Before the new version, let’s revisit 1984’s Dune—the greatest movie ever made.

I wouldn’t say “greatest,” but it’s a really damn good film and below is one of the reasons.

I love Dune because it feels just as alien as something set 80 centuries in the future should. (To put that span of time in context, remember that 8,000 years in the past would still be 3,500 years before the Great Pyramids were built.) To create this feeling, Lynch blurs the novel’s plot and characters into a Spaceballs “ludicrous speed” lightshow.

That is also why I love Lynch’s Dune. You have no idea why any of those people are doing what they are doing and that’s the way I like my far-future science fiction. It seems the characters do have reasons that motivate them, but they are incomprehensible to us — as would be true for events that are happening 8,000 years hence.

There’s just so much glorious strangeness in that film, as there should be.

How the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Helped Make Your Smartphone’s Screen Possible.

Another thing that according to liberals “never happened” but of course is true of many technologies they use every day. The article lists a few of them but what nearly everyone misses is the spillover funds from the general Weltanschauung of valuing science that also never would’ve occurred without lavish funding of space-related activities.

Still, good piece that’ll have a billion libs wailing.

If I were really fucking rich ($100 million +), I’d be buying up airplanes and cattle farms and all kinds of other shit to compensate for all the things the neo-puritans are gonna try to take away soon.

On a more serious note, sort of stealing an idea from Nils Gilman, I think the neo-puritans (who are mostly on the left) are going to join forces with a large part of the alt-right over time. In some ways this is already occurring with opposition to porn and sex, and from there it’ll transition into eco-fascism next. CRT as practiced outside academia is also basically acceptable left-friendly segregation and racism, so that will play into it somehow as well.

The next few decades are shaping up to be…interesting.

One of the primary skills of this era is being able to tell when experts are lying to you, or are just wrong, without tipping over into bizarre conspiracy thinking like “vaccines don’t work” or “Bill Gates is microchipping us all.”

This is really hard to do, of course, and it’s really a superpower when you can do this. Most people realize the available experts are inferior, but then they flop right on over into conspiracy thinking because they don’t have good enough minds to evaluate actual evidence and cannot understand complex systems.

I am very thankful that I have the skills necessary to dismiss experts as needed, evaluate evidence apart from their lies and obfuscations, and that I can comprehend complex systems pretty easily.

And this is why it is pure poison for web browsers to not display the actual and complete barenaked URL in the address bar. https://t.co/t4fVmhZ4mB

— Charlie BRAIN WORMS Stross (@cstross) October 14, 2021

The poison is intentional. The lie — as always — is that it was “for security” because those poor, poor rubes grammas didn’t know what all those funny words meant.

The reality is that the URL was deliberately obscured so that advertising and such could be more easily foisted on us and its source hidden, while search is emphasized. Why do people so easily buy the lie that it’s “security” and “for your own good?” Especially since that has never, ever been the case.

Huh, I think I might’ve figured out why there are so many social scientists and other screeching lately about, “There’s no such things as generational differences!!!!!!!”

Not sure how I missed this, but I got it now: it’s because if you can deny that there are generational differences, you can then obfuscate the fact that there have been enormous economic changes wrought by pretty malevolent forces arrayed against each successive generation. That is, Gen X is worse off than the Boomers, the Millennials are worse off than Gen X, and Gen Z has it even worse than all of those. Concealing that is vitally important to the neoliberal project — hence, all the Drum et al. articles about how the Millennials don’t have it bad at all, it’s all lies that they are struggling, the facts are fake, etc. It’s all of a piece and “there are no generations” is one of those fragments.

That took me an absurdly long amount of time to figure out. Maybe I’m losing my edge. But I got there.

The bitter fact that the credentialists never want to face up to is that, yes, a 99 percentile smart person can ABSOLUTELY come in and do their job MUCH MUCH better than them.

I'm talking 10-100x better output.

10/N pic.twitter.com/a8kcNtg4Kx

— The Last Contrarian (@lastcontrarian) October 14, 2021

Right. Life is not chess, and nearly nothing can be learned in general from chess about anything save chess. That entire thread was moronic.

And because so many institutions, fields and practices have been so politically captured, most experts are fairly worthless. So yes, I agree that for many fields, a smart person could come in and do it better than the “expert” if that smart person wasn’t already politically captured.

I find shockingly enormous mistakes experts make all the time. In papers, in public statements, all over the place. These are basic errors that someone who has read even one textbook in the field should never make, yet there they are.

The best experts are indeed pretty far above mere mortals. But many fields (even many STEM fields) have none or nearly none of these, so it’s not easy to beat out the “experts” there. I know because I do it all the time.

A German friend of mine moved from her home city over this. She loved Munich and would’ve lived there her whole life, but the constant threat of sexual assault and gang rape hanging over her head caused her to abandon the city for a more rural area.

It was not just Afghan refugees that were the threat, contra this article. It was mainly a lot of North African men. Due to all the harassment, she went from very supportive of refugees to staunchly opposed to any Islamic/North African asylum-seekers and economic migrants, and I understand that 100%. Gang rape vs. refugees — well, not hard choice, really!

And before you say, “Ah, she was overreacting!” No. She was hassled on the bus and on the street frequently by these men. It was not some nebulous threat; she realized it was just a matter of time before something far worse happened.

According to liberals, this is all fake. But the facts on the ground are quite different.

(By the way, she is very left-wing, what in America would be called an extreme socialist. She has absolutely nothing to do with the German right-wing parties in any way.)

For those of us accustomed to unrestricted energy use, the actual constraints of the Paris agreement are a shock. Here's what a path for Paris looks like, in personal use, for 2025: https://t.co/7TfgmTKxt6 5.5 tonnes per person. That's the Paris agreement. @emmalincolnblog pic.twitter.com/HCSiL8lNWs

— City Atlas (@cityatlas) October 16, 2021

You’re right; I do not accept degrowth nonsense. We need to be increasing the amount of energy available to use. No one in the US except neo-puritan pseudo-ascetics will accept this, nor should they.