposition.' And the visitor responds 'Well then where's the bathroom at asshole?'. This is... reflective of real attitudes towards worrying about highly selective college admissions.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
19m ago
The WSJ has a new article (archive link) out detailing a certain incident where Trump was composing fanfic of himself and Jeffrey Epstein bonding over their shared secret interest in the same kinds of women, and then signing his name to it. This was sent as a gift for Epstein's 50th birthday.
“Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything,” the note began.
Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.
Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.
Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.
Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?
Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.
Trump: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.
I personally don't think it's that bad, but I've been heavily radicalized against conspiracy theories over the past few years. I highly doubt Epstein was blackmailing huge swathes of wealthy/influential people with pedophilia. However, if I was given towards conspiratorial thinking this probably wouldn't be a great look for Trump.
erwgv3g34
20m ago
From in His strength, I will dare and dare and dare until I die:
Costco is ENORMOUS. The parking lot must fit hundreds of cars, and on a Saturday afternoon it's mostly full. The shopping carts look practically big enough to drive down the street themselves. They go in through the huge automatic glass doors into a high-ceilinged, concrete-floored, vast echoing room with shelves and shelves and shelves of food. And a lot of things that aren't food, too, clothes and toys and bicycles and electronics and even furniture.
...
It's wonderful. She is not totally flabbergasted, she's been inside a small-for-this-world ethnic grocery store in California, but this is a glorious height of human achievement that belongs among the wonders of the world, and she loves it, and she bounces on her heels and squeals and praises God who made civilization and all who made this bit of it with His hand guiding.
"Everyone should live to see Costco, and Heaven and Hell should have it," she concludes this praise.
TIRM
21m ago
I'm here and I'm not a racist. I'll keep chugging along.
Can we please not be reddit fixated on vote tallies?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
22m ago
Or you can just like, not let it bother you?
My whole last page of comments got ratio’d and I’m still alive.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
24m ago
I think it’s two things: school and work eat up more time for young people, and algorithms have gotten too brain-frying and addictive. So those ages 13-25 are more stressed than even a decade ago, and at an early age they’ve been driven into low-intellectual low-discussion online spaces. There was once a time you could have long discussions on even YouTube, like over weeks continuing the same conversation, but they changed the design to make it impossible long ago. The design on Instagram also actively prevents discussion. The new Reddit design has also heavily discouraged discussion. For addiction, think about how different the YouTube experience was in 2010 compared to today, not just shorts vs video, but the flashy thumbnails and formulas every large channel uses to maximize engagement. All those techniques increase the sense of novelty and reduce attention span, which winds up making reading and discussion laborious for zoomers.
There aren’t actually any private alternatives to the “old internet”. The closest are group chats and discords, which are qualitatively different and possess other challenges to maintaining discussion. Most of the internet that would have entered discussion in the past (to discuss news / social issues / politics / whatever) engage with the more surface-level apps like Instagram and tiktok and parts of x, usually for being performative and social and “engaging” and curating a vibe to reap social rewards — not really focused on discussion. And then there are the smaller users who just hang around these accounts. Even for film — why discuss film when you could post your lettrbox and put it in your social media profile to get laid? This appears to be the prevailing trend.
Also, I think a lot of boys who would be involved in online discussion are addicted to video games, which have gotten more addicting over the years, and are also probably making memes instead of discussing — at one point, memes and discussion were interlinked in image boards, but now you can post these in apps and gain a small following.
tl;dr cultural decline
Rov_Scam
26m ago
My point is that it would have been of no tangible benefit to Epstein. The prosecutor wasn't in a position to cut any deals, regardless of what information was provided.
quiet_NaN
29m ago
Is that really what they are saying now? I'll be polluting their data by answering "99" in the future.
Probably not, I do not hang out with a lot of wokes. or people generally. :)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
29m ago
Racism is, after all, the default state of humanity
Like, yes, but also no? Mostly no. First of all, we should probably state that race doesn't really exist. There's nothing inherently, fundamentally, deeply different about human groups. There are some genetic quirks here and there. Sometimes these genetic quirks collect in particular geographical and sexual assortment groupings. But groupings mix and blend like crazy, and different quirks show up, and then sometimes get re-blended, and sometimes groupings get big enough that humans in their constant drive for classifying and categorizing and delineating end up giving them a linguistic label. Sometimes, quite frequently in fact, these linguistic labels end up being poorly applied, but sometimes they are pretty accurate, or the label shifts and stretches to match some underlying grouping. And anyways, these labels very often extend poorly and incompletely to individuals: even a single mixed-race person breaks all the categories.
In this context, the modern (popular) understanding of race is probably less objectively "correct" (insofar as it even makes sense to say) than the more ancient understanding of race. Historically, and I mean by that roughly before the initial advent of genetic theories and eugenics and all that stuff, racism was the case where it applied geographically to clustered sexual assortment groups. And usually (but not even all the time) this worked just fine, because mass migrations and mixings were semi-rare. We should also note that even here, culture and race are basically intertwined quite tightly, because both are primarily geographic and spatial in nature (although culture can spread memetically and through trade links faster than actual sexual interlinkage). These migrations did happen though with some decent regularity, but the typical person alive would have limited exposure to other groups anyways. As especially "empires" grew (typically defined as a cross-cultural/ethnic political entities, as opposed to "kingdoms"), and increasingly leveraged what we could call cultural technologies, you did start to see some differentiation.
But here, it's important to take things into perspective. Locally, skin tone differences due to tanning would imply social things mechanically, but melanin differences were not seen as the primary differentiator, and nor were other ethnic groupings. Empire-wide, you'd get some local-geographical discrimination and categorization, but the interplay with culture was also very important. And even more than culture, social status. If you look at Rome, for example, as a time in history when you had different ethnic groups interacting all over, and frequently (in a relative sense), social standing and nationality seemed to matter much more than localized ethnic groupings inherently. There was this general idea of "barbarians" but that had again more to do with culture than race.
Fast forward. Today, many people think of race as skin color, and maybe a few other scattered traits like facial structure or whatever. This is ahistorical, frankly, at least when it comes to skin color. Slavery really did a number on the country and dichotomized things, for one, and also the modern "categories" are, frankly, terrible, even without skin color explicitly. "Hispanic/Latino" is such a uselessly broad categorization. Brazilian is its own pot of crazy. "Middle Eastern/North African" is like, very loosely its own category but doesn't even show up in many official government questions. We now have this vague notion of "white" which sometimes does and sometimes doesn't include Eastern European origin in addition to Western European origin, and sometimes includes Spaniards but sometimes doesn't, and anyways I'm not going to get into all the (common) edge cases, hopefully you get the idea.
And underneath it all, you have increasing rates of "interracial" kids. Underneath it all, even if you are to try and be scientific about "race", you still have to make a highly controversial and indefensible decision, which is where to "snapshot" racial differences as a baseline. When we are talking about Chinese people, are we talking before or after the Mongol invasion? How local are we going? Are 'Han' Chinese from Northern China different than 'Han' Chinese from near the Vietnam border? Do we distinguish Koreans from Chinese? What about Japanese, who objectively stayed more isolated historically? How linearly do we interpret genetic distance? Is a Japanese person more or less different than a Chinese person vs a White English descent person from a Portuguese? Are we just admitting that we're taking culture and history into account, or are we still insisting on some genetic measure? If we're talking genetic facts, are we allowing for snap judgements?
All this to say that sure, historically humans discriminate, but no, they didn't think of race like we do now. Racism is an obsession of modern discourse, and it just doesn't make sense. Most notably, there's this conflation of culture, nationality, and genetic "race" as one giant construct - often this is lazily referred to as "race", but it really is more broad. Maybe we need a better word.
Now, many people here at the Motte seem to take the tack that so what, categories are imprecise, but all that matters is some kind of "predictive accuracy" for my mental heuristics. Can I predict that a Black-presenting person will rob my store, and does that merit treating them different? These are different questions, and have more to do with "discrimination" (which includes much more than race) than they do race itself, and I've gone on too long, but let me just end by saying that if you think historically there was anything remotely like these modern issues of 'asians are good at math' or 'blacks are criminals' you are dead wrong. Historically, those statements are really weird to say. Charitably, you can maybe say that these issues are common to the last ~2 centuries of history, as transportation technologies accelerated migration trends, but you really can't say more than that.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
30m ago
I also think having an upvote/downvote system on what's supposed to be a neutral discussion forum is just completely idiotic. Everyone just uses it as an "I agree" button for upvotes and "I disagree" for downvotes. This functionally means any left-leaning or even just contra-MAGA opinion gets heavily downvoted. I've had plenty of people then use this as an excuse to claim the equivalent of "uhhh, can't you see you're getting a lot of downvotes!?! Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe this is because you're wrong and stupid!?!?!?!?" Pure heat, negligible light.
However, you can actually block yourself from seeing the score if you use Ublock Origin and add the following to your filter list:
www.themotte.org##button.m-0.p-0.nobackground.caction.btn
I consider this 100% essential if you want to use this site and ever substantially disagree with MAGA talking points.
Some are evidently hardwired to care more than others.
There's a reason why TheMotte leans heavily rightist, while leftist spaces don't even let us post there.
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