domain:drrollergator.substack.com
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4m ago
If you have a good majority (say 60%) of the citizens behind you, then you do not need to shoot at the feds, you can simply elect one of your own as the next president.
Except I'd argue that the past decade and change serve to illustrate why that doesn't work, because the president isn't actually in charge of the Executive any more (see basically everything MacIntyre talks about here, or this from Jim). FBI JTTF goes after the "domestic terrorists" it wants to, not the ones the President directs them at — as we saw when Bush the younger tried to redirect them from chasing specters of the Klan to Muslim jihadis.
Our democracy is a sham. It's as fake as pro wrestling.
aqouta
5m ago
and (the textbook example) shouting "fire" in a crowded theater.
I feel compelled to point this out every time it comes up but this is not a true exception. It was briefly law as an example to justify banning handing out communist pamphlets but it was struck down as plainly unconstitutional.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
6m ago
It's the only other place on the internet (aside from here) I regularly interact with as the users don't immediately make me want to scream.
Best I got lol
faceh
8m ago
Actually that right there is a use for AI.
Read the notifications pouring in, mute the unimportant, queue up the actionable but not urgent, and only let you see ones that read as actually important (not just "flagged" as important).
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
11m ago
Quite literally the old school definition of left but I admit at this point "left" means "shitlib" and not "Marxist" despite the old dictionary definition
faceh
11m ago
Okay, went ahead and put a selection of them in a playlist.
https://suno.com/playlist/d8348313-aa62-4474-b272-75d4dbabf641
Note these took me <20 minutes to generate, counting time setting up prompts (I used ChatGPT to fill out the prompt descriptions a bit).
And less than $2 worth of credits, I'd guess.
I don't have an ear for music but these pass as the sort of classical songs I listened to on CD growing up.
The playlist has an "inspire" button that would let one use these songs as the basis for future generations.
Lest I pretend it does it perfectly every time, it did ALSO produce THIS monstrosity on the same prompts:
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
14m ago
I'd bet a decent chunk are idiots with cheap DJI or equivalent drones not following the rules. But probably not all of them.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
14m ago
ICE arrests superintendent of Iowa's largest public school district
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency arrested Ian Andre Roberts, who is the superintendent of the Des Moines (IA) public school district. If you've been following along with this aspect of the culture war, you probably figure he was arrested for abetting or protecting a student or faculty or staff member from them. But no; the guy is, according to ICE here illegally and was given a final order of removal in May 2024. ICE is strongly implying he never had any work authorization beyond a long-since-expired student visa. It seems to me pretty bold for someone here without work authorization to be in such a high-profile position. Even more surprising for him to be hired; the district claims to have done a background check on him; you would think this would result in them finding out he was not authorized to work and not being hired. Someone screwed up there.
Other aspects are that he had a weapons possession charge in Pennsylvania from 2021, but this was a pissant ("5th degree summary offense") thing about having his deer rifle on his seat still loaded. More serious is that he fled the ICE agents when stopped; his car was found with a loaded handgun, a hunting knife, and $3000 in cash. I don't much care about the illegal-alien-in-possession aspect; making a whole range of normal activities super-illegal based on a status offense is a tyrant's trick. But fleeing certainly seems to indicate a guilty mind rather than some sort of error or misunderstanding on ICEs part.
At first I thought they might have the wrong guy; there's an Ian Andre Roberts from Guyana who competed in the Olympics. But no, that's actually the same guy.
On reddit, /r/desmoines is up in arms... about the arrest, of course, not about the school district hiring a guy with no work authorization.
quiet_NaN
20m ago
In that context, the optimal gun is nearly identical to Grandpa's full power hunting rifle, which nobody has the political power and will to ban.
I think that this depends on the killer's goal. For a targeted assassination of an unsuspecting victim from distance, hunting rifles seem obvious. But not every sick fuck is a sick fuck bent just on murdering one specific person, some want to kill as many as possible. These seem to be the ones who mostly go for semi- or full-auto weapons, if they can get their hands on them.
wemptronics
23m ago
Semi-mandatory is a dangerous line to ride.
I consider semi-mandatory as preferable to an amendment. The US is at least relatively accommodating for conscientious objectors, although that's more a necessity determines thing. The cost to living in a powerful nation that likes to wage war is sometimes you're a slave for dumb and unnecessary reasons. That's a fair enough thing to object to.
Lean into sports and competition.
The US still has a relatively healthy recreational sports industry that still can create fads and innovate. Disc golf or pickleball as two examples that come to mind. Underwater hockey might yet take off for you. I'd prefer to subsidize getting the youth outside, but if video games are a reality (I like video games too) then competition e-sports are of higher value. Team based games at least provide a way to develop teamwork, communication, and leadership ability. Might even be able to route around the Hitler Youth comparisons by promoting e-sports in addition to real ones.
Tractatus
24m ago
If you think the consequences only showed up in the last 10-15 years, you are necessarily insisting that the sky-high divorce rates of the 60s-80s, the latchkey kids of the 80s-90s, raised on "the electric babysitter" and Nintendo (who emphatically did not turn out "ok"), the rise of hookup culture and dating apps, and so on, were actually Good Things. I don't know what to tell you, other than that you're being incredibly myopic. Great evidence for Chesterton's quip about the whole world being nothing but Progressives who go about ruining the world, and Conservatives who insist you cannot undo what the Progressives have done, because they have already adopted those changes as "tradition," as being Gospel truth.
The modern buzzword du joure "Parasocial Relationship" was coined not in 2020, but in 1955; much different than the modern use (which is just describing a dysfunctional form of propinquity; if I didn't know any better, I'd suspect the definitional drift was deliberate), it described disconnected housewives who legitimately behaved as though the fictional characters on the soap operas were really their friends. The standard description was "newlywed leaves her family ties, moves out to the suburbs, doesn't really gel with the neighbors, and, with entirely too much time on her hands due to kids and school, along with modern conveniences making housework take up much less of her day, vegs out in front of the boob tube and goes haywire." This was not treated seriously because this extreme was so rare, and the solution was to get the women involved in the community; after all, it was the 1950's, everyone was having 2.5 kids and making good money, so it could not possibly be the case that cookouts with the HOA, bowling leagues, Avon parties, et al, were actually not viable long-term replacements for blood-and-soil family ties. In fact, other than Christopher Lasch, I don't know anyone that even thought to connect the dots.
This new paradigm, that you must leave behind your family, you must "find someone that's right for you" (no-one ever seems to notice the narcissism inherent in such a statement), that the friends you choose are more important than the family you had no say in, these all moulded the Baby Boomers; it should be no shock to us when the Boomers had half the kids their parents did; that they slapped bumper stickers on their overpriced RVs, proudly proclaiming how they weren't going to leave a dime to their kids, spending it all on themselves, and eagerly consumed media praising them for this choice ("It will teach them to earn it on their own, like I did!" >conveniently forgets all the bailouts his parents and/or grandparents gave the Boomer after every fuck-up); nor should it be any shock to us that they would ultimately decide that "find someone that's right for you" necessirly implies "and if this person no longer feels right for you, or if you meet someone new who feels "more right" for you, well, it's time to blow up the marriage. It'll be hard on the kids, sure, but if they loved you, they would want you to be happy."
No, inceldom is not some wholely new phenomenon that can only be attributed to technological changes, it is just the next stop on the slippery slope of the radical change to the family that has been ongoing such Industrialization. It isn't even new; mass societies destroying families is so common across history that Spengler includes it - in the form of his comparison of the City versus the Country - in The Decline of the West and that was published in 1917, long before Tiktok, Youtube brainrot, and AI slop was even a twinkle in anyone's eye
LazyLongposter
26m ago
Much like masturbation, I'd be much happier if philosophers kept it to themselves.
Have you ever been in any "philosophy" circle? It quickly becomes unreadable because every single person will come up with their own definition for already defined words to match one of their theories, and then will use them in concert to try to make their thesis a mathematical proof. You end up with sentences that look like plain English, but are completely unintelligible. This is the antithesis of good communication and discussion.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
26m ago
Stupidpol is not a mainstream left-wing forum, it's a forum of left-wing rejects that are routinely called fascist, who were preparing for offsite emigration themselves at one point. I used to post there myself.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
41m ago
Hephaestus is disabled in the lore, though.
Hephaestus is described in mythological sources as "lame" (chōlos) and "halting" (ēpedanos). He was depicted with curved feet, an impairment he had either from birth or as a result of his fall from Olympus. In vase paintings, Hephaestus is sometimes shown bent over his anvil, hard at work on a metal creation, and sometimes his feet are curved back-to-front: Hephaistos amphigyēeis. He walked with the aid of a stick. The Argonaut Palaimonius, "son of Hephaestus" (i.e. a bronze-smith), also had a mobility impairment. Other "sons of Hephaestus" were the Cabeiri on the island of Samothrace, who were identified with the crab (karkinos) by the lexicographer Hesychius. The adjective karkinopous ("crab-footed") signified "lame", according to Detienne and Vernant. The Cabeiri were also physically disabled.
In some myths, Hephaestus built himself a "wheeled chair" or chariot with which to move around, thus helping support his mobility while demonstrating his skill to the other gods. In the Iliad 18.371, it is stated that Hephaestus built twenty bronze-wheeled tripods to assist him in moving around.
Where was I “blaming that for a rash of violence dating back to July, if not last year”? Please re-read what I wrote.
The wording was sloppy, because I had two clauses, but the entire American Eagle “Good Jeans” incident showed the left that cancel culture techniques just weren’t working any more, and it was around that time the left started to become really violent.
Another example of right wing cancel culture from earlier this year is how 4chan hacked that Tea app then mocked the pictures of women using that app.
faceh
42m ago
Edit: I believe the “good stuff” is still being made, but its audience and distribution network is not part of the great algorithm fork. It’s elsewhere, it’s curated, and it’s often offline. Interested in the new avant garde. I suspect it’s here, it’s just not where 50-98% of people spend their time.
Yep. You have to be willing to dive beneath the surface, long enough to find the pockets of original and specifically high quality work that the indie scene is putting out.
faceh
44m ago
Writing long-form fiction to even a high-human standard.
I like this one. The ability to create a fictional world that has 'infinite' branching plotlines and arcs to follow, or to produce the exact sort of one-shot novel you've been craving.
MathWizard
Good things are good
51m ago
I think a major issue is that they've replaced many of the major roles with women for the sequel and they don't think it's ok to make jokes at the expense of women so what we get is a whole load of anodyne nothing.
2015+ in a nutshell.
HereAndGone
56m ago
Several pundits and outlets liked making little lists of "possible VP picks".
Politico's list included a gay woman (if we're talking about why Kamala felt she couldn't pick Pete), so I do think picking Kamala was due to some internal politics in the party. For example, again from Politico's list:
Bass, 66, has said it is “very important” that Biden pick a woman of color for the VP spot. She was the first Black woman in the country to lead a state legislature after being chosen as speaker of the California state Assembly in 2008, after serving as an assemblywoman for three and a half years. Before entering public life, Bass was an emergency room physician assistant at the outset of the AIDS crisis and a civil rights activist.
Hmm, that wouldn't be you throwing your hat in the ring as "I will serve my country if selected", now would it, Karen?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
59m ago
the fact that there was far more intense pressure to assimilate in centuries past than in the current historical moment
I don't think that's actually true. The central group of contemporary concern, Hispanics/Latinos, are assimilating extremely quickly. The major difference I perceive between 1900 and 2025 is the acceptability of explicitly racism - everybody is still more than a little bit racist, but almost everyone agrees, on paper, that racism is bad and feels the need to launder racist claims through other paradigms.
analyzed voting patterns and political affiliation among different demographic groups and found distinct differences in political alignment among the present-day descendants of these 19th-century immigrants.
Assuming this is substantively correct, it doesn't meant much on its own. Different immigrant groups were not uniformly distributed around the country. Germans were heavily concentrated in the Midwest, Italians on the East coast, etc... These places have their own regional politics that will confound efforts to trace an ideological lineage through immigrant populations.
I’ll ask you: in the absence of assimilationist pressure
I think this hypothetical is nonsense. It's not far off asking, "in the absence of air, would you be happy taking a plane from NYC to London?"
The pressure to assimilate doesn't come from having people lecture you about the importance of assimilating. It comes from being immersed in the host society, from unavoidably picking up the norms and values of that society, from the countless petty conveniences of conforming to that society's expectations, from having your children grow up in that society. To a large degree it comes from being allowed to assimilate.
This tracks with my experience in a roughly similar age bracket. I'd guess you were in accelerated tracks and likely took AP courses. This is the basic way we teach history: start with basic myths then add nuance as a child develops. Myth making has taken a backseat to nuance at earlier ages, but your mileage may vary. Your experience with history is still probably the modal experience of American children that attend adequate schools.
Most kids don't get much out of history. Many kids, especially girls in my experience, consider history boring and irrelevant. This is maybe natural as it is old and they are young. Which is why I think you deploy my liberal brainwashing in a separate, national civics curriculum. Not wrapped into history that a teacher may or may not resent teaching.
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