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I don't hold any BTC, I only have alts. I was always vaguely worried about the 21 million cap for that reason, plus it's so high market cap that gains would diminished...

On the other hand, if things get bad, the miners will change the rules by consensus. Violating 21 million would make a lot of people very angry but there's no reason all parties can't be satisfied. We had this before in the block size wars. Miners decided they wanted to keep small block sizes with higher fees, thus bitcoin cash and BSV faded away into irrelevance. Bitcoin will persist in some form, in some fork.

If CBDCs take over, we enter the darkest timeline. What good is freedom of speech without the freedom to buy a website, pay for organizations?

The president declares "No-knock warrants are now classified as potentially lethal force," what changes?

Federal courts have decreed that police violence should be justified by the circumstances, primarily the risk to officers and others, so they would presumably need to be able to argue some proven risk.

Which in this case seems to be absent.

He's saying that socialism can't create a perfect utopia, but it can make things better. This is a pretty common attitude across multiple ideologies. A standard American capitalist liberal might not think that we can create a utopia, but he does advocate for making things better through legal reform, scientific advancements, etc.

The bear is the option of someone who knows they'll never have to make this choice.

This just makes me want to start sponsoring Knight of Columbus Taverns all across the country. Bolt 'em on to the local parish. Have to be a local or sponsored by one to attend.

Perhaps the Holy Spirit - in the form of the fully alcoholic blood of Christ and its various Irish and Scottish cousins - can move the younguns to form holy unions.

Here's how I see it, your description was true for other countries and the related policies have since become a dogma to export via UN resolutions and American soft power or enforce via EU law. There is no real immigrant voting bloc in Ireland, the biggest left-wing party Sinn Fein has flipped their stances on the hate speech bill and the EU migration pact because the last year has caused division within their base (working class vs woke middle class), there was no 5 figure increase in 3rd world immigration until like 2 years ago. The immediate consequences of this situation (though not so immediate when there's an election coming up) work against the left defined strictly, though of course the woke wings of the centrist parties are pretty happy about it.

The conditions for this situation to arise thoughtlessly on the other hand have been present for a long time. Ireland paved the way for the present immigration situation at a time when we faced little consequences for it, the Irish government got to pass laws that made them look good in the eyes of the EU, UN etc while the actual immigration numbers (excluding EU migrants) were minimal. Immigration was simply not that important an issue until recently and there was no cost to winning over the striving middle class who have always been ashamed to be stuck in a backwards Catholic country. Now that Ireland is actually facing consequences for their eagerness to ape the big important countries the cracks are starting to show.

...A quote from a recent conversation seems relevant.

I am pretty confident that people can't do much better with a torture regime than we've seen them do in the past. That is to say, I think the problem is pretty well bounded by irreducible limits on human agency and capacity, and I do not expect this to change in the forseeable future.

The core of our disagreement comes down to whether there are practical limits to the exercise of power. You don't seem to believe that such limits exist, or are so distant that they cover all plausibly survivable spaces. I disagree. I don't think the Enlightenment revolutions of the 1800s - 1900s are repeatable, and I think the social systems that produce similar regimes are observably dying. That does not mean we are heading for utopia; there is no utopia. It does mean that humans are moving away from centralized control as the default organizational principle of society. Attempting to assert control through the naked exercise of force is less practical now than it was previously, and it grows less practical over time.

For a long time, castles were the defining paradigm of force. When gunpowder arrived, one might argue that it should benefit castles, since it allowed faster mining and quarrying of stone with which to build them. One would be wrong.

The problem is that nobody is joking.

What are your thoughts on Zyn?

I would take the bear.

It is a whole ass forest! Random collisons would already be unlikely, but on top of that, I am sufficiently experienced with hiking to know how to avoid bears. I also don't need help, so the alternative (friendly human) is kind of useless here.

So, the only bad event that can occur is a freak instance of a pscho-killer sprawning and wanting to screw me over.

I have thought this through:

  • If polar bear & aduly grizzly-> climb a tree
  • If black bear & sloth bear -> you can scare it off
  • If forest has ton of food -> don't need another human
  • If forest has very little food -> don't want another human.
  • If the forest has no food -> I would rather fight a bear who gives me a few days to prepare, rather than a psycho who can rush me and won't fall for stupid traps. (also, I'd rather eat a bear than a human. Just sayin)

The only situation where I'd take a man, is if I was stuck there for life. Need some companionship, and bear ain't gonna cut it.


Actually, no, scratch that. I take the man.

Sloth bears are aggressive, nimble and amazing tree climbers. They would probably rush me and kill me before I get anything off the ground. Only about 1-2% of bear are sloth bears, but that still more than serial killers. So there are 2 bad outcomes, and an aggressive sloth bear is far likelier than a psychopathic killer who is also stronger than me.

A response to this I've seen that I think cuts into some of the absurdity of this is:

So you understand why we don't want random men in the girl's bathroom, then?

Something that I think is also lost here, is that men also view other men as predators. A lot of chivalrous behavior (the type of behavior that radical feminists fought so hard against) was specifically designed to minimize the risk that men pose to women.

Walking a woman to her car at night is so that a good man can protect a woman from the bad men.

Encouraging women not to go out at night alone is because men realize that there are predatory men that they might encounter, and realize that this is dangerous for them.

And with people it's the other way around!

I enjoy chewing ginger and thyme. What else should I try chewing on?

Permanently stuck in a forest with a man reminds me of this story: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russian-family-was-cut-off-from-all-human-contact-unaware-of-world-war-ii-7354256/

One should take precautions against both bears and some men, but the real problems with any situation that can be described as "stuck in the woods" is much more likely to have bad outcomes from exposure, starvation. and sometimes drowning. I lived in grizzly country for a while, and people were much, much more worried about people trying to cross weak ice.

Why not just go with "fascist"?

I believe the term is socialist, presumably of the ethno/nationalistic variety.

In the event of a brown bear, a California ranger told campers to make lots of noise, bang stuff together, yell, and whatnot, the bear would probably think there was a group of people, or more people were coming, and leave. But also that they're really focused on food stashes, so don't be dumb and leave food lying around.

In grizzly or polar bear country, what are people doing out in the wilderness without a group and multiple guns? I think when I was in Alaska the men in town shot any brown bear bold enough to show its face. Each family had a half dozen or so guns.

But why did you ignore the other two sentences I quoted?

Because they were prefatory, and the sentence I quoted appears to be the conclusion that follows from them.

Why do you think these sentences say "we know how to solve all our problems"?

Because he doesn't seem to see that statement as an obstacle to attempting solutions to all our problems. He says institutions can never resolve all the conflicts, that Socialism does not and cannot liberate Eros from Thanatos. And then he concludes that the Revolution should proceed anyway, endlessly, and that this is a good thing. Doesn't he?

"Limits" stop things. This "limit" stops nothing, instead it "drives the revolution beyond any accomplished stage of freedom", and he seems to consider this a feature, not a bug: "it is the struggle for the impossible, against the unconquerable whose domain can perhaps nevertheless be reduced". "Revolution" is commonly understood to mean the seizure and exercise of power. He claims that "revolution" will never end, and that this will plausibly deliver benefits indefinitely.

I do not see how this statement cashes out in a practical limit to socialist ambition. To the extent that it proposes a limit, the limit is entirely theoretical, and it appears to explicitly claim that such a theoretical limit will and should be ignored.

That's my understanding at least; am I misinterpreting him? What am I missing?

If you want to argue linguistic precision, I'd say this falls under "problems we can't solve aren't actually problems". I don't see anything here equivalent to "we can't solve some problems, and we need to accept that and not try."

Why isn't that fear enough?

Because, in my assessment, it's not rational. It appears that others agree with me, Abbott and DeSantis among them, among a number of other leaders and their supporters. Defiance of Federal authority is observably being coordinated, right out in the open where you can watch it happen.

You can believe that such defiance is inevitably doomed to fail, but I disagree, and it appears others disagree as well. Very well: we've made our predictions, and the outcomes will be as they will be.

What matters is not respect, but obedience. Blues don't need or want Reds' respect, only their submission.

It doesn't seem to me that they're getting it, and the trend seems to be that they're getting less of it over time.

Because you will be punished if you don't?

It seems to me that their capacity for punishment is declining, and that well-chosen actions can force it further into decline.

Trump is certainly being punished. He has survived so far, and is plausibly going to win the election. If he does, they will stonewall him and continue their efforts to destroy him, and the result that matters is that the system will continue to bleed credibility and thus capacity. If he does not win the election, or if they succeed in destroying him, the system will likewise continue to bleed credibility and thus capacity. I do not see a route by which the establishment arm of the GOP regain authority over and support from their base, which has been in open rebellion for some years now. Abbott has not yet been punished, and neither has DeSantis. Even if Trump is destroyed, and Abbott is destroyed, and DeSantis is destroyed, someone else will step up to take their respective places, and the process will continue.

This implies we have any meaningful ability to do so.

Abbott has done so before, and Biden backed down. Abbott is doing so again, and Biden is very likely to back down this time too.

There is more defiance to Federal authority now than there was two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago. It does not seem to me that the trend supports your interpretations or predictions.

...As for the rest, I maintain that the ultima ration is preferable to an uncontested blue tribe win, and that it favors Red Tribe. I also maintain that it would be a tragedy of almost unimaginable scale, think it should be our last resort, and do not believe that discussing it in detail is a good idea, especially in this forum. I continue to decline discussion of the ultima ratio beyond these points, and continue to be comfortable with your assumption and assertion that this means there is no substance to my argument. I invite you to dispense with the questions and simply proceed to state that I offer no explanation and thus should not be listened to. Others are free to draw their own conclusions.

Glen Youngkin won in VA largely because he said "Hey, stop teaching kids woke stuff in public school."

Maybe, but I think there's a difference between "stop teaching woke stuff" and "stop copying the Catholic Church's playbook". I seem to recall a significant rape scandal at that time (the school administration was just relocating the boy-in-a-skirt rapist from school to school, then the cops arrested the victim's fathers when they dared to complain)?

There's a lot of tolerance for the former and most parents don't really care all that much about it (considering how averse they seem to be in terms of trying to reclaim their rights). Heck, even a "we're so powerful we won't even bother to cover up the fact that trans rapists are A-OK in our books" has only so far prompted the election of one more sympathetic governor; if that's the full extent of parental organization and power here, well...

I don't recall anyone claiming that the other side was lying.

Here's a sentence out of that paragraph

But why did you ignore the other two sentences I quoted?

The institutions of a socialist society, even in their most democratic form, could never resolve all the conflicts between the universal and the particular, between human beings and nature, between individual and individual. Socialism does not and cannot liberate Eros from Thanatos.

Why do you think these sentences say "we know how to solve all our problems"?

Shit man, I had 0 dates up until age 30. I somehow got married, much to my infinite surprise. Just goes to show that you never can really know the future for sure, I guess.