Neither Trump nor Bernie Sanders will ever be president.

Never, ever gonna happen. Never.

What a bunch of sophistic hooey.

This is what pisses me off about smart people. They are so confident in their ability to delude someone or many someones dumber than they are that they forget they aren’t the smartest one in the room.

Well I’m in the fucking room now, homies. I’m all up in your post doing an exegesis on your bullshit.

“Better a witty fool than a foolish wit,” some old dead dude said. Hear, hear and all that.

Maire Leavy spends an entire post justifying why attempting to achieve privacy is overrated, that it is impossible, and that making efforts to do so is beyond the average user.

Maybe this is true.

However, the argument is specious assclownery because that doesn’t mean Mozilla has the right to make it worse.

Mozilla is like Tony Stark. They are good people, like Stark is a good person. A good organization. And like Stark, so convinced that they are righteous and good that anything they do must be by definition good as well because of the transitive quality of goodness — no matter how destructive or dangerous. Well, fuckers, goodness is not transitive.

It’s your actions every day that make you good…or bad. Not your words. Not your beliefs. Not your intentions. What you do. Your actions, every day.

And if your actions harm your users, then what you are doing is bad and wrong no matter your doctrine or intentions.

Maire Leavy, you are once again the smartest one in the room. I’m stepping out. TTFN.

Damn, I’m so fucking tired of hearing from the moronic tech geek IT community every time Apple rolls out something that they didn’t invent it.

First of all, who gives a shit. Apple (generally) isn’t in the invention business.

What Apple does is takes a look at the market, sees what’s out there and determines what they can vastly improve from its origins. Very smart, by the way.

The first in a market is usually the first loser. Apple cannily avoids this mistake and usually turns out products that are 5x better for less than 1.25x the price.

The tech idiot community always has this attitude that if Apple didn’t invent something, it didn’t have anything at all to do with it.

Improving something vastly and/or making it where it doesn’t require a PhD in computer science to use counts for nothing, apparently.

What a technology geek sees when traveling abroad.

The singularity adherents might be wrong in the broad outlines, but to our predecessors what many of us have lived through would seem like a singularity to them.

We have capabilities that would be pure fucking devil magic to someone from 1500.

This is a great sentence from the piece.

We live in a world where it is normal for a team of scientists to keep on working while they are flying. Not only do we fail to notice the change, but we even insist forcefully that nothing changed.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately — this complete blindness to major societal and cultural change — and have long intended to write a thorough piece about it.

This amnesiac tendency mystifies me because I easily remember when many things used to be much different and it baffles me when people tell me (very, very wrongly) that things used to be no different in any way.

For instance, the increase in societal prudishness over the past 30 years, the difference in openness/approachability, that Keynesian economics had never fallen out of favor, the difference in children’s freedom to roam/explore (yes, many people deny it was ever any other way) — all these and many more are examples of where society has vastly, massively shifted in a pretty short time and yet many people will deny it was ever any different.

I think perhaps I can better see these phase transitions because I am not strongly connected to my — or any — culture.

But I don’t know.

I’d been contemplating writing a post about this for a while, but Clarissa has done it already.

I don’t even want to excerpt any of it as it’s so good.

The simple fact is that allowing emigration from places where men truly and deeply hate women makes life worse for the women resident wherever those men end up.

This is inarguable and it does happen and has happened in many places — it’s just inconvenient for many on the left to talk about.

But I care about women more than I care about what some brainwashed lefty doofus thinks.

I have nothing but sympathy for the refugees. However, if I were dictator it is highly doubtful I’d let a single North African and/or Islamic man into the country (no matter how white they were), because I’d rather the women of my country prosper and not have to worry even more than they already do about being harassed, stalked and treated like human garbage.

The simple cultural fact is that if you let a bunch of women-hating men in, life is going to worsen for the women around them.

Not worth the trade-off to me. Not even close.

About the below, that the food industry is most likely a secret hidden funding source doesn’t make the FA/BP/FC movement incorrect.

This is a fallacy and failure of critical thinking and of discernment.

The FA/BP/FC movement should be evaluated on its merits or lack thereof (and there are indeed some merits, especially before the movement was hijacked by its most extreme elements).

While it is important and interesting to know why a largely-harmful movement achieved cultural ascendance, who funds them doesn’t make them wrong or right — corporations like the psychopaths that they are will throw money at anything that advantages them, regardless of its truth value.

Fat people claiming oppression is an insult to people who are actually oppressed.

Firm evidence is yet hard to find, but I think the best chance is that the Fat Acceptance/body positivity/fat celebration movement is mostly funded by food industry groups.

Why would they not do this? That’d have great return on investment. If I were Monsanto or General Mills or Nestlé I’d be shoveling money (discreetly) at these groups as fast as I could.

Some indirect evidence is that you never see any of these people or groups question current food industry practices, ask why obesity suddenly begin increasing in the 1980s and then skyrocketed in the early 1990s (even though processed foods had been widely available and cheap since the early 1950s), or make any effort into funding investigation into possible environmental exposure links to obesity.

Of course not. It all reeks of food lobby money. The ROI on that would be very high, so if they are not doing it I’d be extremely shocked.

I’m constantly surprised by the narrowness of people’s conceptions of the world and the relations therein.

For instance there’s loads of people convinced that humanity can never go extinct and furthermore, that the natural environment has little relation to human flourishing.

Where do they think the oxygen they breathe comes from? Magic? Are they not aware of the complex relationships of ocean salinity, temperature and nutrient/pollution levels to phytoplankton, which produce ~70% of the oxygen we breathe?

One of the real and extreme dangers of global warming is of course that we disrupt the oxygen cycle and that is game over for humanity. We are done. Goose, fully cooked.

But it’s not just about that. Just a minor example. I run into this constantly. Most people are specialists knowing one minuscule area and grasp almost nothing about any other area, or even worse have in their heads only some combination of urban myths, long-debunked “science” from the 1900s, and what they’d prefer to believe.

It’s just a bit shocking how little most people are even aware of the complexity of other areas of study, or that the things they take for granted don’t just get created and sustained by hot air and hocus-pocus.

I know that it’s basically impossible for most people to read and to study as much as I do. But still…it seems like more is possible?

The Onion wrote this as a joke, but it’s closer to reality than they probably know (since no one who works there has probably every been in the military).

When I was in the army we’d get magazines in the office advertising items like tactical missile packages, self-propelled artillery and anti-aircraft radar and weapons. Nearly anything in the modern arsenal at one point or another I saw advertising for.

It’s not that units (usually) purchase such items themselves — but the decision-makers in line units do influence people who can and do make purchases, both directly and indirectly. So the arms manufacturers logically advertise to those influencers. And of course it’s not like you can walk down to the corner missile store and buy these items, but like all things in a capitalist society they get purchased — and that means advertising.

The first time I saw an ad for a cruise missile in a magazine I was looking at, it kind of blew my mind a little. But then like most things I just got used to seeing ads for automatic grenade launchers and howitzers next to whatever article I happened to be reading.

Reading “realistic” novels about regular people — about their marriages, lives, quotidian travails — is extremely boring because most people are extremely boring.

I think that’s the main problem I have with “serious” literature: it’s written by, for, and about people I’d never want to talk to for a single second in real life.