
There was a second view of improving humanity, and making humanity ready for Utopia, in the last century.
The first one was eugenics, by race or health or whatever characteristic that particular government chose. And those were usually a mix. Sure, Germans picked for “pure Aryans” but that was because they believed pure Aryans were more intelligent, healthier, more altruistic etc. etc. etc. In the same way, the soviets would kill people who didn’t work right with others, weren’t all for the revolution, committed the crime of wanting to feed their families or being left alone to work or criticizing the assholes in power, because at the end of that eugenics road was the Homo Sovieticus, who would not need government to live in Utopia.
But there was another way around and through this, a less obviously evil way to create a human fit for utopia, and that was Social Engineering.
It was used in all the “socialist” countries — and let’s remember my 11th grade book, which called socialism a system on the way to full communism — to create a society in which it was unacceptable not to be a socialist.
“Social engineering” shaped opinions, shaped lives, shaped what you were allowed to say, and think and believe. And yes, it was used in the US too.
Now, granted, in the more obviously communist places, like the USSR or the DDR, they would put you in mental hospitals, if you didn’t believe the word from above, or you insisted in believing that humans should have some freedom of movement, belief and trading. The justification for it — watch our current sh*theads try to pull this one — is that if you weren’t fully onboard with communism, you were obviously crazy.
The full end of this was reeducation camps, brain washing (which never seemed to work that well, though initially they expected it to) and all the rest of it.
Here, and in Europe (in Europe is still like that) the methods were “softer”. It was the fact that all the channels of communication and the official “public truth” was so pervasive and cohesive. This was particularly deceptive in the west, because the media wasn’t controlled by the government. It was, however, controlled by the left, in its march through the institutions.
Journalists, professors, even artists, were hired and given prominence according to their political beliefs. I.e. the lefter the better. And once in place, these people hired for politics, took their orders from the hierarchy and propagated the “political truth.” This was hilariously obvious to someone from outside, and might still be obvious to you, even though it’s not working anymore.
Take the push during Trump’s presidency, to make not opening the borders the worst thing evah! All of a sudden, there were shows about poor children whose parents were deported, etc. etc. etc. It was everywhere, including in seemingly independent fiction (books, movies, tv series.) Currently, the word has obviously come down that every couple has to be bi-racial, that no main character anywhere can be obviously and clearly white (they have to at least be very tan.) I know this, because my husband watches a never end of romantic comedies and sit coms. Or at least, he has them on in the background while doing other stuff in the evening, in the family room, so I get to see them too.
This had hit in England before, and it’s the main reason I stopped watching British mysteries (though some great wokeness in motives and resolutions didn’t help.) Now, before any idiot decides that’s because I object to interracial marriages — snort, giggle — no. It’s just that it’s pervasive, obvious and completely divorced from reality. In the UK and HERE. (I asked in the UK. And people from there in the comments laughed at the idea.)
I’m sorry, but most people still marry people of the same race, and no, white people aren’t so grossly outnumbered in the US that none of them can date or marry someone white.
I mean, about 20% interracial couples feels about right. I’d even take about 50%. I mean, it’s exaggerated, just like having a gay person in every cast in the early two thousands was exaggerated in relation to population, but it wasn’t exactly implausible for each group. Could happen is the necessary for suspension of disbelief, not “must happen.”
Unfortunately 100% is thoroughly unbelievable and insane, and I can’t suspend disbelief. Also, you might not know this, but I hate being propagandized/preached to.
I had that problem even when it was the only way to consume TV and literature, because all of it was controlled. It contributed to my not watching much TV.
This cohesiveness of thought and message reached full flower of “cohesiveness” and forcefulness in the twentieth century, because the industry and technology enabled it.
The industrial revolution had reached a peak. It was cheaper to do things in bulk and from a centralized location. This didn’t apply simply to shoes and clothes and furniture, but books and newspapers, and tv programming.
So we got the industrial-news-information-entertainment complex, and from the center of that complex, it was easy to push the “correct” opinions and the “correct ideas.” Because these were known by all the “well educated” and the “well informed’ everyone who disapproved or disagreed was stigmatized as either stupid, or uneducated or crazy.
Now, in the West, “crazy” was mostly characterized as a harmless cook kook (d*mn you otto-corrupt), someone whose opinions shouldn’t be listened to who should not be considered.
And “they” are the same utopians who tried to create the “perfect” society through eugenics. And the “perfect” society is the same centralized, top down, communitarian, herd bullshit the eugenicists tried to create.
And it’s as dead as the harsher forms of creating the perfect humans.
It was killed by easier means of communication, by decentralized production, by blogs, social media, being able to talk to people across the country with the push of a button at no cost, etc. etc. etc.
Is it completely dead? No. The very old and very busy people still depend largely on the old media. You can tell, because they think Brandon is competent, the greatest crisis is white nationalism, and the economy is doing fine. Oh, and January 6th was an attempted insurrection and upteen policemen were killed by the insurgents. They also have no idea there’s a surge at the border, etc. etc.
Here’s the thing: Most of the people who took over our government under a color revolution in 2020, and the bureaucracy they’re plugged into are still using the mass media for information and entertainment.
Why shouldn’t they? They never disagreed with anything it proclaimed, and never had a need to find alternate information because “something isn’t right.” They were selected for adherence to the message and willingness to have their thoughts and words reshaped by Marxist International Inc.
But the rest of the people aren’t obeying. They’re not falling in line with the message, not responding to the pull on the heart strings, not believing whatever Marxist International Inc is proclaiming this week.
This has caused great panic in the corridors of power, because they can’t understand why not. They can’t understand how we can take the push and ignore it. At first they tried doubling and tripling down, because the problem must be they weren’t OBVIOUS enough.
This of course just made people nope them harder. Then they went crazy.
Their minds were confused because the Covidiocy worked, so they thought obviously it still worked. They didn’t and still don’t realize that it only worked because it was such a bizarre and horrible thing to do, so inhumane, so divorced from the most basic decency and costing the lives of thousands of people, probably millions worldwide — the collapse of the economy; the ventilators being used and set by doctors who had never had occasion to use them and had no idea, with recommendations much higher; abroad and in NYC using it to kill vast numbers of very old patients; the isolation that caused suicides; the vaccine injuries, and on and on and on — that people couldn’t believe anyone could do that on purpose.
The big lie for a while coasted on the fact that no one believed they could do something that outrageous.
They still don’t understand why it didn’t work to keep us locked up and reshape our lives forever. (Remember “the new normal”?)
And they don’t know why any of their — stomp, stomp, stomp — attempts at panicking us since haven’t worked.
This means they’re going to go more insane. I don’t know how, because insanity can’t be guessed. I don’t know what they’re going to try to do to us the rest of the year.
I know it will be bad. I know it will be strange. And I know we need to refuse to go insane along with them.
I also know that as we refuse to be reshaped and have our thoughts and ideas controlled, they’re clamoring for censorship.
You must be aware of this. There’s something very weird going on with Zuckerberg. Note that after he apologized for corrupting the mind of the young with Facebook — snort giggle. Seriously. What children are on facebook? — his stock shot up. It was so obviously a payoff, since Meta is dead in the water and Facebook is getting abandoned in droves that you know, you know, it’s because he’s serving the purposes of the government.
What purposes? Well, they figure they can censor social media “for the children” and we’ll go along with it. So you must be aware that, yes, while social media can be a problem, the way to control it is for parents to control it. This “for the children” is their attempt to get the law on their side to censor social media — the thing WEF called for.
Because they can’t control the adults, but they can use the children to blind us.
The mark of how important this is, is that they’re doing their best to destroy Musk. Because he took Twitter away from them. And even though it’s still controlled and has legacy bs in its code, it’s too free for them and word of things they don’t want known gets out. See, European farmer protests, for instance.
We cannot let them stampede us into censorship, because that will prolong their hold on people’s minds. Oh, not forever. Even in China they don’t have the full control they had before the internet. But decades. And we can’t let them have decades to finish destroying the world.
Because socialism and its attempt to reshape man into the perfect creature for communism kills. Fast or slow, hard or soft, it always kills.
First the mind, then the body will follow.
Giver your minds over to them, and they’ll make you live in 15 minute concentration camps, waiting for the government’s ration of bugs, and watching controlled entertainment.
Until the lights go off and the great population reduction is achieved.
Because the only communist utopia that works is the peace of the mass grave.
“Now, in the West, “crazy” was mostly characterized as a harmless cook, ”
I’m guessing you meant ‘kook’?
😅
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The only harmless cook is a skinny cook.
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We should all aspire to be “dangerous” cooks, using lots of meat, butter, eggs, bacon grease, and so on….
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I, being a fativore, obviously endorse this message.
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Mmmmm, bacon!
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A well marbled piece of beef …. sighs happily in cat
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Maybe people believing I’ve “lost my marbles” is a good thing.
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The Reader has to ask – were they cateyes or crystals?
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Her name was Krystal. She wasn’t much to look at, but she was a fine wrench-wielding wench who could diagnose and fix a car faster than any other man in the shop.
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Obviously Krystal had all her marbles, but the Reader suspects a loose screw somewhere.
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Krystal easily found the loose screw stuck in the right front tire, and quickly fixed the flat.
Her most embarrassing moment was when she was filling a split rim tire that wouldn’t fit in the tire cage (it was for some construction equipment), and the rim explosively disassembled, punching a very precise 2-foot wide circle in the roof of the shop.
But then that made a good story for her to tell the newbies about following proper safety precautions.
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Yup, just bought some huge ribeyes from Costtco, i swear they are almost 2-1/2 inches thick and so nicely marbled i could taste them sizzling on the grill as i was looking at them in the store.
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I prefer their flank steaks myself, but I wouldn’t refuse a ribeye.
Outside of some specialty butchers, Costco has the best meat IMHO.
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We get Costco Sirloin these days. The cut we really like is running $24.99/# for the cheaper cut ($29.99 for the more expensive). Going down on sale these days, maybe, to $22.99/#. (I can never remember the name of the cut of meat. Know it when I see it.)
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Out here in the boondocks on Maui Costco is about the best place to get decent cuts, they have excellent pork and chicken too, will miss it when everything goes to hell but will just be bangin on the deer more, nothing like slow roasted venison in a port/balsamic sauce with wild veggies
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We get Costco pork ribs when they are on sale. They are on sale quite often ($3.99/# last round). I get hamburger ($4.99/# currently), break it up into smaller packages to freeze. I make hamburger patties to freeze individually too. Used to get some other meats, but the commercial (not Costco cut) usually have a lot of salt and soy. The other Costco indulgence is individual serve smashed avocado servings, which is frozen. No one else at home likes it. I get out 2 servings to have thawed for hamburger (use one) or tacos (use 2).
Hamburger can be less per pound at Fred Meyers, but only on “needs to sell” discount. Milk & eggs, Costco is less expensive, but not if it is the only things I am picking up. Need to watch FM like a hawk on their milk digital coupon sale which can be a lot less than Costco ($1.50 / 2 gallons). My shopping route is: Petsmart, Costco (across the street), Fred Meyers. More and more I am going to Costco because I am taking mom.
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I was told the opposite. Never trust a skinny cook.
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Just because they are harmless, doesn’t mean you can trust them.
It just means you can probably take them in an arm wrestling contest over the last piece of well marbled prime rib.
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One obvious element of their failure is their need to find an “Evil Overlord” that has somehow “taken control of the people”.
Rush Limbaugh, various leaders of the so-called “Religious Right” (now called Christian nationalists) and of course Trump have chosen to be these “Evil Overlords”.
The Left’s Mindset is “Of course, the People would support the Left if they were thinking” and “since they aren’t supporting the Left, the People’s minds are controlled by the Evil Overlords”.
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Of course. Because that’s the way they think. But THEIR overlords are not evil. THEIR overlords are necessary.
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I would posit that much of the left want or need someone to guide them and therefore thinks everyone else needs/wants someone to guide them. So they have their “overlords”, so to speak. Someone to take marching orders from. Someone to tell them what they should say and think. And if they have them, then of course, we must have them, too. What they can’t imagine is that the rest of us don’t see ourselves as a group. We see ourselves as individuals with our own ideas of what makes us happy. And in some crazy way (who even understands how the universe works?) each of us complements the other making a whole. I like to have working plumbing. Down the street the plumber likes my art. We trade. We’re both happy. We don’t need Donald Trump to provide that happiness. What we need him for is to create an atmosphere that allows us to make each other happy.
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Yes. they assume so. i remember a French A** here telling me that if the government doesn’t control the news, how do they know what to think? Sigh.
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Back in the mid 60’s it was William F. Buckley who got on TV and demolished any lefty who dared debate him. The left tried to smear him but never really succeeded.
He probably would have had more impact if he had limited his speaking vocabulary to 9th grade level words rather than choosing more precise words that a majority of viewers would need to (but not) look up.
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‘False consciousness’ is the doctrinaire Marxist term for this. You’ll see it sometimes as ‘voting against their interests’ – with the implication that seeing with the omniscience of the state (ha!), that they know better than you do. Mock and ignore, or come up with creative ways to be contrary out of sheer spite.
Sadly, false consciousness is best demonstrated in those hopeless cases in the gulags, thinking “If only comrade Stalin knew!”
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I’m thinking that one Lefty/Liberal wrote a book titled “What’s Wrong with Kansas” about “voting against their interests”.
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From the Amazon blurb – “In asking “what ’s the matter with Kansas?”—how a place famous for its radicalism became one of the most conservative states in the union—Frank, a native Kansan and onetime Republican, seeks to answer some broader American riddles: Why do so many of us vote against our economic interests? Where’s the outrage at corporate manipulators? And whatever happened to middle-American progressivism?”
The Reader thinks these questions would have been better put to the Democrats.
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Yes, the arguments about people voting against their interests always baffled me. Did they maybe have different priorities than you? Maybe? I mean, isn’t the individual the best person to decide what his priorities are?
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With Kansas specifically, my understanding is that the state was being kept afloat by ag subsidies, and the standard “D” line was “If you vote R, they’ll take your subsidies away.”
Which of course didn’t happen, since most of the subsidies are federal programs, but it kept the primarily rural population in line.
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When they say “they voter against their interests”, they mean “They ignore and/or disobey their betters”.
See also “uppity”.
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Case in point before our town in this coming local election.
They’re pushing for community aggregate electrical power and the warrant is written that if you don’t want it, you have to opt-out. My opposition to it is they are interfering with a contractual relationship I already have with a power supplier; and forcing me to do extra work. I don’t care if they can provide cheaper electricity, my bill is one of the lowest in town because I conserve better, not because of the supplier’s rates. And there’s no guarantee that they’ll always have the lowest rates. But their arbitrary and tyrannical usurpation of my choice, and the addition of 3 more levels of bureaucracy are my objections. But I may have to organize a class action suit against the town (and I’ve never done that before.)
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Cue noticing the continued determination to vote blue policies, no matter the evident consequences.
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Because the obvious solution to failing policies is to double down on the same thing.
———————————
Government can’t turn failure into success, but it sure can turn success into failure.
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“If you were a better person, our policies would work!”
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Democrats will tell you any failures are because the conservatives are screwing up the math on their plans by resisting the implementation. Buncha loons
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“What’s The Matter With California” is a good answer to that book.
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IIRC, Frank wrote a regular column on the WSJ Opinion page for a while. I remember hearing third-hand of one reader who thought his column was a satirical parody column.
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I once saw an exchange, after a certain election, that went
Leftist 1: Why are women voting against their interests by voting for that guy?
Woman: Actually, after all due consideration, I concluded he was more in my interest than his opponent.
Leftist 2: You’re selfish.
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The claim of “voting against their interests” is usually made by people who:
a.) don’t know what those other people’s interests are,
b.) don’t understand that those other people may have multiple, conflicting interests and are choosing the best, or least worth, based on their evaluated needs, or
c.) have an ulterior and malignant motive for denigrating other people’s choices when they don’t agree with them.
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Embrace the power of AND.
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Embrace the logic of OR.
;-)
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:laughs:
:cheers:
True, the “non-exclusive or” is far, far superior; it avoids easy falsification and allows charitable thoughts.
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Finding an Evil Overlord is easy. Recognizing the bastage in the mirror, not so much.
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That might be what I hate most about the left. The notion that if you don’t agree with them, you are “suffering from false consciousness”, “suffering from internalized misogyny”, “not acting in your own best interest”. The idea that someone could in good faith disagree with them is unthinkable.
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Yep, I learned that one early, during my parents’ spectacularly complicated divorce, when any disagreement with my father got me an automatic “your mother told you to think that”.
I learned “virtue signaling” early as well, when my Gothardite best friend picked up an album, called “The Innocent Age”, sniffed, and dropped it with “There’s no such thing”. I was amazed, how clear it was that she was saying it for parents and preachers who weren’t there.
It just took a couple decades for people to come up with the words.
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We’re not acting in their best interests, and they can’t stand it.
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The ultimate denial of other’s humanity.
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Rush gave the system a major shove. I remember when the news shows would do pieces on this or that liberal issue. They would interview several calm, measured “experts,” who all agreed that the issue was good, and one guy to give the other side. This guy would always be a crank of some sort. So without ever actually saying, “We favor this issue,” it was clear that non-cranks all favored it.
Rush would take the issue and ask the obvious question the usual journalists studiously ignored. Which meant a bunch of his listeners would sit up and listen, because he just asked the same question they’d been asking, and didn’t come across as a crank. No wonder he was popular.
Lord, I miss him.
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The primary reason for the crank was the Fairness Doctrine, which required media organizations to provide “balanced” discussions on issues. The crank was their token nod toward that balance.
But as was noted here a few months ago, even at the height of the Keft’s control, people still slipped the blinders. Alex Keating was supposed to show what was wrong with conservatism. Instead, he inspired a lot of people.
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Ditto Archie Bunker.
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*Keaton
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LOL. Glad you corrected that.
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And he’d have a collection of clips from the Sunday talk shows that would reveal how coordinated the messaging was. It would be so many repeats of the same phrase.
Another amusing thing was his response to calls for “equal time” which was, since the mass media was marching in leftist lockstep, “I am equal time.”
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Yeah the first time I noticed the coordination was when suddenly every Ron Burgundy and news bimbo was talking about gravitas as if they had actually all used, or even heard, that word ever in their entire lives.
Every news reader on every station, radio, tv or even print. All gravitas all the time.
After that, the pattern was unmistakable.
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Took me longer to catch on, but once you recognize the pattern, it’s clear as day and you wonder how you ever missed it.
I used to wonder why so many conservatives flocked around that small handful of rabble-rousing commentators like Rush Limbaugh, while everybody else stayed with the calm, measured, unbiased mainstream. Er…yeah. Eventually I figured it out. Eventually. People who are still where I was 10 years ago are asking me why I waste my time getting “fake news” from sites like Breitbart.
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Let’s just hope that if and when they do wake up, they don’t run off a cliff in panic.
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Oh, by all means let them run off the cliff in a panic.
Just give us a few minutes to make popcorn and grab a cold brew first. :-P
———————————
Ma Lemming: “If all your friends jumped off a cliff into the sea would you…oh…um…nevermind.”
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“One bullshit to rule them all, and in Darkness bind them.”
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One Asshole to Rule them….
Lord of the Assholes.
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“The truth is always true. Calling it ‘Disinformation!’ does not make it untrue, it just makes you a liar.”
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They’ve got “malinformation” to cover that angle now. It’s almost brilliant in its obviousness: a special category for stuff that is demonstrably true and factual, and that everyone who spends the tiniest amount of thought at all knows is true, and even the term they’ve chosen to describe it acknowledges that reality — but you are nonetheless not allowed to know or think about it, because doing so would be bad (for them).
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One of my hobby horses. Socialism is the modern gnostic death cult, they seek perfection (ie.,) completion, the end. Not for them the Christian perfection, no, the end for them is oblivion but not individual oblivion like the Buddha. Nope, they want oblivion for everyone.
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“You want to drag everyone down to Hell? You first, you last, and you always.”
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I know a hand basket when I see one and I’m not getting in, sorry. Not sorry.
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c4c
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t42
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2-4D
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Queen to Queens’s level three.
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TK-421.
(Why aren’t you at your post?)
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How open they’ve been about going after Musk is kinda weird. After pretty much forcing him to buy Twitter, then deeply regretting do so, I wasn’t surprised they’d do something. But how brazenly open they’ve been with the lawfare is just unreal to me. The whole thing about him not hiring immigrants was so shocking that I couldn’t really believe someone would A) be so stupid as to completely ignore the law, and B) none of the higher ups said, “Wait a minute. Let’s think this through a little.”
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I think for a lot of the people on Twitter, they were expecting the following things-
1-That Musk wasn’t going to go through with it, and
2-He wasn’t going to change things because he was “one of them.”
And when he did and when he wasn’t, especially with the mass-firing of people in the San Francisco office (most of which, I bet, were in “social justice” positions of some kind), they realized that they had created a monster and they tried to get rid of him.
This was because Twitter was like bouncing a tiny rock off rubber walls. It was one of the BIG tools that a lot of the idiots used to “create engagement” of some kind, along with their massive Rolodexes of connections to journalist “lists,” people friendly on Wikipedia to edit articles, people that could game the SEO scores on Google, and a whole raft of tricks to make things seem bigger and more “important” than they were.
And the seismic shockwaves of Twitter not having an artificially pushed finger on the scale is being seen right now in how insane they’re getting.
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And suddenly there’s a whole lot of “colonizing Mars is bad, actually” takes coming out simultaneously, too.
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yeah
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Not sudden. The fringe has been saying it for at least the last few years. The same fringe that says our treatment of our own environment is affecting the whole solar system.
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I dread to ask.
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It has been noticed for 10+ years that the solar system is shifting. Storm patterns changing, several planets are showing changes in electromagnetic systems, etc. Since hoomuns are so almighty powerful, it must be climate change.
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Never mind that the second half show the opposite of that first half… kinda like how averages average out. Weird.
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Insty’s wisecrack about SUVs causing planetary warmening on Mars/Jupiter/Saturn never gets old.
OTOH, my favorite: “If the people who keep telling us it’s a crisis actually acted as if it were a crisis, we might believe them.” Maybe. IMHO, that ship sailed and sunk just at the sand bar.
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“The ocean levels are rising!”
“…which is why you bought that beach house?”
“The world is warming, we must cut CO2!”
“…which is why you fly those private jets to the conferences?”
“Everyone must stay home to avoid contagion!”
“…which is why you went out to fancy restaurants?”
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Those bohemian germs wouldn’t dare infect the hoi polloi at the High Table!
…which is why the help all had to wear masks. For their own protection.
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Er, the hoi polloi were the staff. Did you perhaps mean the hoity toity?
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Oops. Yeah, I mean the Aristos.
Maybe we should call them the Eloi? :-P
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“Ladies. Gentlemen. You have eaten well. You have eaten the world’s wealth. Its spirit. Your feast is nearly over. From this moment on, none of you are safe.”
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Too malignant to be Eloi, too stupid to be Morlocks.
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They’re the idiots complaining about our “polluting” the moon with human artifacts and dead probes.
Of course, these are the same idiots who never learned, or refused to learn, what the term “value” means.
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For some reason, your comment about the Moon made me wonder how long it would take to walk around it. Given the circumference of 6,786 mi, and assuming you could cover 15-20 miles a day (as long as I’m dreaming, I’ll dream Pee Wee’s spacesuit, TYVM, and reasonable accommodations at each stop), it would take over a year.
Assuming that average because you’d get the speed bonus of lower gravity, but you’d lose mileage due to the rough and uneroded terrain.
You may now return to your regular discussion.
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There are some folks who undertake the Terra del Fuego to the Bering Straits hike. That would be an equivalent to circumnavigation of the Moon. And little things like fatal accidents would be just spice for the goose.
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I’m surprised they stop there. “Eeevul Big Oil must be stopped before they incinerate the whole universe!”
Hell, it’s hardly any stupider than the rest of the bullshit they’ve been spreading.
———————————
When reality doesn’t conform to your theories, it’s not the universe that’s wrong.
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Plus the old, “We must solve our problems on Earth before we go to the other planets!”
I am sorry to note that Lewis was more or less in that camp.
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FEFers. Fix Earth First….
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I’m more in favor of colonizing space, having read T.A. Heppenheimer’s book “Colonies in Space” long, long ago. Mars seems to be all rust, dangerous peroxides, and super cold CO2. Oh, and basalt. If it had aluminum, titanium, and plenty of solar power, then maybe. And a magnetic field worth anything.
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Oh, yes. And actually using anything Up There, too.
All the way to multiple whole books over the past few months… ones I’ve stumbled over in bookstores.
“A City On Mars” (by “the Weinersmiths” — couldn’t make that up) isn’t too bad, it’s more of a “this is real hard and here’s why” book; though they do finally come out for a go-slow policy, and even a “managed commons” for space resources. A.k.a., “The Little Red Hen in Space” or as Lincoln almost-said, “You go bake some bread, and then I’ll eat it.”
“Astrotopia” on the other hand, is half rant and half criticism of our standard-issue “Western” values and achievements, and half “huh-what??” (One chapter is, IIRC, “The Rights of Rocks”; which makes slightly more sense than 1/2 + 1/2 + 1/2 = 1.)
N.B., I’m NOT suggesting you buy either. I sure didn’t, though one can stand and read without voting-with-your-dollars for any more of it…
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In Jerry Pournelle’s “Birth Of Fire”, the secondary Bad Guys were among a bunch of academics from Earth studying Mars.
They were somewhat willing to help the Mars Rebels against the Earth Corporations that ruled Mars until the Rebels decided to start terraforming Mars.
“You can’t pollute the Martian Environment!”.
Note, this book was published in 1980’s.
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Written in the 1980s, it may even (IIRC?) have been Jerry Pournelle’s first novel; and is still pretty much classic today. (Also pretty sure that the first SF book by Arthur C. Clarke was “The Sands of Mars” — also about a kind of terraforming there. And the first SF book I ever bought, way way back when.)
Some of the things he puts in his early stories/books, like the overt government suppression of Laurie Jo Hansen and her whole space consortium, are eerily current. (Look up “Varda Pharmaceuticals” for a sad story of, we needed to get a “reentry license” to bring back our cargo of space-made drugs, but the FAA wouldn’t give us one, so now our satellite and cargo is space junk. Of course, they never told us about any of it before we launched… or told anyone else, then, either.)
The Universe can be a new frontier and a far huger home for us all.
Or it can be a museum exhibit and a strict research preserve.
It just… can’t be both.
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“We’ve found our candidate planet. Granted, it’s a bit of a fixer-upper; the surface temperature is 260° below zero and the atmosphere, what there is of it, is sort of frozen solid. It’s also in need of a few trillion tons of water.”
“Still, it’s not a total loss. We focus sunlight on it, drop in a few dozen pulverized comets — we don’t want it covered with craters, after all — seed it with some hardy photosynthetic bacteria, in a few decades it’ll be marginally livable.”
“REEEEEE!!! You can’t destroy a Natural Environment like that!!”
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Suddenly I’m reminded of the “plot hook” at the start of one of the “Circuit” trilogy books by Melinda Snodgrass (yes, it’s about space law and space lawyers, but it’s still good).
FINAL ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENT,
MARS/EDEN PROJECT.
No environment, no impact.
[[statement complete]]
(For that matter, also see “Scaling the Rim” by one Dorothy Grant.)
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“But how brazenly open they’ve been with the lawfare is just unreal to me. ”
In God’s name, why? It’s been obvious for 20 years and more that there’s a government of men, not laws. Selective enforcement, convictions without evidence beyond “I said so”, the list of examples has been endless.
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It’s circle squarers in another form. They don’t like how the Universe works, so attempt to redefine things that cannot be redefine. Pi will refuse to equal 4.
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I’m remembering the good(?) old days, when the liberal trope was to accuse the state legislature of a flyover state of decreeing that Pi = 3 or 22/7 or some such.
OTOH, these are the same people who can’t count the number of sexes.
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Oh, I’m aware of their history. It’s how open they’ve been about it with him. Before, they always at least tried to cover it with at least some form plausible sounding excuse. But they’ve just blatantly said in their media events that they’re going to go after him because he’s “too powerful”, no trying to hide it with a reason.
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All of a sudden, there were shows about poor children whose parents were deported, etc. etc. etc. It was everywhere, including in seemingly independent fiction (books, movies, tv series.) Currently, the word has obviously come down that every couple has to be bi-racial, that no main character anywhere can be obviously and clearly white
It’s all purely and totally organic, Sarah. Just like what cows leave behind them.
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My guess is that some editors/agents/producers have a file for cause-du-jour and when the political winds shift they pull out something they’ve been sitting on.
Yes, that file reeks.
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The lockstep in the entertainment industry is just terrifying to behold.
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I hope we can bypass the ‘zon.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/05/exclusive-amazon-bowed-white-house-pressure-suppress-books-skeptical-covid-19-vaccine/
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Indeed. That alone is a valid reason for the impeachment and removal of Joseph Biden.
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Indeed – and I was around in time to see the Tea Party partisans – as decent, hardworking, patriotic and knowledgeable bunch of engaged middle-class people as ever were – get demonized as a bunch of crazy, ignorant racists.
It is kind of amusing, watching the entertainment media try and paint all American blacks as wise, tolerant, law-abiding, and educated middle-class (and to be honest, there are enough who are all that and good citizens besides) while on the ground in reality, many ordinary Americans are experiencing the inner city thug element as hostile, violent, irrational professional criminals. It’s kind of like watching a cat frantically trying to bury their bowel movements on a linoleum floor.
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770?
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Just like how “homeless” is Big News… during any and every Republican administration (or Senate or House majority…) and suddenly drops off the radar when a Democrat needs cover from the media because “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
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THIS
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Or it gets normalized. Just part of the scenery, folks.
Or, of course, becomes the rationale for massive public spending projects (see San Francisco and, “harm reduction”).
Still bemused by listening to a Seattle news report that a third bedroom community had banned camping on sidewalks after a father told the council his son couldn’t play in their back yard due to the feces from the homeless camped on the sidewalk.
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It’s very bad in the nearest Big City, too. I do know that someone filed an ADA lawsuit due to access issues (homeless campers under overpasses blocking the sidewalks completely.)
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There’s been some posting and videos about how Hollywood is hiring writers and it’s like a perverse form of cult activity.
(Seriously-one writer just got called in for an “interview” because the twenty-something “girl” in charge of the writer’s room wanted to make it clear that she was going to black-list him from ever writing again in Hollywood. Why? Because he hadn’t answered the questionnaire the way she wanted it answered, he knew about the subject matter that was being written about, etc, etc, etc…)
Every cult is ultimately self-destructive as the purity spiral gets tighter and tighter and our current cult behaviors have grown so large that when it starts to shed…it’s going to be painful.
Many of the big entertainment companies are starting to self-destruct.
Disney is doing stupid “edutainment” things for stock-holders to keep the current Board of Directors in power.
And just being forced to watch the Grammys last night was painful.
Keep calm, carry on, and keep your powder dry.
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Well, according to Damore (guy fired for being insufficiently woke) Google passed the Cultural Revolution level years ago. It’s a wonder they still function.
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I suspect that enough of the “working” areas of Google are firewalled off to ensure that they make some kind of money in the middle of that dumpster fire.
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What purposes? Well, they figure they can censor social media “for the children” and we’ll go along with it. So you must be aware that, yes, while social media can be a problem, the way to control it is for parents to control it. This “for the children” is their attempt to get the law on their side to censor social media — the thing WEF called for.
I’d guess that they’re trying for the same thing Nikki — Democrat with the highest number of votes in the Iowa Republican caucus!– was demanding, where you have to prove who you are to be on Social Media.
To make sure you’re not a kid, after all.
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So…they plan to ask for ID? What kind? SS card? Drivers license? Birth Certificate? They do realize that this would make social media a haven for privileged white guys? /sarc
After all, the disadvantaged can’t get ID.
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Facebook has had “we don’t think your name is real, send in a photograph of your driver’s license or other legal photo ID” for ages. Wollf Howls-At-Moon has them nag him for it, not aware that he’s got tribal membership and yes that’s his legal name…..
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They want to know who is saying stuff because they can’t argue against the content of speech, they have to go after the speaker.
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Just pointing out the hypocrisy. Rather like “My body, my choice,” which only applies if they say it applies.
There are lots of others.
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“You’re free to make any choice I want you to make.”
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“Unless it’s covid vaccine. Then it’s MY choice. Get shot up or else.”
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And after destroying IDent by giving it away to illegal aliens, it would prove nothing. Or should, considering.
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Sooo…you have to provide ID to post on Farcebook, but not to vote.
The Stooopid, it burns!
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“Make it as easy to vote as to post on FaceBook!” }:o)
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Here’s an anecdote I just had to share in this thread:
Person I know, knows a person who gives “cultural competency” talks monthly at a local community mental health center. One day a participant in audience shared this story:
Mother describes a story regarding her two elementary school aged sons. At the beginning of recent school year they decided to prank their teachers by dressing alike and claiming to be the other. The key part of this story is that their parents are of different melanotic races, and one is very white, and the other very not white. Not one teacher “noticed.”
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The question is now, did they fail to notice or did they DECIDE to “fail to notice”?
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Does it matter?
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As Barrett The Parrot (RIP) used to squawk (loudly)
(looking at you long and hard. Tilts head for another look) …. “NUT!”
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Blink.
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Prior to COVID a high school near me let students out at lunchtime and a number of them ate at a chain restaurant I frequented. There were plenty of racially mixed groups and some pairings that were almost certainly romantic.
And while there were/are black and white neighborhoods, they are small (a few blocks) and not exclusive.
So in situations where people will naturally socialize, race and mating become matters of personal attraction. And that attraction includes personality as well as appearance. Only when people feel they are being used for other people’s experiments and purposes do they take offence at being pushed together with “other”s.
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I don’t have anything against bi-racial pairings. AGAIN note I said that. I mean some idiots think I’m in one.
I’m just saying that 100% of them starts jarring and feeling unnatural.
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Especially when they’re all based off of what counts as interracial this week– the only constant is that black is always not white. Asian? Arabic? Mexican? Dark Med groups? Egyptian? Indian? They’re random if they “count” as white or not, the only thing constant for “white” is “not black.”
The freaky part is where you’ve got completely random racials on what’s supposed to be a bio-family. Yeah, “white” parents can have a “black” kid, and visa-versa. You’re unlikely to get the United Nations postcard effect, though.
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Yes. Precisely THIS.
I also do realize that kids will mingle without noticing. My hope for the future is on this. I’m not bent on “preserving” any race, except the human race, because that’s the only thing that counts.
I do however object to skewed and insane portrayals of the world to serve an agenda.
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“In the same way, the soviets would kill people who didn’t work right with others, weren’t all for the revolution, committed the crime of wanting to feed their families or being left alone to work or criticizing the assholes in power, because at the end of that eugenics road was the Homo Sovieticus, who would not need government to live in Utopia.”
Why does that sound so much like a company that hires people based on whether they, “fit the culture of the company” rather than the ability to actually DO the job?
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because to an extent it’s the same.
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Company Culture is a real thing– just have to remember that not all cultures are equal, and quite a few are dang toxic.
“He can do the job, but actively destroys every single interaction with everyone else” is a serious issue.
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I think most of us have run into, or seen, that kind of toxic employee at least once. However, when you see companies claiming to value tolerance, and then excluding people for a ‘normal’ level of conservativism, or objecting to CRT or trans- indoctrination, then you’ve wandered into, “The Soviet Zone.” — cue weird theme music —
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What, you want they should get hired on, discovered to be The Enemy, and then destroyed as well as fired?
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Judo does have the attraction of using your opponent’s own momentum against them. I see no reason not to adhere to Sun Tsu’s recommendation to attack an enemy where he is weak; and such businesses tend to be weak between their ears.
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Both Judo and Sun Tsu would suggest you not be standing on the target when doing an attack.
They are weak. So join their competition.
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Yes, but a lot of times “culture” is euphemism for politics. Google reportedly is like that.
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I’d rather they didn’t destroy more people to stay afloat– if they want to shun the unclean and happen to die faster, seems like a good idea.
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So, there’s an alternate model to ‘something bad is coming, I can feel it’.
It is another one of my rambles on ‘state space’, predictive models, forecasting, etc.
The leaders, ‘thinkers’, and actors of the opposition are theory obsessives, or outsource some of their thinking to theory obsessives.
They are theory obsessives who are in particular sure that there is a more or less closed form, complete, model of human behavior that is predictive, and also manipulable. (It is interesting that they seem to need epicycles of conspiracy theory to explain how their theory works.)
Problems include that by definition, data for theory comes from the past, and where human behavior is concerned the justification for going from the past to a prediction of the future may not be founded. It works for future widgets, because widgets can be very similar, have limited possible state spaces. But, is Bob now the same as Bob six months ago, or three years, or whatever? I’m certainly similar, but even as an individual I have potential for nonlinear and perhaps inexplicable shifts in behavior.
Anyway, perhaps human behavior is an infinite dimensional state space, or very large dimension at least. Left theory models are fewer dimensions, maybe quite a lot fewer.
Suppose you have a system that is a bunch of gears and stuff. Well, each gear as a rigid body on its own is gonna have six degrees of freedom (three slides, and three rotations), but assembled you lose some from each gear. A gear on a shaft usually has around one degree of freedom, a rotation, but if you do not assume rigid you can have different sorts of vibrations. So, say, seven gears could be seven degrees of freedom, except you can couple it down again to one, if they all mesh together. State space extends your rotational degrees of freedom, to include how fast the rotations are, plus vibrations. Quite a lot of gear trains are fairly rigid at slow rotations, but vibrate a lot, then fall apart, as you try to get them moving too fast, faster than intended to go. As you energize the rotational mode, some of the energy goes into vibrational modes, until the vibrational energy exceeds the ‘binding energy’ of the system.
Left theory models are a state space that they are sure responds in certain ways, and that they can also manipulate.
Their theory covers N modes. It says ‘put energy here, ultimately get outcome Y’. They are very sure of it, and also probably wrong. Well, if they put in their energy, and get X, seemingly opposite of Y, their conclusion is not revising their theory (except for adding conspiracy theory epicycles), but to try to add more energy in possibly a different way.
The more energy may take into account the latest epicycles, or in mental stress they may get rigid, and not up to varying their approach in any way but being ‘stronger’.
But, again, their N model theory is reduced order, based on at most past behavior, and probably based in observing a ‘system’ that they had not quite energized in the current way.
So the added energy goes somewhere, they don’t see where it goes, they add more. If we think inside this state space metaphor, we intuit that the energy is going to exciting new modes, modes that they are not familiar with. A theoretically perfect control designed on the smaller state space would eventually fail from having modes in the larger state space energized. (The state space was always the larger size, but the extra bits were not obvious so long as all of the energy was in the smaller set of modes.) Their methods were always more poorly designed, and crazier, than a theoretically perfect control scheme.
Therefore, they are actively breaking the very things they manipulated to get into power. Quite possibly by a purely peaceful mechanism like people distrusting them.
Anyway, since I am using widget theory as a metaphor for human behavior, I must say again as a caveat, that human behavior can always be funkier than widget theory can be extended to cope with. This is a metaphor, and an intuition. It is not a complete predictive theory, and can not be extended to a high fidelity human behavior theory that is very true.
But, from the center of gravity of the opposition’s insanity, we can reason our way to an intuition.
This is basically similar to some of the predictions felt. It might be that the ‘something bad, but ultimately victory for good’ feelings are confirmed, or maybe there is a parallel error. It is probably a different path, but who knows?
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It would be quite possible to use this metaphor to deliberately break things. Just encourage the random introduction of energy and wait for the vibrations to start.
Wouldn’t even have to be for destruction per se, but just to take advantage of the chaos.
Glad to see you again.
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Hari Sheldon was a fictitious character.
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Leftroids assume that humans are one-dimensional widgets. All [category] are alike! And [category] exists only in their own heads.
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Which is funny, because I have yet to meet one who considers himself a widget. It’s always those OTHERS, out THERE who are part of the machine (or should be).
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Determinists are funny that way. They can preen themselves intellectually and morally for seeing through the fallacy of free will … except that if their theory is true, they were bound to reach that conclusion and there’s no point in assigning credit for doing so.
This is a much more fertile field for applying Pascal’s Wager than the thicket of religion. What can believing in free will hurt? (Aside from hurting those who stood to benefit from your submission to being a drone.)
Republica restituendae.
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Precisely. I mistrust the motives of determinists.
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Better Pascal’s Wager than Laplace’s demon. The determinists seldom consider the theory behind their determinism. Hand wavium, and name calling tend to ensue when one brings it up. “That would violate all the laws of physics.” Umm, no actually it would leave the laws of physics exactly as they are.
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Determinism flew the coop 100 years ago when Einstein (and others) discovered Quantum Theory. Nothing is predetermined, everything is probability and uncertainty down at the lowest, simplest level.
Just ask any engineer how hard it is to design a machine that will do exactly the same thing, all the time, every time. Ask an electronics engineer about keeping random noise out of the circuits. (Trust me, it’s REALLY hard)
Back in the late 1970’s there was a problem with 16 Kbit dynamic RAM chips throwing random bit errors. Engineers studied the circuits to death and tried to build in more reliability, but the errors wouldn’t stop. It was like the memory chips themselves were causing the errors for no reason anybody could find.
Finally somebody figured out that the clay used to make the ceramic DIP packages was slightly radioactive. Every once in a while an alpha particle would zap a RAM cell and flip its state. Earlier 4K D-RAM chips didn’t exhibit the problem because they were built using larger geometry; one alpha particle couldn’t fully discharge a RAM cell.
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Cast Away: Only Tom Hanks could make two hours of talking to a volleyball great.
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I seem to remember that issue; I was a new engineer at the time. It doesn’t even need that. Since a good bit of random noise is thermally generated (Johnson or Nyquist noise), the only way to eliminate it entirely, even in concept, is to operate the entire circuit at 0K. Not near, at. Good luck even getting there, much less staying there while the circuit operates… ;-)
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In order for the circuit to operate, it can’t be at 0 K. Changing a state requires energy — if the circuit is at 0 K there is zero energy; if there is enough energy to change state, the circuit is no longer at 0 K.
So a perfectly noiseless circuit can’t actually do anything.
Most of electronic engineering is figuring out how to make the circuits do something useful in spite of the noise.
Which is why I have to laugh at creationists when they claim that evolution is impossible because there is no source of new information. The universe is awash in information; it shows up as noise, and it’s everywhere. If there were no information, there would be silence between radio stations, rather than static. DNA is such a useful molecule because it (mostly) excludes extraneous information while preserving the information necessary for an organism to go about its business.
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At my house, the ‘things that go bump in the night’ are cats.
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“So a perfectly noiseless circuit can’t actually do anything.”
That was essentially my point with “Good luck with that”; I probably was unclear.
As for the rest, I fully agree.
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PRECISELY.
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The gatekeepers either prevent us from mentioning the Romanian revolution, or attack us for it. In the spirit of ‘go over, go around, tunnel under’ what if we just started mentioning a desire for traditional Romanian cuisine? “I could sure go for some Tochitura moldoveneasca right now.” Mix it up with the dishes so it’s not the same one every time.
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I have a fun Transylvanian cookbook. Talk about fusion cuisine! Although some of the recipes are … complicated. And all of them are hearty, which I pretty much expect of Central and Eastern European “working people” food.
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“In the West crazy” was mostly characterized as a harmless cook”
So, not Long John Silver, then?
😋
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Note that it was an autocorrupt issue. I fixed in text, hopefully.
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Not a criticism. How often do we get to reference harmful cooks 😆
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Most of our current problems, however, are the result of harmful crooks in positions of authority.
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