domain:traditionsofconflict.com
HereAndGone
1m ago
Harris running can be laid at Biden's feet, because he insisted on a second term and then had to be dragged out and knifed in the back by the party in order to dislodge him, by which time there really wasn't anyone else they could run, never mind that the funding by donors had all been earmarked for the Biden/Harris campaign and there was a real fear they'd have to pay it all back if they went with a primary.
The party didn't do itself any favours by then acting the opposite of the 'open, transparent, democratic' process by making her a fait accompli candidate before any race could start, but they were - to be fair to them - really hobbled by their own past bad decisions in humouring Biden (mostly for the "who the hell else do we have? and who else can beat Trump?" considerations).
WandererintheWilderness
4m ago
Well, yes. But ultimately the problem is people forming their worldviews based on fiction instead of balancing their intellectual diet with non-fiction or, better yet, first-hand experience of the real world. It's a problem as old as Don Quixote, and I don't think the correct lesson to take from Don Quixote is 'how dare those irresponsible poets fill their ballads with giants, virtuous knights, and loyal servants? we need more books about windmills and scumbags to fix impressionable readers' sense of reality'.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
6m ago
Do you really think shoving all the gays back in the closet and teaching masturbation is evil will fix everything?
A practical Church-oriented solution would probably wind up looking like homosexual desires are a cross some people wind up bearing, like some people have kleptomania. It doesn’t matter how much you desire to steal, or how seen and valued it would make you feel, or what great justifications wordcel kleptomaniacs can generate to justify themselves. Civilization just isn’t going to let people steal all the time. The ordered solution is to not do it.
I imagine Richard Simmons was the optimal gay guy, from the Church’s perspective. Did he break down and sin from time to time? I’m sure he probably did. He was discreet enough that we will never know for sure, though.
But when society condones disordered living, it causes real harm to both society and the individual. Just like when society condones shoplifting, for any reason, SJW or otherwise, eventually stores start shutting down, harming society overall and the individuals who were doing the stealing.
Addendum: This stance presumes that homosexuality is, in fact, irresistibly based in biology, which I am not aware is proven.
birb_cromble
6m ago
Smaller studios like A24 are promising
If you haven't seen it, A24 distributed a film called Warfare that was actually pretty good.
I went to the big temple here, donated food to the poor people outside the temple and spent time with my family and cousins. We also went to a tourist trap cafe where you click photos with Hawa Mahal visible and get terrible food whilst riding around the old city. Nothing beyond that. Never been a big fan of birthday celebrations. Did get an ice cream like always.
I see many people who are piss poor or disabled daily, so days like these help me soak in good parts of life. It's not good rn but I'm still very happy that I don't have to roam around the streets begging for change.
There's a lot left to do, I want to do whilst being appreciative of what God has given me so far. Not all is good, it's a lot more than I deserve.
HereAndGone
9m ago
That the government works fine without the extensive input of the President is a feature, not a bug.
But the American president is not a figurehead, he is meant to be the one running the country. If the Prime Minister's girlfriend is in fact the one making the picks as to who gets a job, that is an unfortunate reality, but the girlfriend was not the one elected to do the job. If the Permanent Under-Secretary for Filing Cabinets is the one running the country while the President goes golfing, that is not what the people decided should happen.
And if that is what happens, then the people should be informed, not laughed at for being too dumb to realise that they have been lied to for decades.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
10m ago
Some months ago, someone on Twitter said the following:
The decentralization of the internet liberated heterodox info to the public but Libs are right: there is enormous danger of misinformation and disinformation.
That's the kind of middle-of-the-road statement that, two or three years ago, I would have associated with Right-wing rationalists. People called out the media and the establishment when it was wrong while also being open and honest about the Right's flaws. While that tendency still exists in places like DSL and here, I've found it's becoming rarer and rarer, with those espousing it increasingly likely to be told they aren't welcome. This parallels a wider tendency in American politics: the rise of the so-called "Tech Right." People like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Shaun Maguire. Richard Hanania initially hoped they would infuse the Right with needed level-headedness, after all, such people were urban, socially moderate, and didn't have chips on their shoulders about class. This has largely not happened. You could hardly imagine Musk, Andreessen, or Maguire saying anything like the above statement. Their attitude parallels that of the Right as a whole - "misinformation" is just a left-wing smear and there's no downside at all to every random person with a two-digit IQ having a social media megaphone. Musk did push back on the tariffs, (perhaps because his business interests were being harmed) but you could never imagine him saying "libs are right" about anything. Even when he's broken with Trump, he hasn't reflected on the barren epistemological environment that led to Liberation Day, instead doubling down on conspiratorial Epstein stuff. To get a reasonable, moderate perspective, you have to follow the kind of people who march around with tiki torches and scream "Jews will not replace us!" That's not much of an exaggeration; the statement that libs were right about misinformation came from Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Charlottesville goon march.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
12m ago
It's a common strategy for picking a VP. Obama and first term Trump utilized similar strategies, despite their own talent and charisma. I'm curious to see if Vance has the balls to push Trump out on that ice flow.
HereAndGone
13m ago
That even before the questions about his ability became pubilc, Biden had been doing little to nothing in actually governing the country and the decisions were being made by a mix of insiders, cabinet members, civil servants, and whoever could grab the spotlight to get their pet project rammed through.
I think this may well have been the case; does anyone think, for instance, that Joe Biden personally really really wanted Sam Brinton as deputy assistant secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy? Or that the LGBT Pride Celebration with the topless trans people on the White House lawn was a cherished long-time plan of his? There's an awful lot of "he probably just signed what was put in front of him" that seems to be there, even if we discount the autopen!
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
13m ago
“Heap more evils upon them O Lord, heap more evils upon those who are glorious upon earth.”
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
14m ago
Third rate universities have programs like lumberjacking, which do require manual labor.
Makes me think of Deep Springs College.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
15m ago
Mantergeistmann
16m ago
I remember stopping by Trader Joe's during the mid-morning on a day off... completely different demographic from the weekend/evening crowd.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
16m ago
This is an astute observation, but I assume you can reason out what the result would be if an entire generation or two of Americans were raised only being exposed to the counterfactual reality presented in media, with no knowledge of our exposure to the mundane-but-not-telegenic underlying reality. They’d have an extremely skewed understanding of what the world is actually like.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
17m ago
Hey thanks man. It’s a gift from God, was never very good at it without Him heh.
HereAndGone
18m ago
never pauses to question whether a better VP candidate might have been able to salvage the shit sandwich they were handed. Or, for that matter, whether a stronger VP might have pushed Biden to the curb years before. An ambitious, mildly evil VP, like a young LBJ or Bill Clinton, would have stuck a knife in Biden as soon as he looked weak.
There's some hint that this was precisely the policy the Biden administration (or the Politburo, or whomever you want to point the fingers at) adopted to muzzle Kamala: all the stories that leaked out about "trouble in the VP's office" and how she was a terrible manager and had high staff turnover and was being sidelined by Biden's office so she constantly was the last to know about things going on and never got the chance to make a name for herself (apart from things like being saddled with the 'Border Czar' position which was a poisoned chalice).
So whatever ambitions she may have had, the Biden inner circle/Biden himself made sure to quash so she would not be able to build up the reputation as the dynamic young rival for the next race. Ironically, Kamala herself seems to have picked her VP on the same criteria: Walz because he was not visibly ambitious and would not be a threat and would be content to stand in the background and do as he was told.
I think that most people who care about the Epstein matter, me included, care mainly because of the political implications, not out of empathy for the girls. I abstractly empathize with the girls, but I don't know them, so their woes don't really emotionally affect me any more than it emotionally affects me if I hear that, say, 3000 people died in a flood in Bangladesh. Which is to say, very little. Same with the Rotherham scandal. I abstractly care about the victims, but I don't really feel much emotion about it.
The point of the Epstein business is that I want to see rich, powerful people who seem like predators brought down from their high places, thrown into the mud, and trampled on. That's why I care more about the Epstein matter than about the Rotherham scandal. Because it seems to afford more opportunity to damage rich, powerful scumbags. Now that's something I do feel emotion about. Glee and a zestful desire to see mighty amoral people brought low. It's a very primal, atavistic emotion, to be clear, not some clean moral imperative that looks pretty on paper. No, it's like the glee that a villager feels when he sees that a lion that has been prowling around the outside of the village for days get shot through the heart with an arrow. I don't feel the glee because yesterday the lion ate some guy on the other side of the village whom I didn't know. I didn't know that guy so I felt little emotion when I heard that he got eaten. But that lion felt like a looming threat to me, prowling out there, powerful, enjoying his lion life, clearly not giving a single shit about my desire to not get eaten. So when the lion went down, I celebrated.
pigeonburger
21m ago
But not quite up there with that misunderstood Karl Popper quote!
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22m ago
I would say it’s not.
You’d probably get a bunch of knee-jerk reactions writing you off as a stereotypical SJW, so it might be frustrating, but it wouldn’t be against the rules.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
24m ago
And this is a fair way to say it.
If I am a Martian Elm on Neptune, I’m not concerned much about the plight of the Neptunian Elm. But I also don’t want the Venusian Elm to move in on my nice spot by the river, either, and start competing for water. Even if I am supremely confident I’ll win, there’s nothing I really gain out of the situation.
Besides not speciating into a Quokka Elm, I guess.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
28m ago
Your opinion is just as valid as his. “I hate spending time with racists” is fine. So is “I think racists are shooting themselves in the foot.” Neither of those is booing the outgroup, and neither is building consensus. No one can take your preferences from you.
Mantergeistmann
32m ago
I know a boomer or two who has empty houses that he doesn't even rent out because he doesn't want to bother.
Pretty much everyone I know personally who has rented out in the past would never rent out again. They'd much rather pay taxes on an empty house than deal with the potential for another tenant from Hell, and they've all dealt with at least one. And these were not people renting out cheap shacks, either.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
32m ago
I got sniped by your edit, RIP.
Sorry.
To respond, you seem to think of the “weak but strong” mindset as recognizing the enemy’s strength but thinking oneself still capable of taking them on.
I think it is most essentially revealed in that Tyson quote. It is unsurprising to me that uneducated Iron Mike, via practical training and competition at the highest levels, stumbled across the idea’s purest distillation. Throughout training, he is deeply concerned that his opponent is too strong for him. This leads him to train harder. He does retain a certain degree of confidence in his own strength, though, or else he wouldn’t be willing to face this guy’s challenge. At the moment of decision, he then switches over to the idea that his opponent is too weak, that he knows he has him. But he still has to respect his opponent’s strength, because Tyson demonstrably fought hard and tactically. He is just utterly confident that he is the strong one now.
It’s important to note he wasn’t always right! He was one of the greatest, but I think it’s fair to say that when he lost this “too weak and too strong” mentality, he also lost bouts he could have won.
As I see it, and as how most applications of the term I’ve seen look like, it’s a cognitive trap that does improve morale, but usually does so at the cost of epistemic clarity(e.g. “Republikkkans are literal fascists, we can surely defeat them with protests and slogans!)
I think this is just a side effect of, what I would Chudishly call “ivory tower thinking.” A sort of over-academicizing of thought. Despite this, the concept is extremely practically useful in real life.
The way it is tossed around by overeducated people who do not have any actual experience with low-information, high-friction contests is what leads to the cognitive trap version that I think you do correctly identify.
I think this is why colleges and universities used to be so big on amateur sports for as much of the student body as possible. I’m sure the logic would have been “It’s just good for the young men’s development,” but I think this is kind of practical learned knowledge is an element of what they meant by “good.”
daguerrean
35m ago
I think it makes sense to say it is invasive in the context of a white suburban middle-class family. Are white people an invasive species from the perspective of indians? Absolutely, but I don't have to care about that.
My apologies - regardless, I wasn't trying to start beef, just point out that you're the foil to whiningcoil in that you gore red tribe oxen. Sometimes. And it make people big mad.
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