Day: February 11, 2018, 11:11 PM

The Problem

Chill Uncategorized

The problem when people write about something they know nothing about, they sound like idiots and don’t even realize it.

So Elon Musk shot a car into space. There had to be some load on that flight; that was the whole point of the test. That much concrete — which is what normally would have been used as the test load — would have been nearly if not just as expensive and would have gained SpaceX no publicity at all and would not have caused everyone on the planet to start ceaselessly gabbing about what SpaceX can do.

Some people — all idiots — seem to think the point of the fucking flight was to shoot a car into space.

Nope.

That was just a side benefit of the mission. The mission would’ve happened with a car or with concrete or any other suitable test load.

The point of the flight was to test deep-space heavy lift and orbital insertion capability for large payloads of a new rocket configuration. And for that — are you surprised? — you need a heavy payload. Like, say, something that weighs as much as a car. But something not too expensive. Like, say, a used, depreciated car that your company makes. It’s a lot better to lose a used car than a $50 million satellite on a test run. The flight, after all, only had a 50/50 chance of success.

The only thing worse than Musk’s cheerleaders are his damn critics. They can’t seem to read, write, or understand any language known to humankind.

Too

Chill Regular-ass Post

I was going to write a post nearly identical to this one. Instead, just go read it.

I wanted, though, to talk about this part a bit.

On the Right there are things like MRAs and PUAs (if that’s still a thing, is that still a thing?) but most of what the Left is embracing are things that also lead right back to traditional gender roles and the idea that women need to be modest (hijab-o-mania among supposed feminists) and need special protection #metoo!metoo! around male predators (which is all of them).

There is what the #metoo movement claims to be about, and what many of its proponents believe it is about, but that and what is actually about and what will result from it are very different. This divergence occurs in most social and political movements. It’s not unique to #metoo, but it is almost always verboten to point it out.

All that said, what the #metoo movement is now mostly about — and this will only increase — is to ensure that assortative mating occurs correctly, that undesirable men (and sometimes, undesirable women) are driven out of the dating market and punished, and that traditional gender roles are upheld and strengthened.

Again, it does not matter what the #metoo movement thinks it’s achieving or doing; those ends are what it’s achieving no matter its members’ self-opinions about its directions and focus. As the post points out, rather than being liberating, #metoo and its offshoots will be constraining, though not of the predators imagined to be restricted. This is not accidental, because truly punishing sexual predators is not the goal now, if it ever was. (And I do think it was at very beginning.)

Whether it’s the stated goal or not, in our social milieu what the movement will actually achieve is the infantilization of women and the punishment of (mostly) low-status men.

Bordering

Chill Uncategorized

Great post on Clarissa’s Blog today.

I’m driven nuts by folks who rant against the injustice of having to compete on the job market with candidates who have a PhD from an Ivy, an independent income, a supportive spouse, a helpful thesis director, etc. And in the same breath, these very folks loudly denounce the nation-state and call for open borders, which would mean that thousands of talented, hard-working colleagues from Peru and everywhere else would be on that same market immediately, willing joyfully to take on conditions of labor that none of the current contenders would be able to survive.

She is herself an immigrant, but recognizes that the “open borders” stance is not tenable for a society.

The “open borders” rhetoric, though, is just demonstration of mood affiliation. Hardly anyone one really means it. Those who do mean it most often are those who wouldn’t be harmed by it, or need the cheap labor for exploitation and then disposal.

Open borders and ideas like it are a way of virtue signaling, but a particularly hypocritical one: it means that relatively well-off people are willing to harm millions of Americans so they can feel better about themselves.

I guess that’s not so unusual, really, but in this case it’s particularly egregious and obvious what’s going on.