I haven’t changed much intellectually in the last 10 years, but I think I’ve gotten far better at recognizing propaganda, and noticing it for what it is earlier than most.
Realizing how pervasive and effective propaganda is was very dispiriting, but at least I have some immunity to it now.
so far the overall impact of the woke moral reaction to the problematic in art has been to capitalize on problems at the expense of art. we now have a plethora of dull, pathetic books & films that are relevant bc their orderly adherence to woke conventional wisdom
— Alison Balsam (@foolinthelotus) October 31, 2019
Turns out you can’t make much in the way of great art if your primary concern is offending no one and adopting the moral styles and fashion trends of the last 15 minutes. Who would’ve guessed?
No, the ACA was bad, not incremental. This is the cost of Obama doing bad things and no one being honest about it. Progressives can’t tell the difference between good and bad policy. https://t.co/NcTXB1f9Vj
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) November 16, 2019
Exactly. I said it at the time and was lampooned for it, but the ACA was designed to kill any forward movement on health care, to entrench the status quo. It was anti-incremental.
Turn out, I was right and we are seeing the results of that now. Obama was a terrible, mendacious president and the world is far worse as a result of his Republican presidency.
All of this in the article is something I’ve been saying less eloquently for years. One of the many events that pushed me away from the left and so-called progressivism is their perfect willingness to make their movement about harming those already downtrodden, and to uphold the values and norms of corporations and the already-powerful against the weak.
Because women are more likely than men to experience physical and sexual threat in their daily lives, they are also more likely to judge others (usually men) to be creepy. Judgments of creepiness, however, are not necessarily reliable.
Conventional wisdom tells us to ‘trust our gut’, but researchers say that our gut is concerned more with regulating the boundaries of social mores than keeping us safe.
A while ago, I saw someone on Tumblr claiming how abominable some dude in his late 50s was for dating a woman in her late 30s, how he was obviously a horrible predator. People, if a woman in her late 30s can’t make decisions about who she wants to date, what’s the point? Women might as well be restricted from leaving the house without the company of a male relative (I think tons of progressives secretly wish for this).
I know it doesn’t make me popular, but it’s clear that most of the “protection from harm” prog showboating is just for the purposes of policing assortative mating, upholding au courant social mores, and eliminating rivals from the dating market.
Throwing the Base Under the Bus—and Other Deep Thoughts From NYT.
Democrats will lose again just like in 2016 if they pull this shit.
It’s interesting that a lot of the most ardent open borders advocates are academics who work for some of the most exclusionary institutions in the world.
I started reading a book and somehow the e-reader software I was using started it at 90% through. I did not realize this fact and almost abandoned the novel because it was completely incomprehensible.
Feeling very dumb as reading comprehension is not something I typically struggle with, I started paging back through the book and and then realized that in fact I had not read almost the entire thing. That explained why characters I’d never heard of with information everyone seemed to already know well kept popping up, referencing events I’d never read in way that implied I should know about them.
I have no idea how the e-reader software jumped from the title page to 90% through. It has never done that before and I cannot reproduce it. So the book is not actually an indecipherable mess, I am happy to report.
Nestlé Says It Can Be Virtuous and Profitable. Is That Even Possible?
No. Nestlé is destroying Florida springs. Fuck Nestlé. NYT: propaganda arm of large corporations.
i am absolutely going to go batshit hearing people say that social change is achieved by being "reasonable" when the entirety of history shows that change happens when you make the lives of people in power utterly miserable and just generally be a loud asshole
— Colin Spacetwinks (@spacetwinks) November 16, 2019
True. Real social and political change occurs for these two reasons:
1) Fucking shit up.
2) A credible threat of fucking shit up.
Or, to return to the old chestnut from Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.”
Even if you don’t think it’s true, it’s still true.
choosing to use Chrome is basically letting a parade of clowns stroll in and fuck with your workflow every 6 weeks
— Katelyn Gadd (@antumbral) November 14, 2019
Firefox is no better. Often worse. There is no good browser left to use — all are perilous to work and to privacy. The droolers have achieved complete and unchallenged victory, enabled by utter numpties who don’t know the first thing about software design, statistical analysis or UX.
I am glad I got into computers before it became what it is today.
Due to the recent bug we are removing all jump instructions in the next microcode update.
— Instructions (@x86instructions) November 12, 2019
For a moment, I didn’t realize this was a satire tweet and I was like, Umm, how is the CPU supposed to work? (I know that the JMP is not absolutely required, but unless you like CPUs that are a millionth their current speed, it is!)
but this is the part I’m wondering about.
See how fast the ICBM is moving?
How realistic is that? I imagine “not much” but I don’t have any data to confirm that. pic.twitter.com/msPVjVqoIY— foone (@Foone) November 15, 2019
That is realistic as to speed. It would be moving that velocity or faster. ICBMs re-enter the atmosphere at 6-7km/s. Air resistance starts slowing them down but they are quite aerodynamic, so they’d still be going 3-4km/s by the time they got close to the ground. Also note that the re-entry vehicle is not the missile you see flying. The RVs are shaped like sharp bullets. Like this:
Also: regardless of speed, could you see it at this distance? It’s not going to have a rocket engine going, it’s purely ballistic at this point.
— foone (@Foone) November 15, 2019
Yes, you would be able to see it at night. No rocket engine, but remember how I said that ICBM RVs enter the atmosphere at 6-7km/s? That means they generate massive air friction and their external components quickly start glowing red- or white-hot. There’s some kind of aluminum lattice that shields the vital components, and some other things I can’t remember, but anyway, the re-entry vehicle would glow at night, and brightly enough that you’d definitely be able to see your doom arriving.
The three most important things experts understand about software security:
1. Software is unbelievably unreliable and insecure.
2. No, really, you have no idea.
3. It’s actually even worse than that.
— matt blaze (@mattblaze) November 7, 2019
Yep! I find massive security holes in software all the time by accident. That is, I just try to do something, notice that I can do more than I’m supposed to be able to, and explore that. If I tried, I am sure I could find just loads more.
“Secure” software is like a latched screen door. Normal software is like a house with no doors at all. Most software is like a door with no roof or walls. It’s a sign that most hackers/crackers aren’t all that good that there aren’t more massive breaches.
Progressive hierarchy creation and preservation is the hidden impetus for much that you observe now. The infiltration of neoliberal thought and the subsumption of genuine progressive forces under that rubric explains most of the explosion of identity politicking, not any real desire for positive change. Creating more hierarchy, more divisions, is how consumerist society metastasizes into arenas where it should not impinge, and of course you are a racist or TERF or some other form of bigot if you resist this in any way. Even the arena of dating is becoming increasingly constricted as pseudo-choices are made for you by those who “know best” what’s best for you. The illusion of choice while having none is the characteristic of our age, and no one is willing to enforce this as stringently as an enlightened progressive mind who will wail about “choosing my choice” but will inveigh mightily against anyone and sanction them mercilessly if someone does not make the same decision — in love, in being, in just denying the validity of the choice at all.
Official GDP figures say India was the fastest growing major economy in the world last year.
New household survey data, withheld by the gov't, say real per capita consumption *FELL* 3.7% over a 6-year period ending in 2017/18. Down 8.8% in rural areas.
India is getting poorer. https://t.co/NKlHSKs64J
— Justin Sandefur (@JustinSandefur) November 15, 2019
So much for Pinker’s dipshit ideas. India is very fucked. Has not enough water, is poorly run, and climate change is going to cause millions of deaths there from water shortages and likely war with Pakistan.