domain:rifters.com
Terracotta
19hr ago
Some things aren't worth taking risks on, especially when the payoff is low, the risks are enormous, and my disposition is the catalyst for those risks
Well, it's not like you're signing the marriage license by asking a woman out; you could just enjoy learning about her and having a fun time together, day by day. I totally get the masochistic appeal of shutting oneself away in proud, bitterly high-minded self-isolation. But in the meantime you do miss out on the opportunity to share some potentially good (or at least interesting) company, to appreciate somebody's good points and be appreciated by them in turn.
As for overweight women, well, that is just prejudice. I'm in the USA. Our fat is a special kind of fat, and the fatter that fat gets the more viscerally I am repulsed by it.
You doubtless know that this means being viscerally repulsed by like 80% of adult men and 75% of adult women in the country, and as a smart guy you probably realize that such big feelings must be coming from a bunch of your own and your parents' stuff, not just from the bodies in front of you. Sometimes I look at old photos of working people, and those people are also tragically less beautiful than they should have been, through a similar combination of too little sleep, poor-quality food, shitty jobs, contaminated surroundings, illness, sorrow, sin and old trauma. I'm not sure any of us is all that beautiful, inside or out, but it would be hard to feel this stressed by it, and I'm sorry you're dealing with this.
I've really appreciated how reflective and fair-minded your responses are here; thank you! Hope better days are ahead for you.
SnapDragon
19hr ago
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
19hr ago
Yes, I think generally similarly-sized SUVs have a higher vehicle curb weight, which cuts into towing capacity. Trucks also generally have much better rear visibility.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
19hr ago
I would say it's a massive rabbit-hole with the outcome being far from certain. How do you determine "equal protection under the law" for people who aren't the same? We're kind of debating it with the trans stuff right now. Does a man have a right to women's facilities, explicitly demanded by various "equality acts", for example? Some people say "yes", other's say "men are not women, so a law demanding the creation of women's facilities does not demand that men are given access to them". I would say that whatever the answer is, it's not written in the constitution, and we should stop pretending that it is.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
19hr ago
And you often do the same in war. Sun Tzu says that exactly— where you are weak you want to look strong and where you are strong, you want to look weak such that your enemy attacks where you are strong and not where you are weak.
But the biggest part of poker is the fact that it’s one of the few games where the entire point is that you have incomplete knowledge. And therefore a lot of the strategy is about using the odds and psychological power to make the most of the cards you have. This is how both war and politics work. You don’t know what the other guy has or is going to do, so you act to maximize your odds based on tge cards you have. Trump seems to be pushing hard on the “I have really good cards here, you better agree to this ceasefire or im going to take it all.” It’s not a check, it’s a raise. Agree or get more of what I just did to you.
Who promised you this? I wouldn’t even want it that way.
Seems like an implication of "is contradicted by dissenters buying a piece of media to fight back against the mind control". A handful (effectively: 1-2 that are very close to each other) of ideologies dominating the mass-media ecosystem seems to fit right into my model, and "dissidents" buying a SocMed is far from a contradiction.
Politically, or, consumerismically?
The latter is a more obvious example, I think
For everyone else, they enjoy ads, it’s like good art to them, they’re more than happy to reward companies that evoke such joy with their purchases.
Well, I will give you points for originality, I haven't heard that theory before. I kinda doubt that personally. I know there are some ads that are fun and creative, but the general sentiment towards advertising seems to be negative, and regarding even the positive ones, I don't think I heard anyone tell me they want to reward the company for a particularly well-made ad.
Tree
20hr ago
I for one don't think we have a neat equal distribution of ownership of mass-media between various ideologies.
Who promised you this? I wouldn’t even want it that way.
if mind control doesn't work, why would you say so much money is being spent on marketing?
Politically, or, consumerismically? Compared to the power of the citizen and the GDP he controls through the state, the political ads and lobbying don’t represent that much money.
For consumption goods, I know everyone thinks ads don’t work on them, but they mostly don’t work on me (also, adblock). For everyone else, they enjoy ads, it’s like good art to them, they’re more than happy to reward companies that evoke such joy with their purchases.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
20hr ago
I would say that marriage is firmly under “equal protection under the law.”
self_made_human
C'est la vie
20hr ago
Trust me, I feel second-hand embarrassment about the whole affair. It's somewhere between performative, maudlin and plain old cringe. Even if they'd wanted to showcase the undersung colonial experience, in the War museum, how hard could it be to find something to showcase that has something to do with war?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
20hr ago
He certainly has his moments.
Especially speaking off the cuff. It’s a gift.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
20hr ago
As I understand it, Virginia v. Loving says yes
No, I don't care about rulings, I mean the actual text of the actual constitution.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
20hr ago
Indeed, by the standards of Middle Eastern ceasefires, this one seems to be holding together OK. Iran fired off two missiles (most sources say both were intercepted, one says one hit a residential building), Israel dropped two bombs in response (and told Trump they would have dropped more if he hadn't yelled at them, quick thinking on Netanyahu's part), and nothing more. Also no Houthi attacks on shipping, no closure of the Straits of Hormuz, and no bombing of Iran's oil terminals
netstack
Texas is freedom land
20hr ago
As I understand it, Virginia v. Loving says yes.
I will admit that I’m not an expert. But I don’t think the dissents rejected the idea that marriage was a right protected by the 14th. They were more concerned with 1) whether the historical use of the term included the opposite-sex qualifier and 2) whether the due process clause protected positive rights in addition to negative ones. Or maybe that was just Thomas?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
20hr ago
Looks to me like Trump imagined that because the US is large, it has magical powers to compel others to do what it says.
Trump appears to be compelling others to do what he says. Israel's airports have just resumed full operations. Iran is telling the Saudis that they're ready to resolve their differences with the US.
I’m getting a strong feeling that this is the same exact thing as happened with Russia and Ukraine. Wasn’t he supposed to end that war? What happened there?
Trump does not actually have magical powers. He has considerable power, but exercise of that power comes at unknown but significant costs. So far, ending the Ukraine war is beyond him. We'll see how it goes in the future, though.
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
20hr ago
Great write up
I’m a Heat Dolphins & Marlins fan and I wish I enjoyed hockey
I really only watch Dolphins games and Redzone and only follow the other two online, Heat daily & Marlins on occasion (even tho I like watching baseball the most - it’s the most exciting sport)
I wish I were a Panthers fan - the last three seasons would’ve been fucking insane to watch
The point is, 'mind control theory' in its strong form, is contradicted by dissenters buying a piece of media to fight back against the mind control.
I don't see that as a contradiction. For one, the purchase was kind of a fluke to begin with, the way I remember it, the TDS brigade was convinced they were owning Elon buy forcing him, via the court system, to buy it. Other than that, while competing interests may balance themselves out, the "balance" is far from guaranteed, I for one don't think we have a neat equal distribution of ownership of mass-media between various ideologies.
Are we just haggling about the price? I could just as easily say "Sure, you can fool some people some time, but you can't fool all the people all the time....".
We very well may be. I don't hold a maximalist position. Look, here's me arguing for limits to the power of propaganda while expressing sympathy to the position that "propaganda works".
Though to point out it's something more than haggling over the price: if mind control works only on a "some of the people some of the time" basis, why would you say so much money is being spent on marketing regularly and continuously?
But what they ultimately wanted to achieve, more than anything else they ever wanted before, was preventing Trump from getting elected, twice, and they failed at that.
They failed, twice, to exercise control at the point where exercise of control is the absolute weakest and most difficult to execute: control over highly protected and highly legible choices made by dozens of millions of Americans in secret, all at the same time. And of their numerous attempts to forestall these choices, many failed by very thin margins or in very temporary ways.
There’s this contradiction at the heart of anti-establishment movements – according to their own central myth, they are doomed rebels against the all-powerful, entrenched evil forces of the establishment, the cathedral, the megaphone, the elites, and so on.
Anti-establishment movements do not have a central myth that they are doomed. Their central myth is that entrenched evil forces are a clear and present danger that must be fought with maximum effort, right now. "Winning" means removing that threat and preventing it from re-emerging, and electoral victory is not the end of that effort, but rather the beginning. You have to actually wield power to un-entrench the elites from their positions and entrench yourselves or your allies therein, or you'll be right back where you started when the electoral winds inevitably shift.
"Don't be ruled by people who hate you" is the proper foundation of political thought.
kky
20hr ago
If we follow your logic at its word, the natural conclusion would be the total collapse of the Democratic Party.
Right now, the fringe elements of both parties are wildly unpopular. The question for most elections is who comes across as the most repulsive and who successfully tamps down on their extremists in public messaging. Since Democrats are better educated and hooked into their politicians, this has turned into a real advantage for the Republicans. The Democrat extremists are able to effectively pressure and primary politicians into following their worst ideas, which have a lot of salience right now.
So we have a civil war right now, between the Democrats from the Reagan days who want to relive that heady sense of resistance like they were young again and the young progressives who have been educated into mind-meltingly unpopular ideas. Out on the distant fringes are the swing-state Democrats like Fetterman who are effectively untouchable by the party mechanism but equally have no sway over it. Whoever wins is going to win based on their ability to signal #resistance to the equally extreme base, as voters on the edge increasingly disengage with the party. But the party does not compromise on its least popular tenets, and in fact broadcasts them as a matter of principle, and the way things are going, will stand absolutely no chance in upcoming elections (only exception being the presidency if Trump does something dumb like defy the law to run for term 3 and scare the normies way too much).
So we should expect to see evaporative cooling concentrating the heart of the overeducated party, keeping seats where urban Millennials and Xers dominate and hemorrhaging the rest. And then, probably, the Blue Dogs try to create their own party and recapture the many voters who really don’t like Trump but can’t find it in themselves to vote D.
There was a moment, after this election, where I wondered to myself: is this when the Dems will figure out what’s happening? Is this where they Sister Souljah the woke out and start trying to win elections again? But that moment passed in a heartbeat, and the old party mechanisms reasserted their dominance. I think this is a general pattern, not just for democracy but for every kind of human organization, where the mechanisms of power become too cleanly rationalized, too stable, and the possibility of an internal coup vanishes. The existing order loses the possibility of making mistakes and being replaced from within, as they control all the needed feedback mechanisms and are not vulnerable to it. It’s at this moment that the levers of power cease to be representations or formalizations of the real sources of power, and become sources of power in themselves. When that happens, the power structure itself is in dire jeopardy, as it’s lost all connection to reality and has become a sort of ouroborus, swallowing its own tail and growing smaller and smaller.
I suspect that part of this self-consuming behavior is related to class divides like the educational alignment of the parties, but that’s probably enough on this for now.
Tree
20hr ago
Do you disagree with the theory that Elon Musk buying Twitter was a pivotal moment for Trump's second run?
Can't have hurt him. The point is, 'mind control theory' in its strong form, is contradicted by dissenters buying a piece of media to fight back against the mind control. There's the sarcastic quip about 'build your own banking system'- well, him, and through him, people who agree with him, did buy their own media system.
Sure, they can't control the entirety of society at will, 100% of the time, but engineering does not require 100% accuracy, just predictability.
Are we just haggling about the price? I could just as easily say "Sure, you can fool some people some time, but you can't fool all the people all the time....".
gattsuru
20hr ago
No.
The problem is that there are enforcement of laws that people disagree with, which have very overt parallels to matters where the other tribe received broad victories, which any reasonable reading of the text of the law would not permit, and where defendants either lose in court or never have a fair day to start with. It's a problem when the Constitution seems a scam, and where the BATNA looks like a direct improvement on the very measures that negotiated agreement is advertising itself on.
phosphorus2
20hr ago
Here is the Imperial War Museum's purpose, in its own words:
IWM was founded in 1917 to document the First World War in real time, and to preserve for future generations a record of everyone’s service and sacrifice, military and civilian, across the UK and the British Empire. IWM’s remit was later extended to cover the Second World War and conflicts involving British and Commonwealth service personnel, up to the present day.
The next, and final day, had been organized at my behest. At some point, I'd evinced interest in visiting the Royal Armories Museum (to meet the ever-entertaining Johnathan Ferguson), but was enthusiastically informed by my cousin that we had the Imperial War Museum in town. With a name like that, how could I not go?
It was a bit of a drive, and the exterior was uninspiring. Very 1990s, all angular slopes and little decoration to break them up.
The insides were rather interesting. I was a bit confused by the currently running exhibition, organized by a Punjabi lady and celebrating her experience of growing up in the UK as an immigrant. A lot of East meets West, leaning towards the East. Not particularly exciting to me, I'd grown up there.
Of course there is an exhibit exploring the family, marriage, religion, and the role of women within Punjabi culture in an English war museum. Its like they picked an exhibit as conceptually distant as possible from what they tell the public their purpose is. Its so quintessentially English, of their all encompassing self debasement. Just a little snapshot, a microcosm, of the degradation of their own culture and people perpetuated by their own elites.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21hr ago
Rulers rule by codifying their rules into written laws out of a pragmatism that allows them to rule more effectively.
Some rulers do that. Other rulers claim they're doing that and then rely on manipulation of procedural outcomes instead. And likewise, some critics are pointing to actual abuses, and some are simply mad because they got caught breaking black-letter law.
I believe I and others here are pointing to actual abuses. Between formal complexity, subjective interpretation, selective enforcement and corruption, Rule of Law is not a sustainable assumption in the United States. We cannot passively trust the legal system to fulfill its promises to us; pressure must be constantly applied, and some of that pressure must be illegible and outside the formal bounds of the law.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
21hr ago
@ZorbaTHut, I've made two pull requests in the repository.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
21hr ago
Is the right to marriage written into the constitution?
It missed its chance to be the one and only 10th Amendment precedent.
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