domain:papyrusrampant.substack.com
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
5m ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Democracy simply does not work.
Rightward leaning folks essentially re-inventing the Chinese government is potentially one of my favorite things about the mid 2020s.
I just listened to an interview with Oren Cass and you change about 10 words and this dude would have made Daddy Xi proud.
Can't wait for "the shining city on the hill with Chinese characteristics"
fribble
5m ago
I asked it last week. My husband has a highly tuned llm (granted, he buys access) and we have an ongoing friendly argument about how useful (him) or useless (me) they are. So whenever it comes up I ask chatgpt some dead simple question to see if it gets in the right ballpark. In this case (and often) it didn't - it gave me bodyweight stuff like deadbug. Don't get me wrong, deadbug is useful! But the whole point of LIFTMOR is that us oldsters need to be lifting heavy (safely) to increase bone strength. Stretching and bodyweight is helpful but not enough.
Tree
8m ago
You can do sensationalism and flatten NYT reader’s PC sensibilities at the same time.
'Woman raped! How horrible! And all those people did nothing while she screamed for help! We really live in a society! Imagine being there while he ripped her clothes off! We have failed collectively! Here's a movie of the event so you can vicariously live it, just as it was! But of course we need to interrogate what we as a people have done that it came to this horrible, yet fascinating experience, that requires solutions only the left can provide !'
While your racist uncle’s yellow journalism would go for the trope of the beastly black man towering over the virginal white woman etc.
I think I showed that the specific paper at the time is unlikely to have been trying to cover up a black man committing murder
It seems to me you tried to use that article as evidence of racist reporting from a racist time, but it backfired.
You said:
An investigative article by The New York Times claimed a connection between the Fruit Stand Riot and militant bands of anti-white youth gangs "trained to maim and kill" and "roam the streets of Harlem attacking white people"
as if this was an obviously ridiculous theory, that could only be a racist figment of NYT journos imagination. But something similar to this actually happened.
To go on another tangent, you lifted this whole sentence from this wiki article. This sentence is sourced by wiki by the NYT article I provided – in the article however, those quotes ("trained to maim and kill" and "roam the streets of Harlem attacking white people" ) do not appear. They were possibly paraphrased from “trained in karate and judo fighting techniques” and “connection with two other murders of whites in the Harlem area” by a wiki editor to make the NYT article’s reporting about anti-white groups seem more ridiculous and racist.
aqouta
14m ago
We live in a 600sqft 1+1 apartment. It's pretty affordable at this point (thanks rent control)
It's kind of funny how you thank rent control and then describe all the predictable downstream consequences of rent control like high market rate rents and difficulty in relocating. There are grandparents with an empty nest facing the exact reverse scenario an rent control prevents this from being remedied.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
16m ago
Dan Carlin constantly quotes some historian talking about ancient texts, and it goes something like "We cannot believe ancient history, but we have no choice but to believe ancient history."
I know I'm dating myself here, but one of my history professors kicked off the semester by brandishing a Weekly World News and proclaiming it to be equivalent to about 95% of recorded history. Needless to say, I was greatly entertained that semester!
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
16m ago
So far we've been beating CoL inflation, so the trend lines look good (even modelling the inevitable slowdown in wage growth with age). It just takes time, which biology doesn't seem to have gotten the memo about.
I haven't done the math, but I also wonder how well this actually plays on net. The best and highest paying jobs are in Toronto. If I move to Calgary and my wages and CoL both decrease (or stagnate), am I ahead? Especially because I can always sell a Toronto home and move to Calgary later, but the reverse doesn't work (assuming Toronto house price growth continues to outpace Calgary).
Also, thanks to my parents I am an east-coast latte-sipping downtown elitist lib-pilled yuppie (see my flair). So moving to Calgary (and Alberta generally, although I liked Austin so if Calgary was cool I'd deal with the awful governance) is not a very appealing option. Soy-jacking aside, I love the vibe of big cities, and the absurd fun and convenience they provide.
Finally, all my friends and family are in Southern Ontario. Most of my friends live a 15 minute walk/5 minute bike from my apartment. If we moved 3000km to have a kid, we'd be completely isolated from everyone we know (which isn't a permanent issue, as you make new friends, but damn...).
Grant_us_eyes
22m ago
Part of the controversy is that Immigration can benefit several groups - such as Big Business(who now has access to cheaper labor), immigrants, who are now getting paid far in excess of what they would have received in thier home country - but it hurts American workers, who are, to quote the person whom wrote the article;
What does it all add up to? The fiscal burden offsets the gain from the $50 billion immigration surplus, so it's not too farfetched to conclude that immigration has barely affected the total wealth of natives at all. Instead, it has changed how the pie is split, with the losers—the workers who compete with immigrants, many of those being low-skilled Americans—sending a roughly $500 billion check annually to the winners. Those winners are primarily their employers. And the immigrants themselves come out ahead, too. Put bluntly, immigration turns out to be just another income redistribution program.
This is not a new article. This was written back in 2016, in response to a debate between Trump and Hillary. This has been going on for a very long time, and that we're still debating that immigration comes as an overall positive(for Shareholder-Americans, maybe) astounds me and shows how the narrative is controlled overall.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
23m ago
For me, the pleasure of the sex seems dependent on if I can bench press her or not.
Why? What about bench press-less sex doesn't do it?
Shrike
24m ago
Russia has said they would use nuclear weapons if their sovereignty was threatened. While this was a veiled threat along the lines of "Ukraine and the occupied portions of it are part of Russia, so don't you dare take them back", I don't doubt it would ring very true if Russia proper was legitimately under threat of losing territory.
Yes, I agree with you there.
We rolled over then-one-of-the-largest armies in the world in a month and then immediately pulled out.
The United States and its allies did enter Iraq, but it never got within 100 miles of Baghdad. If Iraq had had a credible WMD program, it would not have been sufficient to neutralize it.
On this note, a large army would likely not be the primary thing we'd need to fight China if they up and decided a US invasion of Iran was the perfect time to strike. In the short term, it would be primarily a naval and air defense, with the biggest land target I can think of being Taiwan (who has their own army - and ideally we'd want to keep the Chinese marines from ever making a landing, making them secondary).
Yes, correct. But the US doctrine is to fight with air support, meaning that US munitions stockpiles would be degraded in an invasion of Iran (as would US missile interceptors given Iran's large stockpile of ballistic missiles). Obviously a sufficiently thorough destruction of the Iranian military by Israel makes that moot, but that hasn't happened yet.
I genuinely hope this puts a bow on the whole situation, and the US never needs to lift a finger to change this.
SAME.
I just explicitly and powerfully do not want a nuclear Iran - or any new nuclear country that has even a chance in hell of using them.
Sovereign states have the right to develop nuclear weapons, if they so choose, and invading them for doing so would be a violation of international law. Many of the next countries to develop nuclear weapons will likely be US allies (Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Japan, perhaps Taiwan and Poland; contrast with of course Iran and perhaps Belarus). That's part of why stopping a Chinese invasion is so crucial to US defensive strategy, as a successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan dramatically increases the odds of nuclear proliferation.
On the one hand, I understand the desire to limit nuclear proliferation. On the other hand, I think that the nuclear asymmetry arguably makes the world more unstable and more prone to violence.
Because nuclear weapons are, though not a magical item, a potent deterrent, the best method to prevent other countries from getting them might be to explicitly carve up the world into nuclear power blocs (US, Russia, China, India) and give the nuclear sovereigns explicit hegemony and dominion over the other nation-states. The nuclear sovereigns could agree to use their nuclear weapons against any country that attempted to develop or field any independent nuclear capability. They might even be able to develop a shared nuclear monitoring and weapons sharing framework that could gradually grow in time into the true planetary sovereign, the single nuclear monopower.
This would of course be a complete overturn of the post-WW2 global order, but under that current system unilaterally invading countries that decide to develop nuclear weapons is illegal. Doing so would freeze the number of nuclear powers at their current levels (and possibly reduce them), at the price of the destruction of the sovereignty of most nations on Earth – but you seem quite comfortable to ignore national sovereignty if weapons of mass destruction are in play.
Otherwise, if the United States wants to ensure a nuclear-proliferation-free Earth (I am not sure this is actually a good idea, but running with your goal here for a moment), it is presumably on the hook to (illegally) invade and de-nuclearize any country, which means that it is in the national interest of countries like China and Russia to proliferate nuclear weapons programs to hostile states, forcing the United States to bear the costs of intervention. (Of course the United States can play the same game, but doing so risks...proliferating the weapons!)
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
25m ago
This was really beautiful, and actually inadvertently addressed something I was writing in a different comment to you (started on my computer, left the apartment, will finish later).
Great stuff! Now to find something to have faith in...
HereAndGone
35m ago
reports are citing support for abortion as the through-line of his target list and a history of Conservative Christian involvement in his social media trail
Yeah, but so far the reports seem sketchy - not the actual list but one typed up and given to the police? I don't know how much credence to put in anything, though his sudden turn (if I believe the alleged LinkedIn page on social media claimed to be his) from a history of generally working in the food industry/retail industry to saying he was CEO of Red Lion and working in the Congo sounds very odd - maybe he had some kind of mental breakdown?
According to Boelter’s LinkedIn page, he is listed as the CEO of Red Lion Group, which is based in Congo, and he’s listed as a part of the leadership team at Praetorian Guard Security, which provides armed home security in the Twin Cities area.
It appears in the past, he’d worked in food production for several companies, including Del Monte and Nestle.
According to his bio on Praetorian Guard Security Boelter worked security situations in Eastern Europe, Africa, North America and the Middle East “including the West Bank, southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.”
So maybe he was shooting or planning to shoot pro-choice people, or maybe he had some other reason, or who knows what exactly was going on. I'm waiting to hear more. He seems to have had a mixed background, to say the least.
HereAndGone
42m ago
The elven rings were not corrupted by Sauron, but their own risk was the tendency of the Elves to want to hold back time so they could recreate the immortal conditions of Valinor in Middle-earth (to have their cake and eat it, as it were). They did comparatively little damage because they were mostly around under war conditions, so first hidden and not used openly until Sauron's first defeat, and then used defensively against him. But if they had been used from the start as Celebrimbor hoped, the Elves would have fallen into that trap of trying to be little gods in their own realm.
Gandalf didn't think much of Bilbo's ring, although he was somewhat suspicious of it, because it didn't seem to affect Bilbo badly and he never imagined that this was or could be the One Ring that everyone had been searching for since Isildur's death. There were a lot of lesser 'magic rings', apparently, because everyone including mortals tried their hand at creating magical items, but how much power any of them could have would have been limited.
DirtyWaterHotDog
43m ago
US facilitates illegals in their country
Couldn't agree more.
Moreover, politicians on both sides phrase their rhetoric around immigration without regard for whether it is legal or illegal. This creates a system that is annoyingly hostile to legal immigrants, while being uniquely welcoming of illegal immigrants.
Require some proof of being legally in the US for opening a bank account
This is where the issue comes in. Who enforces it ? There is bipartisan opposition to federal overextension. Each state operates as its own pseudo nation. Consensus is impossible. Don't even get me started on the absurd amount of power dispersed through city govts and unelected courts.
The US political system is built with paranoid protections against authoritarian powers at the center. It's gridlock taken to an extreme. Nothing gets done in the US, because everyone and their mother holds veto power. I'm not an US citizen. But, power is so dispersed, that politicians get away with pointing fingers and doing nothing. All sorts of local veto roles are elected. These roles are decided by low turnout and susceptible to political capture (Soros playbook). The US is unique in having elected state judges, sheriffs, superintendents and more for some confusing reason. If a mayor or governor has such limited control over local law, policing and education then what use is their election ?
California has been unable to build a highspeed rail envisioned 50 years ago despite throwing $100 billion at it. States can't agree on a legal age for sex. What makes you think this system is capable of executing on a nation-wide ID proof platform ?
comfortable
44m ago
Yes, because the entire series is great. Books nine and ten are some of the best material in the series in fact.
You really think Crossroads of Twilight is one of the best books in the series?
HereAndGone
46m ago
That's what Sauron set up on Númenor with the worship of Melkor. And what a lot of people try to do in the world with "but surely this time I can claim the ring and it'll go okay" (be that the rings Sauron gave the Ringwraiths, who probably never anticipated that outcome, or the One Ring itself) even after seeing the disasters that happened before.
Grant_us_eyes
47m ago
It doesn't need to be better to have a devastating effect, it just needs to be 'good enough'.
HereAndGone
48m ago
Yeah, in the world as described, if he does obtain immortality, then there must still be something higher (whatever forces empower the Gu insects, the gods or spirits or just magical energies of heaven and earth) and how can he ascend to that level? The traditional tropes are about the calamities that come to test (destroy) you if you try to cultivate to immortality, and that only if you survive them all will you obtain the goal. So if our guy becomes the single most powerful being on the earth, what next? try to become the most powerful being in the universe? keep dodging the mounting and increasing set of calamities trying to reduce him to dust?
I do think if he achieved a station akin to that of Sauron, he'd be bored: yeah he's got all these mindless slaves under his thumb, but he's spent so long plotting and scheming that what does he do now? He doesn't strike me as the type to decide he'll take up tea ceremony and calligraphy and pondering the secrets of the universe (unless said secrets give him more power). The sweetness of victory is in overcoming this set of impossible conditions; once there are no more obstacles to overcome, what happens next?
FarmReadyElephants
50m ago
I suppose his point is that we rely on faith for a variety of normal human interactions. The true subjective inner state of his wife is not amenable to the scientific method, though he had grown to trust it over time. It can be a pragmatic reality, even a core belief around which he built his life, without being capable of inductive inquiry or deductive proof.
Shrike
55m ago
As I've discussed before, the Ukrainian hold on the actual nukes seems to have been pretty tenuous at best (and the idea that the United States promised them protection in any meaningful sense is false) – but yes, I agree that the Big Lesson of Current Era is "have nukes."
And North Korea isn’t being invaded because of those nukes.
I sort of doubt this, honestly, there's little appetite for even the conventional damage North Korea could do.
HereAndGone
56m ago
Oh man, you missed the best things from 2006!
"Scientists explained" the miracle, you see, that it wasn't a miracle at all. No, just freak weather conditions that happened to line up absolutely correctly for the events in the Gospels to happen like they did (the ice did not prematurely melt so Jesus fell into the water and it didn't last long enough for Peter to continue walking to shore).
Jesus may have appeared to be walking on water when he was actually floating on a thin layer of ice, formed by a rare combination of weather and water conditions on the Sea of Galilee, according to a team of US and Israeli scientists.
Their study, published by the Journal of Paleolimnology (the study of prehistoric lakes), argues that salty springs along the Galilee's western shore can stop surface water circulating at cold temperatures and there were unusually cold spells lasting up to 200 years in biblical times.
Such "unique freezing processes" would occasionally have allowed a crust of ice to form, a phenomenon the study calls "springs ice", in patches on Lake Kinneret, as the Sea of Galilee is known in Israel. One set of such springs is found near Tabgha, an ancient settlement that is traditionally the site for the New Testament's multiplication of loaves and fishes.
"The chance that there was ice on the lake is very, very high," said Doron Nof, professor of physical oceanography at Florida State University and the study's lead author. "It's almost guaranteed during those cold periods, 100 or 200 years long, that there was one such event at least, maybe four."
I do so enjoy a good "scientists explain miracles" story, they're so comforting in their naive optimism about 'we totally understand everything becasue we're so much smarter than the stupid people back then who believed their lying eyes'.
The "Mary the virgin who was raped" story came out of something way back when in the days of the Anglican wars, when discussing the liberals versus the conservatives in theology. I can't point to a particular source because it was swirling around, but the progressive Christian set do love them some "Mary was raped" tales (ironically, adopting the sceptical views of the Talmud that Jesus was really a bastard borne out of wedlock to a Roman soldier by Mary) because uh something something patriarchy colonialism feminism something something.
The re-interpretation of the scriptures that really raised my eyebrows, though, came during the reign of the first female Primate of the Episcopalian Church, the Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, who gave a sermon that, em, changed the focus of the story of St. Paul and the slave girl possessed by a spirit.
Now, the fuddy-duddy dumb old traditional interpretation of this story is that the girl was a slave whose owners made money from her being possessed, since she was able to tell fortunes, and that St. Paul set her free from being, you know, possessed by a demon and exploited as a money-making machine. Not so! says Katie, nope being possessed by a demon and exploited by your owners as a money-making machine was a beautiful instance of spiritual empowerment and Paulie was just jealous.
No, I promise, this is what she said. The original text of the sermon seems to have been scrubbed, so the only quotes are from traditionalists not too happy with this novel exegesis, but a sample of the sermon is this:
Paul is annoyed at the slave girl who keeps pursuing him, telling the world that he and his companions are slaves of God. She is quite right. She’s telling the same truth Paul and others claim for themselves. But Paul is annoyed, perhaps for being put in his place, and he responds by depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness. Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it. It gets him thrown in prison. That’s pretty much where he’s put himself by his own refusal to recognize that she, too, shares in God’s nature, just as much as he does -maybe more so!
Yes, kids, remember: if a demonic spirit wants to set up shop in your head, go right and ahead and let it do so, because that's a beautiful holy gift of spiritual awareness! Honestly, every time I look at the fruitcakes and nutjobs in my own church, something like this comes along to make me go "well at least the current pope isn't this out to lunch, thank you Holy Spirit!"
quiet_NaN
57m ago
IC’s main selling point is that it’s compatible with a scientific mindset.
In that it makes no falsifiable predictions?
Thanks to the degree that Jesus was charismatic and the degree to which his followers admired him, they created and/or realized an imaginal being called Christ
If I say that this sounds like "The Lord" and Christ are just memes (in Dawkin's sense -- culturally transmitted idea complexes which inhabit humans as hosts and spread through them, mutate and compete against each other), then I am probably misrepresenting IC. After all, a world view which would say that Christ is fundamentally only a more culturally entrenched entity of the same type as Julius Caesar, Sherlock Holmes, or Donald Duck would probably not call itself a form of Christianity.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
59m ago
What damage did Israel exactly inflict on Iranian nuclear capabilities so far? All I have seen is a couple dead scientists and some bombed non-critical infrastructure near the nuclear facilities. I have a hard time believing Israel’s opening attack wasn’t the best they can do with tons of smuggled bombs/drones and local collaborators as well as unprepared Iranians.
sun_the_second
1hr ago
Who said that the unity, order, design of (ii) are going to be favorable to you?
The problem is that this would actually fix the problem, which no one in power actually wants to do
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