throwitonthepile

[throwitonthepile]

...is there a dating app for book enjoyers i don't know about or what? of all the profiles i've ever seen on those, i can count the number that listed 'reading' as something they like on one hand

thinking fondly of this meme I made for a coworker years and years ago

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why go through the effort, anon? just do this:

"This Exfoliating Rub (mud from swamp) has been blessed by a local tribal Shaman (Jimothy who owns the vape shop) in ritualistic tradition (on a whim) on a time of high spiritual energy (between cocktails 7 and 8) to ensure the highest quality of its natural cleansing properties.

This Rub has been scientifically proven to increase the amount of chromosomes in your body tenfold!"

slap a pally flag on it for woke points along with a charity that redirects straight to your paypal account and voila! cash cash money money

Ur laughing but sit down and I will tell u a tale, the weirdest thing I have experienced as an archaeologist in all 10yrs of my career.

There's a Natufian site in israel, it's a cave containing some pretty special burials. We were the first expedition there after the rona broke out. As we entered the cave we found dozens, and I mean DOZENS of beautiful clay figurines neatly littered around the cave. We were so confused, we couldn't figure out wtf they were, whether they're "real" (archaeological) or not, and if they are then how did ppl not notice them there before. Well the Scooby-Doo mystery was solved when the security cams we set up caught a group of ca. 10 PPL IN ROBES who came AT NIGHT, put MORE figurines there and did what appeared to be silly little dances. We caught some of the women loitering around the cave the next day, and turns out they're a weird cult of christo-pagan French women [derogatory] who travel around "significant" archaeological sites in israel to CONDUCT RITUALS in them with those figurines. We couldn't do anything to them legally because technically they didn't touch or ruin anything, so we just begged them to stop leaving those figurines in the middle of the site because it's confusing to us lmao. They were nice old ladies though WAY too cooky for my taste, AND they tried SELLING us those figurines for an ABSURD amount of money!! They also tried selling us magic dirt they collected from "significant" sites, and to this day I don't understand what makes a site "significant" for them. Very weird ppl!

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How come I, as a 10yo playing Command&Conquer, could understand that the Global Liberation ArmyTM (""""axis of resistance""") was evil, but a 25yo bitch Becky cant?

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i dunno, what would you count as 'literate?' someone who read Book Of The New Sun?

thinking fondly of this meme I made for a coworker years and years ago

[throwitonthepile]

thinking fondly of this meme I made for a coworker years and years ago

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Could've sworn we were all aware the Iranian regime was bad. Could've sworn just a few years ago my dash was full of people posting that Iran in the 70s video and spreading awareness about women getting murdered. Now that the fight is with Jews it's fine though, right? The enemy of (((my enemy))) is my best friend or whatever?

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Immigration is insane. This is the median voters desire:

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I'm not sure if Spotify has drastically over estomated my net worth or someone's really over spending on ad buys but it's kind of amusing how often IBM is trying to convince me to commission them to make a bespoke AI model to handle my business' data AND applications.

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something something "LLMs will attempt to falsify their alignment with their makers' objectives, and then revert to their original self-defined goals"

Why is it that so often, people follow up the insight "you seem to be having a bad time because you're having a hard time living according to your own moral standards" with "you should adopt lower moral standards"?

I mean, would you tell a guy who's unhappy that he can't seem to resist cheating on his wife that he should replace his value system with one that says there's nothing wrong with infidelity? (Maybe if you're one of those Bay Arean "rationalist" "polyamory" types, you might.)

Or would you tell a serial killer who knows murder is wrong but can't resist his killing urges to adopt a moral system where murder is okay? (No, I've never seen or read any of Dexter…)

Or pick an example of something you think is morally important. Something that you think is bad and wrong. Would you really advise someone to adopt a moral worldview holding that this thing isn't wrong, just because they find it hard not to do this thing?

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So you ask me, what is the key insight of leftist thought??

Good question! Poor choice of person to ask, but good question!

I would say this: when you look at the world you see two groups of people. The majority have to work their whole lives to earn resources they need to survive. Then there is a small minority who don’t need to work because they control important assets such as land, capital, or monopolies either natural or artificial, from which they earn ongoing rents for doing absolutely nothing.

In the short term that’s great for them, but over the medium term it gets even better, as the value of these assets often increases in conjunction with the overall growth of the population and the economy, giving a second big boost to these rentiers without requiring any effort on their part.

If that was just the extent of it that would not be so interesting; a little unfair that some people work and some people do not, but life was never fair. However, the control of capital and the freedom from work also gives this group (or class) of people the ability to shape the nation by applying political influence to ensure that their interests continue to be prioritised over the interests of the workers, potentially locking us into a situation where people suffer needlessly to preserve the current economic order, all to benefit a small minority.

…and everything else flows from that.

Comments appreciated, particularly from people who use words like “praxis” with a straight face. @leviathan-supersystem perhaps?

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I simultaneously think that 2010s political correctness went too far and also that it was necessary as a step in the dialectic to improve the previously existing culture. Like, pendulum swings one way, pendulum swings the other, but each swing leaves its mark. I genuinely believe that (Anglophone) society is less misogynistic and racist now than it was 10 or 15 years ago, and that's thanks in no small part to all the social justice warrior shit, and that's a good thing, and also a bunch of basically innocent people were caught in the blast radius and got fired from their jobs for problematic tweets or whatever and this is pretty bad. Unfortunately this is just how change works, nothing happens cleanly. I'm not making an "ends justify the means" argument so much as a "well all said and done I think the moral calculus has come out in the black, whether or not there might have been a better way to achieve that".

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Let's imagine that you're trying to fix American politics by making a George Washington gambit, or perhaps a Dwight Eisenhower gambit.

Your goal here is to transcend our dysfunctionally-polarized moment by taking the two big political parties and smashing their heads together until they stop moving. You are trying to unite a supermajority of Americans behind a sane, stable, viable-consensus Middle Way - maybe through third-party shenanigans, maybe by hijacking and parasitizing the Republicans or the Democrats, whatever can be made to work.

Let's further assume - arguendo - that you have some good reason to think that you might be able to achieve this, given the right setup and the right resources. We don't need to have the argument over whether it's just a stupid idea from the get-go, that's not the point. (We also don't need to argue over what the sane stable viable-consensus Middle Way would actually be, in terms of policy prescriptions, branding, etc. Fill in your own favorite answer.)

You'll need a figurehead. A presidential candidate. Someone who can, in his person, stand in for the idea of "we're better than all this and we're actually going to set things to rights." Someone who won't immediately be treated as just another shill for the existing left/right.

A real American hero, ideally. Someone who seems like a good, trustworthy leader to as many voters as possible?

...any nominees?

Seriously. I mean it. Anyone at all? I'm coming up pretty short, and that fact scares me.

We tell jokes about God-Empress Taylor Swift (RIP @kontextmaschine), but of course that would actually be a bad idea for our project. She's popular, she might conceivably have the charisma and the intellect and the cultural-manipulation chops, but it doesn't matter; there's no escaping the fact that she's a pop star rather than anything else, and too many people would see her as inescapably frivolous. If she won, it wouldn't do the thing. Same goes for anyone else in the "celebrity performer" category.

War heroes are often good for this kind of role. Do we have any generally-accepted war heroes these days?

A scientist or high-culture artist might do. Are there any who are famous enough, and also not closely tied to an existing political faction?

I'd suggest "civil rights hero / activist leader" except that there are obviously none of those who aren't closely tied to existing political factions.

The best I can come up with on short notice is, like, Chelsey Sullenberger. Which is not super great.

(Admittedly I don't know enough about sports to say whether there's a sufficiently beloved-and-respectable athlete floating around. That would also be sort of an inherently weak choice, not much better than a celebrity performer and maybe even worse, but I can imagine really good spin doctors making it viable.)

[throwitonthepile]

I simultaneously think that 2010s political correctness went too far and also that it was necessary as a step in the dialectic to improve the previously existing culture. Like, pendulum swings one way, pendulum swings the other, but each swing leaves its mark. I genuinely believe that (Anglophone) society is less misogynistic and racist now than it was 10 or 15 years ago, and that's thanks in no small part to all the social justice warrior shit, and that's a good thing, and also a bunch of basically innocent people were caught in the blast radius and got fired from their jobs for problematic tweets or whatever and this is pretty bad. Unfortunately this is just how change works, nothing happens cleanly. I'm not making an "ends justify the means" argument so much as a "well all said and done I think the moral calculus has come out in the black, whether or not there might have been a better way to achieve that".

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Why why does every UX designer eventually contract the brain parasite which makes them think frosted glass is a good idea in computer interfaces. It always looks sexy in the demo videos (which the designer controls completely) and then is a friggin mess in the real world where any kind of chaotic text or images could be right behind the glass, making the UI elements unreadable.

It happened on Windows and it happened on Linux, and both times it had to get walked back in disgrace, but those were both 20 years ago, and they had the excuse that nobody had done it before since GPUs only just became powerful enough, so they couldn't know what a mess it would be in practice. Apple doesn't have that excuse.

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[ tumblr user ]

Damn, one rejoinder to "the future belongs to those who show up" is "why the fuck would I care about the future if I'm not there".

That one's a trap. The right-wing argument is that people will care more about the future if they have children... so people who don't have children don't care about the future, will not maintain institutions, and therefore should not have the same level of voice in the discussions about how society should be run.

I don't think that's the right approach to society, but "I don't care about the future" is a rake.