domain:lesswrong.com
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
10m ago
I think it's best to treat that last "if" as implication rather than the subjunctive. At which point the Principle of Explosion applies.
daguerrean
12m ago
But as a straight white male with a job, I occasionally wonder what exactly Team Blue could ever do to entice me to vote for them in a national election (short of entirely abandoning 75%+ of their policies).
I’ve often wondered this myself and I’m not sure I’ve ever come up with a good answer. I wonder what other Motte users would say for this question
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
13m ago
It is like they are trying to somehow say "white dudes" with a Hard-R if you know what I mean. On paper it sounds neutral, but they way they say it...
roystgnr
15m ago
I'll agree with that in theory. In practice, note that "in appropriate conditions" requires "when the highway designers kept sight lines clear enough for that speed, including to any intersections or on ramps where someone might be trying to enter the highway after checking for traffic expected to be near the speed limit". Since highway designers never actually design for 115mph on purpose, you're pretty much stuck with places where it happened by accident, where the land was so flat and empty that you can't not see the road ahead of you for miles. I've had friends who enjoyed stretches of road like that in New Mexico, but I don't think any of them exist in Virginia.
My friends mostly enjoyed those stretches, I mean. One of them totaled his first car when a deer ran out into the road in front of him. In my experience most people who love driving that fast give other cars roughly the same consideration that he gave that deer, an implicit unexamined assumption that the highway ahead will be either clear or occupied by drivers doing the speed limit, that nobody will suddenly appear in front of them at surprisingly low or no speed. That assumption is usually correct, but it only has to be incorrect once.
FistLast2
19m ago
I have a super liberal friend who told me, "If Biden had dropped out earlier and they'd had a real primary, and Kamala had won, I think I would have voted for her."
Essentially, yes. There are layers.
The violent fringe of the left has always enjoyed more support. More often than not, the media doesn't so much cover left wing violence as cover for it. Left-wing agitators get a lot more institutional leniency and are often treated with kid gloves. They're good kids, with their heart in the right place, but they're just a little too zealous. Moderate left-wingers have a difficult time opposing the radical fringe intellectually, because they don't really oppose the endgoals. It becomes a debate about strategy and how to achieve those goals, and the radicals can rightly accuse the moderates of hypocrisy.
The radical left is a snake, and the moderate left is the grass that the snake hides in.
Of course, there are layers. There are radical leftists who actively support and commit violence, then there are others who don't act but support and cover for the violence, and then there are a whole bunch of people who are either ambivalent or intimidated by the radicals. They will mumble disapproval but they rarely make full-throated comdemnations nor argue back on points of doctrine, mostly because they would lose. The radicals have been able to increase their influence further by controlling institutions.
Of course all large groups and movements have something like this dynamic going on to some degree, but it's becoming more and more a prominent on the left, and it's similar to the problem with moderate Muslims.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
39m ago
116mph is fast, but there's nothing magical about three digits in MPH. One of my cars had that as about its top speed and while driving that fast was LOUD, it doesn't cause you to lose control or anything. It's just that Virginia makes anything over 85 mph statutory reckless driving.
Botond173
42m ago
For clarification, Brian Kilmeade suggested killing the mentally ill homeless.
According to the article linked to by the OP, very specifically mentally ill (implicitly criminal and socially dangerous) homeless who refuse help from social services.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
44m ago
I don't think there are that many "porn is a great thing, actually" advocates out there, and most that exist are probably left-of-center by a decent margin.
Yes, but if the Democrats wantes to capitalize on porn, that would be the position they would have to take. 'We know you're pigs, we want to let you' as summarized by hydroacetylene loses even to 'That stuff is disgusting and we're going to make you stop'
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
47m ago
but I also don't think that column is likely to be motivating outside a small, highly atypical tribe of politics-obsessed weirdos
Nobody who isn't a member of such a tribe thinks about Klein at all.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
50m ago
When is the last time, genuinely, you've seen any article published in any mainstream new media that was written from the perspective of a disaffected male where he was able to express what his perceived grievances were, and explain what he might want from a political party?
This doesn't happen because to express one's grievances as a male is to invite ridicule from all (except a small group of other aggrieved), not just Democrats. Part of "traditional masculinity" is to not make such grievances. This of course leaves men at a severe disadvantage, politically -- it's fine to be a Stoic when you're the Emperor of Rome, not so much when you don't have the power to solve your problems yourself.
Hestia does not have to be a generic big titty asian girl.
But it's so nice that she is ;-)
RenOS
something is wrong
57m ago
In general humans have exterminated, bred & moved very many species throughout history. All to considerable benefit with virtually no ill effect for humans. Most talk about the dangers of loss of diversity are scaremongering nonsense. We could probably even wipe out all mosquitos, and as a result other insects would simply take over its niche. Nature is quite adaptive and there are many overlapping niche species.
Botond173
59m ago
I'm gonna be honest, I'm fairly distressed over this. This is how Pogroms work. In the famed Jewish Pogroms of 1881, 40 Jews were killed leading to a mass emigration from Russia. I wonder if we'll hit that number in Virginia the next 4 years.
Czarist Russia did not have something like the "Big Sort". The US, on the other hand, does.
RenOS
something is wrong
1hr ago
AFAIK the degree of warming usually expected to stop AMOC is generally on the same degree or even higher than the cooling expected to result from the stop, so it mostly comes out as a wash except for slightly more winter extremes, but which are still limited to ca -10 °C. In general also, higher co2 + higher temperatures also mean plants grow better, (which we can already see with current levels) so I don't think starving will be a particular issue.
As someone living in northern germany, I'd certainly welcome a bit more snow in winter!
I would prefer there to be less goonslop in mainstream purely based on aesthetics. It's like the reverse of the "characters must be shapeless agender blobs" trend, and the reverse of the bad thing is not always the good thing.
No, Hestia does not have to be a generic big titty asian girl.
Tanista
1hr ago
There's also just a lot of hypocrisy. I can't know for sure but I suspect things would be better if the same people wagging their finger didn't support their favored groups being assholes all the time in the exact ways they attack. The system might have at least been stable without that.
It's less a church lady enforcing the rules with an iron fist on everyone and more that teacher who clearly has a favorite and is doing such a bad job hiding it that they've emboldened their worst instincts.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
It's in this comment.
That said, I question @samiam's ingenuousness. His example of one side's political narrative is a 2012 LiveJournal post from GRRM, hmm?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
I have seen a few ads out there recently that are clearly right-coded and anti-porn, usually treating it as a personal failing (addiction). I don't think there are that many "porn is a great thing, actually" advocates out there, and most that exist are probably left-of-center by a decent margin.
I could see the median male voter being both a consumer of the, uh, content, but also thinking it should be less accessible. Not high confidence in that, though.
Tanista
1hr ago
It becomes hard when people begin to worry that your kindness is really about giving yourself license to attack the people you claim are stopping you from being kind.
I think part of the problem is that the pro-illegal lean of the party leads to them treating all citizens the way they treated Republicans who complained about being kind and nobody much liked it. The stories of Chicago and NY spending on migrants and the general "deal with it" attitude seemed to trigger black Democrats just as welfare queen stories triggered others.
It doesn't seem baffling to me. The message from Klein, Thomas and Dunkleman is that an entire branch of left-wing progressivism ( the side whose instinct to devolve responsibility and attack concentrations of power like corporations as opposed to the equally progressive tendency to make them partners in regulation and social engineering) didn't just fail, it won and then failed and is costing Democrats.
Their general argument is that systems in place that, for example, allow left-wing advocacy groups to sue and stop nearly all infrastructure or home building, are bad. Obviously some people like those systems and consider them a triumph of leftism (cynically: since they know how to use them better than the people who don't have houses or aren't educated enough to use environmental protection law to their advantage)
It's a clear broadside against an entire set of Democratic anti-monopoly, anti-government, pro-lawsuit activists.
Finally, all wordcels have is how many people value what they say. Klein is the Drake of the Democratic party: a whole bunch of people believe "They" made him successful because he's a capitalist bootlicker because it's easier than admitting that people simply prefer him. There seems to be a clear element of professional envy here. If the Zephyr Teachout's of the world were actually indigent, they'd have an incentive to listen to a criticism of their policies. But they aren't so it's all status games. It's just rappers jumping on a more successful rapper in the hopes of getting their name out/taking their place.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1hr ago
It was not. I encourage you to watch the video. At the point Fields car goes down the street past the camera man he could simply have stopped, put it in reverse, and backed away from the crowd. You can tell this is possible because it's exactly what he does seconds later, after he has driven into the crowd.
It's hard to remember because for some reason there really was a major loss of memory once Trump was elected. I'm not blaming anyone, and I'm not being sarcastic; it was true. I remember the day before, almost everyone in the Motte lamenting that Harris was going to win, and the day after everyone taking about how Harris sucked and Trump's win was inevitable, and conservatives were in such a strong position in the culture war. I'm not sure how it happened like this, and I don't think it was exclusive to the Motte, either, but I'm not certain about that. But it's a really strange phenomenon.
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