domain:rifters.com
Totalitarianit
4d ago
Hybrid regimes, authoritarianism, whatever you want to call it, operates off of public-private partnerships. Governments have lots and lots of leverage, to the point that they can essentially get their way by bullying private organizations. And we live in the post-state; like in medieval towns, powerful non-state organizations essentially share the governance of society. In our case it’s not so much thé medieval church and the guilds as it is powerful companies, universities, a few labor unions, and maybe some religious organizations and NGOS.
Trump appears to be the first Republican who realizes that exerting government pressure on these organizations can enact his agenda at second hand. And he’s much better at it than previous republicans; he got the deal shoved through with the top law firms, he got the teamsters to jump ship, he won over big tech, he’s going after universities.
This to me reads like a steelman of moderate's and right winger's description of the Democrat party. This is exactly what the left and Democrats have done. Now they're getting a taste of their own medicine and half of them act like it is the most authoritarian thing they've seen in modern history. All they really see is the reckless nature in which Trump and crew try to pull it off, and I will definitely concede that part to the left; Trump and his people are not nearly as good at hiding their intentions or authoritarian tendencies. The primary difference is that the Democrats have been very successful at the "We're not doing the thing we're doing." for about 10-15 years. It's easy to pull that kind of thing off when nearly all Western mainstream media outlets will eloquently argue your position for you, and when you can completely ostracize other schools of thought by calling all of their believers "bigots." It has been incredibly successful. That is until the receipts started piling up.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
Since my post about why London-NYC is the best route for all-premium service (including Boom supersonic) got an AAQC, I should probably make a correction - La Compagnie has been flying a daily all-premium flight Paris-NYC (the other Concorde route, so no surprise there) for long enough that we can reasonably assume it is sustainable, and has recently launched a Milan-NYC route (not clear if this will work out for them or not).
This doesn't affect the basic thesis that Boom Overture will be very cool, but fundamentally a niche product like the 2x better Concorde it is.
HereAndGone
4d ago
Consider yourself hit over the head with a plushie for that
HereAndGone
4d ago
I can't help but think that it's a little suspicious that the world's greatest warriors keep finding themselves embroiled in wars
I think that's more to do with Eddison's philosophy of what the perfect life/afterlife would be - Valhalla, not Heaven. Warriors need war to prove their valour and win glory, see how depressed Juss and the other Demons are about the ending where they have beaten their foes and the prospect of peace is before them. I don't think Eddison means us to see the Demons as going around starting wars just so they can fight, but his world (Mercury, and Zimiamvia even more so) are worlds not of peace but where there's always a chance of a low-level conflict going on, where lords fight among themselves and where nations fight other nations for power, status, and influence (but mostly for the love of war and glory).
His is not a world of the common man, the ordinary soldier who gets dragged off to fight in these eternal battles; it's the world of the heroes, the mighty lords winning renown in battle. The Demons don't go to war for anything so vulgar as territorial advantage or resource extraction, they are the heroes of sagas and the Iliad and other such epics.
HereAndGone
4d ago
but it really seemed like they're all essentially human beings, despite names like "demons", "pixies", "goblins", "witches", etc.
Oh, yeah. Except the Demon Lords have horns, and I think the Imps are smaller than the other races. But that shouldn't be too much of a problem, and you can always put your own flourishes on them. And Spitfire literally breathes fire, what's not to love?
“Now turn thine eyes to him that leaneth on Juss’s left arm, shorter but mayhap sturdier than he, apparelled in black silk that shimmers with gold as he moveth, and crowned with black eagle’s feathers among his horns and yellow hair. His face is wild and keen like a sea-eagle’s, and from his bristling brows the eyes dart glances sharp as a glancing spear. A faint flame, pallid like the fire of a Will-o’-the-Wisp, breathes ever and anon from his distended nostrils. This is Lord Spitfire, impetuous in war.
HereAndGone
4d ago
It's an amazing work, and the perfect lead-in to the Zimiamvian Trilogy. You'll know whether this work is to your taste and if not, then don't bother. Eddison definitely had his own view of the perfect life and how it should be lived, and it's not really a Christian one but pagan. But it's fantastic world-building and genuinely both familiar and alien.
And everybody loves Lord Gro! I love Lord Gro! Even Tolkien liked him, though he didn't like Eddison's worldview:
I read the works of Eddison, long after they appeared; and I once met him. I heard him in Mr. Lewis's room in Magdalen College read aloud some parts of his own works – from the Mistress of Mistresses, as far as I remember. [Eddison in fact read from The Mezentian Gate] He did it extremely well. I read his works with great enjoyment for their sheer literary merit. My opinion of them is almost the same as that expressed by Mr. Lewis on p. 104 of the Essays presented to Charles Williams ['You may like or dislike his invented worlds (I myself like that of The Worm Ouroboros and strongly dislike that of Mistress of Mistresses) but there is no quarrel between the theme and the articulation of the story.'] . Except that I disliked his characters (always excepting the Lord Gro) and despised what he appeared to admire more intensely than Mr. Lewis at any rate saw fit to say of himself. Eddison thought what I admire 'soft' (his word: one of complete condemnation, I gathered); I thought that, corrupted by an evil and indeed silly 'philosophy', he was coming to admire, more and more, arrogance and cruelty. Incidentally, I thought his nomenclature slipshod and often inept. In spite of all of which, I still think of him as the greatest and most convincing writer of 'invented worlds' that I have read. But he was certainly not an 'influence'.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4d ago
I think one faulty assumption in your logic is that entities which Trump acts unlawfully and adversely against will always press their legal claims. Take Intel's recent announcement about them giving the US government a 10% stake in the company in exchange for grants in the CHIPS Act. There is nothing in the actual law passed by Congress that permits the executive to withhold these grants or condition their distribution on an exchange of equity. The Trump administration's actions are 100% unlawful. Yet, Intel did it anyway. Unlawful actions can create a lot of short term pain for a company such that they may decide it is better to eat the cost than press their claims. That does not mean the action was lawful.
gattsuru
4d ago
Being a protector and provider, a rock and the firmament. Do transmen dream of defeating villains and being dashingly wounded in an act of heroism?
Yes? Specifically for mouseworld the nearest example doesn't involve being dashingly wounded, but even ignoring outright hurt/comfort, it's a pretty common thing in RP and fanwriting circles (to the point where no few FFXIV groups have jokes about it). I don't think it's going to be a good argument against the 'was driven by an urge to "self annihilation"', but it's present.
Whether many trans guys actually do it, to the extent achieving anything so much more a process than a single event, is a more complicated question.
I gave at least a token effort to reading the trans-mouse erotica comics and I could not figure out what the hell was going on. Consider my comment to be a fully general take that does not relate to those specific pieces of media at all.
Fair, and my apologies.
To give the more general argument: if you believe "FtMism = rejection of and flight from femininity", how does this explain the presence of transman who present (perhaps depressed) masculinity, but like femininity in others around them, such as by having (cis, femme) female romantic and/or sexual partners, close female platonic friends, or (if sexually attracted to men) liking feminine men? Is there an explanation that can separate itself from the trans-internal claim of just not liking being/being seen as feminine?
HereAndGone
4d ago
Gosh, how wonderful it is to be a man! And for a woman, all you have to look forward to is growing bigger breasts because these drive "males just absolutely crazy" (except for the alleged societies where women go around bare-breasted and the men are not crazy about boobies, this is a socially conditioned reaction).
How I wish I were a man! I'd be smart and active and heroic and achieve things in the world! I'd be, now what is that phrase? Elite human capital! But just being a woman means only babies, and if no babies, no worth at all, and if babies, worth for only a little while then I get old and the man wants young big titty girl so I get replaced!
Oh dear, I feel like I need to sob into my pillow.
birb_cromble
4d ago
When my wife brings up concerns about his supposedly authoritarian actions, my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it
I've noticed that the people in my life who are most distressed by Trump are the people who seem to have the least faith in the American system. For whatever reason, they don't think that a government designed to prevent runaway unitary power can actually accomplish that task.
It's fascinating to discuss. When they see Congress flailing around and failing to advance Trump's agenda, for example, they don't see it as a designed-in firebreak that policy should be hard to enact. They see it as two distinct problems - policy is hard to enact and it's policy they don't like.
This pattern seems to hold on the left and the right. The topics that cause their dismay change, but the fundamental mechanism does not.
thejdizzler
4d ago
Yes he is another one that fits this mold.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
Ok, let me steelman TDS. Note that this is a steelman again.
Hybrid regimes, authoritarianism, whatever you want to call it, operates off of public-private partnerships. Governments have lots and lots of leverage, to the point that they can essentially get their way by bullying private organizations. And we live in the post-state; like in medieval towns, powerful non-state organizations essentially share the governance of society. In our case it’s not so much thé medieval church and the guilds as it is powerful companies, universities, a few labor unions, and maybe some religious organizations and NGOS.
Trump appears to be the first Republican who realizes that exerting government pressure on these organizations can enact his agenda at second hand. And he’s much better at it than previous republicans; he got the deal shoved through with the top law firms, he got the teamsters to jump ship, he won over big tech, he’s going after universities.
But enacting your agenda second hand is, well, the other side of the coin of authoritarianism. Literally, thé definition of authoritarianism is when non-state actors cooperate with the government to shut down the democratic process(the government taking direct control is instead totalitarianism). Like when FDR did it.
Do I believe this? Not really, maybe I hope for it a bit. But do I understand the concern among liberal journalists? Yeah, although I point to their open hypocrisy if they expect me to have much sympathy. After all, taking control of the media secondhand is sine qua non of successful authoritarian takeovers. Trump has X and now meta, thé Washington post- it’s not like you can’t point to examples here. News media is just not a profitable enough business for it to be not owned by someone else who can be pressured by the government.
gattsuru
4d ago
Are those six kids from the past partner? Or from several past partners?
The backstory is one past partner, but I think it's intentionally a little ambiguous about whether the set that show up are from that litter or from a timeskip after a second more-intentionally-'donated' litter.
To be fair, I do not get furrydom at all.
That's fair.
And it doesn't help that a lot of the most visible stuff is yiff, and things like "snake women with breasts" which just makes me go "no!" If you're going to be an animal, why be unrealistic?
Uh, a lot of it's just 'if you're giving them hands...', but if you want a serious answer for that very specific example:
But, for instance, in what I suppose we can call classic 'anthropomorphised animal literature', there is no sense that Mole and Mrs. Otter can get together and have cute hybrid babies, because species are not cross-fertile like that.
Yeah. I think a lot of it's come from comedy works, with The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) as one of the better-known examples, but it's definitely a newer convention where present. Barring really old mythology-style stuff where mainstream belief supported a lot of bizarre cross-fertility, I don't think there are many examples pre-1900s. There are a pretty sizable number of modern furry settings that go with the more convention, either to explain all of the consequence-free sex, or for other kinks (eg 'full-service sperm donor' as a kink can range from threesome to mild mdom to extremely cuckoldy).
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
his telling of the doomed airline passenger.
Aged like Milk.
"Democracy is over. January 6th was the last stand. The progs have won." Then, in 2024, Joe Biden dies in the middle of the campaign and Trump 2.0 defeats DEI personified.
This is why "no fucking blackpilling" is a constant refrain for me. Losers gonna talk loser shit and, more embarrassingly, wind up with egg all over their face.
Aapje58
4d ago
Thousands go in, no one comes out, do the guards just tell everyone else they were loaded into buses in back and sent to another camp?
You do know that Auschwitz consisted of about 40 camps? So it would indeed be perfectly plausible for them to be marched to a different (sub-)camp, potentially quite a bit away. And the Nazis would obviously not be worried about making them do quite a long march.
And why do you think that it would make sense for people to be brought out of the showers back to the railway station? Why would they leave again, right after arriving?
Just the first of many logistical problems that make this obviously implausible.)
Do you have any actually convincing problems, that are not simply because you don't understand that these camps consist of separate areas with a purpose (and indeed, separate sub-camps also with a different purpose), and people would not come back to places like the railway station unless they were leaving?
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
4d ago
As for your lack of reproductive rights, say you had those rights. Without knowing the specifics of your life, would you have grabbed your ex by the wrist and physically dragged her to the abortion clinic? Would you have held her down to dose her with abortifacients or undergo a surgical abortion? Or I guess just not have to pay child support? What does this world look like, where you have reproductive rights?
No, I think the only way to get close to parity given the biological realities is just allowing men the option to opt out of the legal responsibilities. But I thought I was being careful, I was just too much of a quokka to understand why a woman might lie about being "on birth control AND infertile". I was presented with the situation fait accompli and had my life thoroughly derailed. It doesn't match up to the body horror of having an unwanted entity growing inside you, but it's not nothing.
Coming back to your dichotomy of 'grace and forgiveness' versus 'punching back twice as hard,' I knew as soon gave any concrete example the goalposts would move from the latter to the former. If your expectation is 'my side wins and nobody on the other side says mean things' then you both have a long, unhappy life ahead of you and moreover, come nowhere close to living up to your own standard.
But that's what a reverent respect for norms as the highest value would actually look like. From the conservative perspective, that's basically what John McCain and Mitt Romney actually did, and that's why so many people picked Trump - because for all his flaws he's a fighter. Because no one (aside from maybe 4 civic religion fundamentalists and the older Republicans who were content to be corrupt Washington Generals) actually places norms and standards as their highest value.
Again, my objection is to the two-facedness of crying about norms and standards, while never actually prioritizing them when it would cost. It just comes off as concern trolling.
There has been tacit acceptance. Trump issued reams of EOs, gutted agencies, tariffs, pretty much whatever he wanted. There's no widespread unrest, no major congressional resistance (remember Schumer giving in on the budget because the alternative was worse?), no 'deep state' blocking his will.
Schumer did cave on the budget, not as an act of goodwill, but because a shutdown gave Trump even more power and authority. Meanwhile, every action you listed has been hit with an injunction from activist judges, often with no authority to do so, even after the SC smacked them down and told them to stop it. I don't deny that the Dems don't seem particularly effective in their opposition, aside from the rogue judges, but they still seem to mostly be in earlier stages of grief than acceptance.
And 'we' tried to kill Trump? Did 'you' shoot up that synagogue, or that church, or the wal-mart? Don't give me that nonsense. If you want to play that game, take responsibility for your own nutjobs first.
I do sincerely think there's a massive gap in how nutjobs are parsed. I would bet that 80%+ of Republicans would support putting a bullet in Dylan Roof Storm. OTOH, Mangione (who I think is an actual drug-addled nutjob, rather than any kind of ideologue) is openly lionized on the left. People wear shirts emblazoned with his face in public. In the wake of the most recent shooting, the response that I've seen on the Dem side is a blend of blaming Trump (ABC news had an amazing piece where they noted that "Trump's name was on one of the guns" without mentioning that the phrase on the gun was "K-ll D-nald T-ump"), mocking prayer, and freaking out over the possibility that people might try to have a conversation about the Venn overlap between trans, mental health, and violence that looks like it might be a Thing.
And democrats escalated, responding with their own molotov cocktail against norms and conventions, Joe Biden.
Eh. I think the calculations there are very different. Biden himself probably is a good standard bearer for the "norms and standards" crowd, or at least he would have been 10-15 years ago. Same as the Republicans I mentioned above, I don't think Biden has broad ideological commitments. I think he wanted to keep the boat steady and enjoy the kickbacks.
The people who made up his administration are a different story.
In 2008, Republicans got wrecked far worse than dems did in 2024. Word for word, what you just wrote applied to them 10x and was written about them as well. And then we all remember how they moderated, played nice with hispanics (muh demographic replacement) and that strategy paid off in 2016, right? Much as I'd like them to (and the Republicans as well!) it boggles my mind that you would look at the last ten years and say that moderation and saying nice things on camera wins you elections.
They very much did go for the Hispanic vote. That didn't pan out too well, but ironically, going absolutely ham on illegal immigration did seriously improve the Republican party's favorability with that demographic.
But let's look at the comparison of today's Rs with the ones from 20 years ago. Roe was overturned, and that was a major win for the religious right, but it's coming from a president who utterly refuses to pass national legislation on the topic, and openly talks about how a 6 week window "isn't enough weeks". The religious right "won", but at the cost of their party being forcibly dragged over towards the much more popular centrist position on the topic.
Gay marriage is not something that anyone anywhere in power on the right is willing to spend political capital to roll back.
They're much more opposed to foreign adventuring. No more Iraqs. No more Afghanistans. The neocons have flipped back to the Democrats as a more pliable vessel for warmongering.
It's not "saying nice things", but these are all significant motions back towards the center of the American Overton window.
Shooting people or waving guns around is the biggest own goal you can score, and will stay that way until the state has truly failed. And even if you win, what then? You're going to kick down every door with a pride flag on the lawn and shoot them, every registered democrat too, and then institute a police state to prevent wrongthink? These are all just childish fantasies. 150 million people disagree with you, and even if, as you like to say, 'we're the ones with the guns,' those people aren't just going to disappear. But by all means, talk more about euphemistic responses in public fora - I don't think it will help your cause.
No, you're mostly right. I don't give high odds of things ever getting that bad. I did try to phrase that carefully, as "if the worst of the worst comes to pass". If a future Democrat administration invites in a hundred million foreigners on welfare, and all but openly tolerates them raping my children while viciously repressing the native population, then yeah. But I don't think the version of the party that could do that is one that can win national elections in the first place.
Not to mention the juxtaposition of you ridiculing left-wingers for being scared of Republicans and a Trump administration while also 'darkly hinting' about 'euphemistic responses' is frankly hilarious.
I think a lot of Democrats believe the world we live in is as bad as the "worst case scenario" I outlined above. I often hear people talking about ICE snatching any random non-white person off the street to disappear them forever - this is a thing I literally hear from strangers. FEMA camps for queers are opening up any time now. Women are dying in droves because Roe was overturned, and they'll probably lose the right to vote soon. The economy is surely about to melt and all the poor people will starve. Millions of children have been stripped of healthcare, we murdered millions more in Africa by cutting US AID, etc, etc.
So many issues where the emotional rhetoric is starkly at odds with the facts on the ground. So many people openly wishing for violence about it, much more than I saw during the Biden administration from the other side.
I think there is a world of difference between believing that there are potential futures where political violence is acceptable or necessary, versus catastrophizing yourself into believing that we're already there by social media psychosis.
This is complicated even further by the "who has the guns" issue, as you noted. I think a lot of the left-wing psychosis and ideation is driven by a kind of general helplessness. Someone should be doing violence to save the innocent trans migrants, someone else. I think a major factor in why the rhetoric gets so heated and incendiary is because there's no thalamic outlet, just keyboard rage until exhaustion. Humans weren't evolved to handle that kind of stimulus. I think the right is less prone to that because there's at least some degree of awareness that the specific individual might actually have to do something, and because they're more likely to have a gym habit or manual job that offers endocrine catharsis. There's a reason this rhetoric stuff seems the worst with "disabled by mental illness" twenty-something NEETs, because they have the most frustrated energy.
Or maybe it's just a bubble, and I tend to see the worst in the outgroup and only pay attention to the parts of the right I find tolerable.
Aapje58
4d ago
but there was found to be a significant psychological effect on the soldiers doing the killings.
And the Jews also had a tendency to run away. Early on in the war, Jews fleeing further to the East was considered a benefit by at least one Ensatzgruppe leader, but I think that once they recognized that the war was not going well, they put more emphasis on killing the Jews quickly, rather than 'we'll get to it.'
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4d ago
I feel similarly. I was most politically concerned about a BLM protest happening across the street from me in 2020 not really because of the movement itself but because of rioting and looting that would typically happen afterwards (perhaps by people completely unrelated to the protests). It drove me towards gun ownership, in fact.
I was also just in general taken aback by reports of people walking into businesses demanding they put up BLM signs, or intimidating people at restaurants demanding to know why they're eating instead of protesting with them.
To me, this stuff seems like lawlessness that doesn't have a sufficient remedy. The riots may be quelled and the harassment by mobs may die down but in the interim you can come fairly close to being terrorized.
Stuff that Trump does feels fairly abstract and easy to undo it it is in fact lawless. Though I recognize that if I were a lawful US Hispanic citizen I'd probably feel pretty on edge from potentially getting caught in a bureaucratic tangle that would feel terrorizing because they thought I was an illegal.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
4d ago
I'm not sure where you get the claim from that there was some extremely high density in the gas chambers anyway.
It is claimed that up to/at least 2,000 people were gassed at a time in gas chambers that were by all accounts and according to construction documents (although they were documented to be Morgues) 7m x 30m. That means it is claimed there were stacked 9.5 victims per square meter. Here's an image to scale showing what that would look like. So you are saying the Jews stacked themselves like that even though they knew they were going to be murdered? You realize a person at the door pushing people inside would do nothing in the face of panic towards the door from a crowd like that.
You can watch this Revisionist film if you want to see a very well-sourced breakdown of the extermination process as claimed by mainstream historians. But yes the mainstream claims relies on the notion that Jews cooperated in arranging themselves with that much, or greater, density inside these structures. Through a single small entrance. Talk another look at that picture and tell me that this is a rational design for an extermination operation... it's just made up.
What part of this requires military discipline?
The people in the train want to reach their destination in a timely manner, they all have a strong incentive to accept being herded in that manner and if they didn't need to be there they would just go somewhere else. You are saying that the Jews would have exhibited the same level of cooperation as those Japanese train passengers but, instead of an attempt to take a train to get to work or whatever, to cram themselves inside their own execution chambers. I am saying they would not have cooperated like that. What exactly could the guy at the entrance do if the crowd inside the train panicked and all tried to leave the train at the same time?
For comparison, you can look at various tragedies at festivals, stadiums and such, where crowds got packed tight by people pushing from behind, which can easily cause extreme density at the far end.
Yes, crowd control is the most dangerous part of those events and when panic is caused for any reason it creates an incredibly dangerous situation for everyone involved. But you are saying the Jews would not have panicked, even though they knew they were being killed, and not only that but the Germans knew the Jews wouldn't panic so they didn't foresee an issue with a very light security detail simply telling thousands of Jews to arrange themselves inside the gas chambers.
The evidence of the Holocaust is overwhelming,
No, it is not overwhelming. The lack of contemporary documentary evidence for the operation is one of the biggest problems, with probably the biggest problem of all being the lack of physical evidence.
oats_son
4d ago
As a group of people, no, they don't want that. I'm talking about a very specific kind of Holocaust denier, the one that I have to deal with myself, and my example is the podcast I linked in the OP. That's two dudes called Corey J. Mahler and Treblewoe. Corey J. Mahler keeps getting banned off of Twitter, so my favorite posts about Adolf Hitler being the "last Christian king" are difficult to find. For how fringe they are, they still really like the LCMS, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, and keep getting into fights with its leaders or something because they don't want it to become corrupted.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
4d ago
Germany did not violate the Munich Agreement. The Munich Agreement is not very long you can read it for yourself if you want.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
4d ago
The other side scares us. Our own side doesn't.
What about MATLAB?
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