Outpacing Zeno ♨️

these people are genuinely idiots

I'm imagining a 2029 DOJ having to implement its own pay scale off the GS to hire enough attorneys to argue before dozens of series of grand juries until they can finally get indictments for made-up crimes, then failing to actually hire more attorneys bc Congress forgot to appropriate any new funds

and it's just incredibly rare for there to be too *few* forms associated with the administration of a program. the institutional incentives are all heavily skewed toward heavy over-compliance with regulations and directives, and against making things easy at POS. Jen Pahlka writes a lot on this

each added form increases administrative burden wrt the administration and interpretation of each form. this can be outweighed if whatever info the form gets you makes it easier to administer benefits, make adjudications, etc, but if you care about state capacity you generally really want less forms

They're afraid to say the phrase "radical conservative terror", much less denounce it, and now they're trying to erase it.

What in the water in ~2004 made male liberals outnumber female liberals and female conservatives outnumber male ones?

New atheism? Gender differences in opposing the Iraq war? Frat humor in pop culture?

An out-of-nowhere, brief, fairly uniform shift in the ideological spectrum. just a bit bizarre

I think it's worth clarifying that you do in fact retain free speech while you're in the military. You are in fact allowed to say what you want in a private capacity, including political speech.

I don't know where people go the idea otherwise, but it's not accurate.

both Klein’s piece in the NYT and the Burgis/Day piece in Jacobin pretend they are about recognizing that each human life is a human life but actually what they are doing is validating the way some human lives are socially valued more highly than others

The example they set is white supremacist

No, Boston Globe, we don’t “need more Charlie Kirks” A shocking death cannot retroactively transform a wicked man into a saint

That ostensibly liberal publications like the Boston Globe are lionizing someone as despicable as Charlie Kirk is the triumph of process over substance. As long as you go through the motions, then the fact that you are calling for violence against marginalized people is just a difference of opinion.

Acts of political violence aren’t acceptable. Non-political school shootings aren’t acceptable. Sacking the legislature isn’t acceptable. Military occupation of peaceful American cities isn’t acceptable. Abductions conducted in courthouse hallways by masked agents of the state aren’t acceptable.

One of the bitter ironies of American politics is that nobody is more committed to political correctness, in the traditional sense, than the reactionary centrist/classical liberal set. The People can't be trusted with revisionist or deviant sources, which might lead them astray.

yeah i think at least two "vibe shifts" are due to occur between now and 2029... like kinda unironically lol

Like the church has always relied on things like icons to appeal to the masses, sure, but I feel like people still acted like prayer, discernment, the sacraments, etc. were what was really core to the faith prior to, say, the Fourth Great Awakening.

Not YHWH sitting in space looking like Galactus

There's something about the ways Christiainity tries to stay relevant in an algorithmic age that feels so hollow and corrupt to me

This isn't the standard story we've had about Trumpism, but it's pretty typical for the rise of authoritarian movements and then consolidating authoritarian regimes. The elites are targeted and cave first, leaving the popular base of liberal-democratic opposition without leadership and coordination.

Congrats on your regime propaganda, ABC News.

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I watched it in 2020, enjoyed it a lot, and then immediately forgot about it almost entirely bc it's never come up again for me (till now). High-quality movies made for streaming that might've become touchstones for a given genre, were they made 20/30 years ago, just fade into the aether now.

R.E.M. “pushed the boundaries” of alternative rock

Herbie Hancock “pushed the boundaries” of jazz

Trump & RFK Jr. are “destroying public health & will be responsible for killing people”

What is journalism, anyway? 🤷‍♂️🤦‍♂️

i'm kind of blown away by how obvious it is if you're, like, literate. at all. i don't even mean for books, i also mean for movies. i mean that if you have understood things at any point in your life, this is obvious. so it's weird to see people act like they don't understand it

Utilitarianism Is Not Virtue Ethics Is Not Microeconomics Is Not Sociology Is Not Utilitarianism Is Not Virtue Ethics Is Not Utilitarianism A brief-ish response to Both Sides Brigade

wrote about utilitarianism and about how it is not things that it is not

Iris Murdoch on AI art being bad, truly a visionary. like actually

if I was to be very mean, I would say that some of the praise heaped upon Disco Elysium by gamers was because it forced them to read a grown-up novel for the first time ever, and if your brain has been rotted by gamer culture experiencing a very good novel will be ecstatic.

yes it very much is a problem! we’d do well to have closer empathetic relationships with the young girls and women in our lives and not engage in the broader culture of shaming of them either

sorry, I was ambiguous. I meant the discourse today (not this discussion between you and me), as a piece of the general liberal perception of teenage boys as budding monsters, functions mostly to shame young guys, and to encourage a broader regime of shaming. 20 yos also use the internet yknow

what we’re talking about isn’t “a conversation,” which basically necessarily entails first having a close, empathetic relationship with a specific teenage boy (which can be done whether you’re a man or a woman), this is acontextual shaming boys and young men as a class for wanting to have sex

yeah this sort of rhetoric is def going to get teenage boys to listen and Be Better, and not cause them to either 1) tune you out entirely or 2) feel deeply ashamed about their sexuality in a way that just worsens the general situation

I frankly doubt language policing about the phrase “getting laid” is doing anything to help women!

they’re (obviously) discrete problems that do relate to each other (also obviously)

I’m not say the mentality liberals have about men isn’t understandable, esp not on an individual level, I’m just saying it’s politically ineffective, and in some sense cruel to people who are, need I remind you, basically kids. Undertake precautions, dating, sure, but don’t treat 18 yo boys as imps

if all you have is a social media discourse where the points of contention are fundamentally attitudinal and ideological, the solution for every problem begins to look attitudinal and ideological. the medium is the message. hammer and nails. or something.