domain:worksinprogress.co
FtttG
10hr ago
I have little hope that a future Oblivion remake would be anywhere near as good because they will simply sand away all the interesting parts
It's crazy that this was announced and released literally a week after you posted this comment. Did your prediction come true?
oats_son
10hr ago
I think you might be right on Cowboy Bebop, though I still like it because I grew up with it. It wasn't until I watched Samurai Champloo as an adult that I realized that Cowboy Bebop was as you say, because I found that Samurai Champloo was superficial in the same ways that Cowboy Bebop was, though Samurai Champloo's case was more severe, I think.
I definitely agree with you on Ghost in the Shell, the movie. I watched it and just could not understand at all how it was so popular and influential as a 90s anime movie. Akira was way better.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
10hr ago
Real punctuation:
-
Hyphen-minus: -
-
Ersatz em dash: --
Mental illness:
-
Hyphen: ‐
-
Minus sign: −
-
En dash: –
-
Em dash: —
t. sufficiently mentally ill to use everything but the hyphen
hydroacetylene
10hr ago
Maybe, but I think it’s more likely that he meant what he said about the leviathan and woke.
hydroacetylene
10hr ago
Trump is not necessarily going to do the smart thing.
2rafa
10hr ago
I don’t think my claim was that Jews don’t blackmail Jews (which would be rather disproven by the Israeli criminal underworld and countless other examples), but that specifically blackmailing Zionist Jews who contribute large amounts of money to that cause into supporting Israel would be pointless at best and counterintuitive at worst.
Balkany was just trying to extort Steve Cohen for money (funneled via his school, as he noted), the most mundane and commonplace motive for blackmail.
sohois
10hr ago
Using regular dashes is fine, one of the reasons that em dashes are so indicative is that no human ever bothers to use the proper type of dash
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
10hr ago
Watch Death Note. I've never found a human who didn't like Death Note.
Please allow me to introduce myself / I'm a man of wealth and taste
I gave up after episode 9. The plot felt too silly and the characters childish. Everyone's actions and motivations were too far removed from reality, like a kid's idea of adult relationships and organizations. Features of the eponymous Death Note were introduced in a way that suggest the author was pulling them out of thin air without forethought or planning.
hydroacetylene
10hr ago
At a large institution? No, you’ll need to be on a contractor list, with proof of insurance on file, with the contractors scheduled to be there following minimum notice.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
10hr ago
I'd like to thank you for posting this, and note that most of this describes the Alaskan Independence Party pretty well too.
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
10hr ago
I use - and … all the time.
I’m unsure my random thoughts will be picked up as AI.
hydroacetylene
10hr ago
Yes. History rhymes. Which of his associates will March on Rome?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10hr ago
An Attempt at Following Up on the User Viewpoint Focus Series
Thanks to @hydroacetylene for 1) the nomination and 2) reminding me to get on it. I followed his excellent template here.
Self-description in Motte Terms
I'm a classical liberal with a keen awareness that the American dream was made for me. In my personal life, I'm a well-paid Texan engineer with an appreciation for firearms. I love America and the American ideal even though I feel it's currently struggling with (what I see as) a particular failure mode of populism.
We enjoy unparalleled material prosperity thanks to strong societal values combined with good initial conditions. That carried us through two centuries of struggle to the top of the world, and now it gives us opportunities to shape the future of mankind. It also reminds us of an obligation not merely to perpetuate the system which got us here, but to spread the benefits to others who are less fortunate.
Yes, this almost certainly makes me one of the most progressive posters still on the site.
I absolutely despise the fascism of pure aesthetics which is so adaptive on social media. Contrarian countersignaling that you'll make the world a worse place because bad things are good, actually. "Tear it all down," "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out"... That's the lowest form of demagoguery.
My girlfriend, whom I love and trust more than anyone, once asked "why do you hang out with these people?" Why am I spending my time on this Earth arguing with people who hate my guts and sneer at the things I value? It's because I believe in the project. I believe that when classical liberalism gets to compete with the fascists and the communards, it comes out looking great. I believe that our model of debate club is a valiant attempt at implementing the liberal ethos of free exchange of ideas. I believe I can win friends and influence people via the political equivalent of betting them that nothing ever happens.
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
Recommended Reading
I'm not going to give a list of published books. Y'all probably know what goes in the classic Western philosophical canon. Plus, and I might not be supposed to mention this, but the vast majority of my model overlaps with what they teach to reasonably smart high schoolers. Perks of subscribing to what's basically our civic religion.
Allow me instead to share a few standout motte posts.
I still think about this post by, I believe, @AshLael. The idea that certain flavors of argument are advantaged against others helps to explain large swathes of the political landscape. It's also part of the reason I'm so invested in maintaining a Debate-heavy space like this one.
Here's a classic bit of Hlynka for those who missed it. While I deeply, deeply disagree with him on lots of things, he was grasping at something that most other users don't quite get.
But I've always had a special place for the strange and wonderful digressions of the Motte. /u/mcjunker's stories, @Dean's policy analysis, all sorts of stuff. One of the best examples has to be this monstrous essay on the aesthetics of jazz. Amazing stuff.
If you have any affinity whatsoever for text-heavy, mechanics-light video games, you should play Disco Elysium. Its Moralintern is a bizarre but excellent commentary on our rules-based international order. Also, it's generally hilarious and poignant.
While I am tempted to namedrop countless other works of fiction, it'd probably be more of a distraction. Ask me on a Friday thread.
Brief Manifesto
Assume your model is not going to work.
Doesn't matter if you're theorizing about politics or international relations or the state of the youth. The very fact that you've taken the time to present it in a forum post is a comorbidity for any number of critical flaws. Maybe it's wildly overcomplicated; maybe it overlooks some basic fact of human psychology. As soon as you introduce your theory, the fine commentariat of the Motte will show up and explain how it's actually stupid.
This is a good thing, because picking holes in ideas is how you get better ideas. (Okay, yes, it's also quality entertainment.) But it might not be fun, and there will be some psychological pressure to insist that nothing is wrong. No. The critics are right, and your grand psychoanalysis is probably bunk. So why not try to get ahead of the curve and figure out what went wrong? What's the first objection someone is going to make when you hit "post"?
This is the difference between arguing to understand vs. arguing to win.
If you want to have a constructive discussion, the single most useful thing you can do is to think about how you might be wrong. It's not easy, I sure don't live up to it as much as I ought to, but I promise. It's worth it.
Ping Me On...
Voting systems. Electoral reform along the lines of single transferable vote is literally my single issue, because I think it's actually a credible path to a more functional government. Seriously, if you know about a way I can act against FPTP, let me know.
Science fiction. Fantasy. Weird hybrids that defy or define genres. I'd like to say I'm pretty well-read in this sense. I certainly enjoy the subject.
Historical trivia of all sorts. Perhaps it's stereotypical for a board like this, but yes, that includes military history and hardware. And while my own collection is still amateurish, I'm always happy to talk about firearms as a hobby, too.
Posts I'm Proud Of
I don't generate a lot of AAQCs, and when I do, I tend to look back with a little embarassment. Something of a tendency towards melodrama. Still, I'm convinced that I was on to something here.
I also feel strongly about my comments on the state of fiction. Media is the first thing to get the 'ol "back in my day" treatment, and especially with modern storage methods, it's so easy to put on rose-tinted glasses. But all sorts of bizarre fiction is out there. Perks of a bigger, faster, more interconnected world. I encourage everyone who thinks modern media sucks and/or is captured by their ideological enemies to go out and find stuff that's just too weird to capture.
This was easier to write and harder to do than I expected.
I'll nominate @Rov_Scam for the next entry.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
10hr ago
I have discovered, by dint of fucking around, that SwiftKey keyboard for Android allows me to insert em-dashes with relative ease. I'm torn about using them—on one end, they're more expressive than standard hyphens or semi-colons; but on the other, in this climate, that invites accusations of AI writing.
I, for one, find this highly disappointing, because — as many of you probably have noticed — I tend to use em-dashes quite often myself. It's partially a combination of how I was taught to write — particularly in college — and them being rather easy to type on my Mac (option+shift+hyphen, with option+hyphen being the en-dash). But, being the old, new-technology-hating curmudgeon that I am, I will not be changing my writing style because of this.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
10hr ago
But yes the plot suffers because the most exciting naval ploys and scenes from several different episodes from early books are condensed to a single 'chase'. However, if they were more 'true' to the series, it wouldn't have been necessarily any less like a series of vignettes. it's been some time since I read the books, but I got the impression the author leaned towards realism in a way which makes for boring cinema by Hollywood blockbuster standards: Aubrey receives boring or exciting assignments or no assignments at all depending on the interpersonal politics and favors and strategic situation of Napoleonic wars (all essentially random from Aubrey's POV) -- often nothing much happens -- individual naval battles are more often due random happenstance than forming a satisfying narrative arch.
The naval romanticism comes in how Aubrey and Maturin find themselves in once-in-lifetime action improbably often and Aubrey gets to execute all the naval tactical genius of the Royal Navy of the era personally. (All the battles and stratagems are supposedly historical or closely inspired, but Aubrey's career is not.) Additionally, later on Maturin turns a little bit into James Bond of Napoleonic times, with all improbable features and events inherit in that.
There would have been some romance in the books, which might have been good for box office if they had incorporated that.
There are some billionaire Jews who are unaligned with Zionism. I recall reading the Wikipedia of a Hollywood talent management owner who had no confirmed philanthropy whatsoever, but for the life of me I can’t remember his name, and there’s also Zuckerberg whose donations to Jewish causes are a pittance relative to his philanthropy.
Certainly, but Wexner’s social circle that Epstein adopted and embraced was comprised primarily of Zionists, not apolitical tech billionaires or those Hollywood types (obviously not all) who didn’t really care about the whole Israel thing.
The only confirmed blackmail case is Bill Gates.
I’m not sure that Gates is the only ‘confirmed’ victim, given that unlike the Dubins or Leon Black (the latter being what I would consider the only truly likely implicit victim of a blackmail scheme given that he directly paid Epstein a huge amount of money for nothing, something even Les Wexner didn’t knowingly do) he didn’t give him a fortune.
This is actually further evidence against the agent theory, since in this one case (where I think blackmail was quite probably involved), the money all went to Epstein directly, not to his supposed paymasters.
Despite having connections to Israel, none of Epstein’s victims were Jewish.
There’s no evidence of this. Only a handful of victims have come forward publicly out of high hundreds or thousands of teenagers. Epstein didn’t spend much time in Israel, he mainly procured girls where he lived most of the time (NYC and Palm Beach).
If Epstein’s circle was Jewish supremacist, this would explain his link to Mossad.
Ghislaine Maxwell isn’t Jewish by the standards of any hardcore Jewish chauvinist, her mother is a French Christian and she never converted. Farmer bought into a lot of dumb things - and was pursued by a lot of open WNs online, over Facebook etc - and unfortunately in grief over a lost life has made numerous flawed claims (most unrelating to Judaism, to be clear) that rendered her a notoriously unreliable witness.
You are forgetting that Wexner was linked to Mossad by way of the Mega Group, and Epstein’s connections were throughout the Mega Group.
On the contrary, I discuss this in my comment when I make direct reference to Lauder etc. Israel’s billionaire supporters supporting Israel is a completely opposite direction of travel to Israel funding Epstein‘s activities in the United States (which mainly included spending huge amounts of money). In addition, the presence of ‘they do it for free’ groups like Mega further casts doubts on the Mossad agent theory. Consider that if Israeli intelligence wants access to the elite of American politics, Hollywood, finance and so on, they don’t and didn’t need Jeffrey Epstein to facilitate it, blackmail or not.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
10hr ago
That’s not correcting the record. Acosta, a career politician in office, is going to tell one thing to a confidant and another thing to the OPE.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
10hr ago
It is a useful for assessing priors, because it’s an example of a Jewish billionaire being blackmailed by a Jewish fixer for the funding of a Jewish cause. We don’t have the luxury of knowing who Mossad blackmails in America, so it is not in the realm of possibility to provide a one-to-one counterfactual.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
11hr ago
Fair enough, for whatever reason the .ph link flat-out wasn't working for me.
Hieronymus
11hr ago
This may be a personal aesthetic thing. I don't like the dash to connect to the strokes of the adjacent letters. Depending on the individual letter shape, that may require a touch of kerning.
aldomilyar
11hr ago
Part of what confuses me about this is that if I'm going to a private island escortfest I don't think most people have a practical way of distinguishing between a 16 year old escort and a 18 year old escort in that context.
Terracotta
11hr ago
I did have a ‘duty’ frame in mind, but what I was really trying to get at in my post was- different people have different duties.
Part of the problem is that underneath those surface differences, those varied daily duties were (and were explicitly claimed to be) the exact same set of primary duties: work as hard as you can, deny yourself, give up your life for those weaker than you, obey those set by God in authority over you. People forget that this cosmic hierarchy used to entail quite a lot of frictional social-class-based and age-based role rigidity, as well, so everybody had the daily experience of both authority and submission. In European trad systems, for example, the working man needs to obey both his lady and his lord and doff his cap to his betters of both sexes, everybody needs to obey the priest, who in turn needs to obey the bishop who needs to obey the Pope, etc. Sons and daughters need to obey both their mothers and their fathers, even as they reach uppity young adulthood. Of course, few humans are good at either authority or submission, so there are endless quarrels about boundaries for all this. But it's really clear how all of the role systems are upheld by the same explicitly analogical thinking and grounded in presumptions of not just difference but also similarity across stations.
The interesting corollary to this is that the dismantling of various family roles flows directly from the (economically-driven) political movement to dismantle class, legal and religious hierarchies, and is driven by exactly the same appeals to natural self-ownership, liberty of conscience and inborn equality before God. Although the US does pass through a couple of decades where class/political/religious hierarchy is gone but some limited gender hierarchy still holds, I don't think it's a stable equilibrium. For the middling sort, the system inevitably gets torn apart by the inherent contradictions in believing strongly in class mobility and spiritual self-determination but not in gender mobility or family self-determination.
Once you're committed to a class ethos of "you are not born to any fixed (economic) station, you can be anything you want to be! You should use your talents to try to rise in the world, in accord with your individual desires," then it's pretty hard to maintain the exact opposite line as regards genitalia. Even for yourself, I wonder if you'd get behind a system where a wife's natural duty to [whatever] implied that you also had a natural duty to obey your parents and go to college as they wished?
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
11hr ago
And Russell Crowe is fat
This is just additional realism in casting. In the book series Maturin comments how captain Aubrey is overweight. Royal Navy food was not delectable (biscuits infested with weevils) but it was calorie rich, and unlike the seamen, captain had not many obligations to engage in strenuous physical activity.
Random British ex-pat who lives in Malaysia and named his account off a resort in the area, never actually says he lives there himself anyway but is instead said by a completely different person on the mod team, shows practically no signs of actually living there in his comment history, and ironically has a comment history supporting the opposite claim where he says that he "visited" the very country he supposedly lives in is possible, but that's extremely odd.
No it's not. It's based off what the other moderator (the same one claiming to have DMs with this totally active account who refuses to post for ... still completely unexplained reasons) said.
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