Gracie Lawrence shines on this one. She’s one of the most amazing singers on the scene.
Watch the story behind Hotel TV & Lawrence the Band here.
Lawrence performs Hotel TV live at Terminal 5, New York City on the Hotel TV Tour.
Directed by Vagabonding Media
Produced by Gracie Lawrence & Clyde Lawrence
Sound Mixing by Jonny Koh
Thumbnail Photo by Deanie Chen
Live Sound Engineering by Leo Pisaq
Lighting by Emily Miller
I have to admit that the first time I heard Lawrence, her voice was off-putting for reasons I can’t explain. But I think after hearing the live version of Don’t Lose Sight, I became a real fan.
Fun fact: they were making YouTube videos together back in their early teen years and both of the siblings were amazing musicians even then. I think Clyde is the youngest songwriter ever to join the Songwriters Guild at the age of five.
Good stuff.
Brought over from previous thread
re: #198 silverdolphin
The old bathroom panic. I wonder how they feel about gender-neutral bathrooms? One of my favorite restaurants redid the male and female bathrooms into a set of 8 gender neutral rooms with locked doors and individual toilets and sinks. Much nicer than before too. A lot more privacy for everyone.
We need more of those type bathrooms around here. My wife lost her right leg about 7 years ago (childhood type 1 diabetes). About 2.5 months ago we lost the fight to keep her left leg. Since the operation to amputate her left leg her right stump has been so swollen that she cannot even get her old prosthetic on. And the left stump is not healed and shrunk enough to even measure for a prosthetic for that leg. So she really has no legs (even artificial) now. So I have to pick her up and move her wherever she needs to go (including the bathroom). If we are out anywhere and she has to go we need a family bathroom or a private one. I can’t go into the ladies room to help her, and I can’t take her into the men’s room. Can be a real pain in the ass.
re: #7 teleskiguy
I made that argument from the second he threw his money in to buy Twitter.
His buddy Peter Theil is famous for trying to shut down outlets he doesn’t like, and is on record saying democracy is incompatible with capitalism.
At last! Bernie gets it.
Bernie Sanders: “Where I disagree with my good friend Cornel West is I think in these really very difficult times, where there’s a real question whether democracy is going to remain … I think we have to bring the entire progressive community to defeat Trump [&] support Biden” pic.twitter.com/6f8s8x1S4N
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 27, 2023
re: #2 Joe Bacon ✅
Let them fire the Federal worker responsible for FOX announcers’ mothers’ SS and Medicare payments
re: #2 Joe Bacon ✅
Don’t look for them to apply the same argument to police unions.
They couldn’t be ideologically more opposite which is why this is pretty remarkable.
Honored to be in sync with @judgeluttig on this vital issue of constitutional law and strategy ⬇️ https://t.co/BuqHdNlNxu
— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) August 27, 2023
re: #9 teleskiguy
At last! Bernie gets it.
[Embedded content]
If he’d only made the same point in 2016 we’d all be so much better off with a 5-4 liberal majority on the SCOTUS.
re: #11 jaunte
Don’t look for them to apply the same argument to police unions.
It depends. If the police in that city are prosecuting a Republican then they should be disbanded for Wrongthink.
re: #2 Joe Bacon ✅
Here’s the clip.
Think of what will happen if Ramalamadingdong fires all Federal employees…especially if you get on a plane and all the air traffic controllers have been fired…
[Embedded content]
One out of three federal employees are Department of Defense. Without them, nobody flies, shoots, or eats MREs.
re: #3 Unabogie
I have to admit that the first time I heard Lawrence, her voice was off-putting for reasons I can’t explain. But I think after hearing the live version of Don’t Lose Sight, I became a real fan.
Fun fact: they were making YouTube videos together back in their early teen years and both of the siblings were amazing musicians even then. I think Clyde is the youngest songwriter ever to join the Songwriters Guild at the age of five.
Good stuff.
You can tell Gracie crafted a big part of her vocal style from classic R&B and, coming out of a white girl from NYC, that might sound out of place for some at first. Bur, once you get used to it and really listen, it totally fits her and Clyde’s music; they wear their influences on their sleeves.
re: #12 teleskiguy
They couldn’t be ideologically more opposite which is why this is pretty remarkable.
MSNBC, August 26, 2023
It’s Time for Chris Christie to Sue Donald Trump
“The former president is likely disqualified to hold public office under the 14th Amendment. One of his GOP primary opponents needs to get the ball rolling in court.”
(with video, 18:22, of Ali Velshi interviewing Judge Luttig and Mr. Tribe)
re: #13 Unabogie
Bernie is a misogynist. I believe this. The only reason he had his extended beef with Hillary Clinton is he truly believes women shouldn’t have that kind of power. He’s old school like that.
The only way the GOP can win *anything* is by moving the goal posts.
They cannot win on the strength of their ideas alone.https://t.co/cwtA9OppGM pic.twitter.com/up6XbK6IKn— James William Garrett 🇺🇲🇺🇦 #HighHeeledBoots (@JamesWGarrett1) August 27, 2023
Today I found out that King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard recorded a whole rap album and they are never going to release it. 😢
re: #15 Decatur Deb
One out of three federal employees are Department of Defense. Without them, nobody flies, shoots, or eats MREs.
True, but to Ramaswamy’s intended audience, “Federal employees” is wingnut shorthand for “overstuffed, overpaid, lazy pencil-pushers/paper-shufflers (hired mainly from Those People to buy their votes), who spend their workdays mooching off the taxpayers’ dime making life complicated for Hard-Working Real Americans”.
And has been since forever….
re: #18 teleskiguy
Bernie is a misogynist. I believe this. The only reason he had his extended beef with Hillary Clinton is he truly believed women shouldn’t have that kind of power. He’s old school like that.
In these desperate times, he’s willing to support a female VP.
I blame Bernie for Trump’s election, as one of the reasons. Some local lefties use a life-sized cardboard Bernie by their card table at each farmers’ market day. I’m ready to go yell at them, now I’m working on getting ready to calmly talk them into the ground.
re: #21 Jay C
True, but to Ramaswamy’s intended audience, “Federal employees” is wingnut shorthand for “overstuffed, overpaid, lazy pencil-pushers/paper-shufflers (hired mainly from Those People to buy their votes), who spend their workdays mooching off the taxpayers’ dime making life complicated for Hard-Working Real Americans”.
And has been since forever….
Still got my Emergency Essential Civilian BDUs, and I can still wear them.
law.cornell.edu
re: #1 teleskiguy
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
re: #22 wrenchwench
In these desperate times, he’s willing to support a female VP.
At least he sees the gravity of the situation. And he’s not racist. Not too many racists in Vermont.
Fixed the broken pedal on the Pelaton this morning and put new Shimano SPDs on it as well as the new boots I got at the same time (didn’t like the sleek plastic exercise boots…felt like I was walking on ice cubes when I got off the bike and onto the hard wood floor so I picked up some basic mt bike boots….much better). Treated myself to a 20 minute classic rock ride with Jenn Sherman. Going to get back into the groove as I’m starting to get assigned work with the new bank and our transition moving along.
re: #321 Vicious Babushka
womp womp
‘I can’t go’: Trump blows up on prosecutors for keeping him from attending PGA event in Scotland
Trump’s been “Putined”.
He can’t leave his own country.
re: #24 darthstar
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
Jesus…I posted this a few days ago and it’s still getting active engagement on mastodon. That place is so unlike Twitter. Hell, it doesn’t even have a hashtag.
re: #20 teleskiguy
Today I found out that King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard recorded a whole rap album and they are never going to release it. 😢
Why record an album if no one is able to listen to it?
re: #31 Eclectic Cyborg
Why record an album if no one is able to listen to it?
If you listen to KG&TLW you know they’re weird dudes.
Prince and Frank Zappa had vaults full of unreleased music.
re: #36 wrenchwench
$3,500 Bond—NBD. Guy could use some help.
re: #37 jaunte
Their code to recognize when a post needs translation is terrible. Misses all the time.
re: #38 Decatur Deb
$3,500 Bond—NBD. Guy could use some help.
Red flag heads the article: ‘book signing at the Nixon Library.’
Do any of you remember back during the 1980’s presidential election that there was a third party candidate whose hands name wad Anderson? My beloved friend went and voted for that cretin, and lost quite bigly.
In 1992 when Perot was running, he actually did better than previous third party candidates.
Imma say this again: the people who mainline bigotry and routinely debase themselves for influence with right wing extremists are the first to insist that they have no influence when violence inevitably explodes. They tell you the link is all in your head.
Master gaslighting.— Brandon Wolf (@bjoewolf) August 27, 2023
re: #43 Captain Magic
Do any of you remember back during the 1980’s presidential election that there was a third party candidate whose hands name wad Anderson? My beloved friend went and voted for that cretin, and lost quite bigly.
In 1992 when Perot was running, he actually did better than previous third party candidates.
I voted for Anderson. Waste of a vote.
re: #47 sagehen
I voted for Anderson. Waste of a vote.
I voted for Nader in 2000. First year I was able to vote.
re: #48 teleskiguy
You weren’t in a state where such a vote would make a difference.
re: #50 Decatur Deb
Voted for Carter twice. I was that guy.
I voted for George W. Bush in 2004. (Sorry.) In 2008, I didn’t vote; logistics were difficult, being newly married and still settling into Minnesota. In 2012, I did vote for Barack Obama.
re: #52 Nerdy Fish
I voted for George W. Bush in 2004. (Sorry.) In 2008, I didn’t vote; logistics were difficult, being newly married and still settling into Minnesota. In 2012, I did vote for Barack Obama.
A rising curve, then.
re: #47 sagehen
And now my beloved friend plans on voting for Cornel West. People just don’t get that such votes are complete wastes. Had Perot not gone off the deep end he may have actually won.
re: #53 Decatur Deb
A rising curve, then.
Yep. Also, a trend: In 2016, I was unable to vote, again, dealing with logistics arising from Mrs. Fish’s severe car accident. In 2020, I voted for Biden. Thank God for no-excuse mail-in voting, because I am not about to let either hell or high water stop me from voting in 2024.
I volunteered for the Dukakis campaign & met Lloyd Bentson. Florida.
re: #31 Eclectic Cyborg
Why record an album if no one is able to listen to it?
Why write a diary if no one else is going to read it?
re: #46 teleskiguy
I would suspect riding a broom nude is like riding a motorcycle nude: you feel the wind through your whole body, for sure, but the first crash is your last.
re: #51 Charles Johnson
[Embedded content]
It’s important to cling to the unproven assumption that there is more stupidity than malevolence.
(Since my disconnection, I’ve been behind on the hatemail tipjar. I owe you.)
re: #50 Decatur Deb
Voted for Carter twice. I was that guy.
Me too. But I think my fiance voted for Reagan.
re: #58 Belafon
I would suspect riding a broom nude is like riding a motorcycle nude: you feel the wind through your whole body, for sure, but the first crash is your last.
Splinters would be rather… unpleasant.
re: #43 Captain Magic
Do any of you remember back during the 1980’s presidential election that there was a third party candidate whose hands name wad Anderson? My beloved friend went and voted for that cretin, and lost quite bigly.
In 1992 when Perot was running, he actually did better than previous third party candidates.
I have admit I did vote for Perot. Young and foolish I guess.
re: #48 teleskiguy
I voted for Nader in 2000. First year I was able to vote.
The only reason we can forgive you for that is you’re not in Florida.
re: #62 Eventual Carrion
I voted for Perot myself, hoping his variations weren’t off the deep end.
re: #62 Eventual Carrion
I have admit I did vote for Perot. Young and foolish I guess.
For a little while I thought of it, but my FIL was his fan. Then Perot let the Crazy slip.
I’ve been working on a presentation examining how communities adapt to change. Here is something I created that I find both horrifying and interesting. The rates at which new innovations penetrate the market place is exponentially increasing.
Here are the market penetration curves for refrigerators, cars, microwaves, etc.
When these are graphed we get this, an exponentially decreasing curve with a half life of 35 years.
Now, this is just a model and there are things to do to make it better. There are not a lot of data regarding market penetration 100 years ago compared to today. So all this could be an artifact. Or the actual rate could be a little different.
BUT, it certainly fits the way many of us feel - the world is changing to much faster today. You barely get used to something when something new comes along. Should you stick with the old way or move to the new one? where before you had years to make the choice, now you have days. And it your community is not organized to deal with that, well, you get the MAGAs.
re: #49 Captain Magic
You weren’t in a state where such a vote would make a difference.
Actually, I was. Bush carried Colorado in 2000.
re: #62 Eventual Carrion
I have admit I did vote for Perot. Young and foolish I guess.
My Dad voted for Perot.
re: #22 wrenchwench
In these desperate times, he’s willing to support a female VP.
I blame Bernie for Trump’s election, as one of the reasons. Some local lefties use a life-sized cardboard Bernie by their card table at each farmers’ market day. I’m ready to go yell at them, now I’m working on getting ready to calmly talk them into the ground.
They’ll tell you that Hillary Clinton was for some reason an exceptionally bad candidate, even while admitting that they didn’t vote for her, didn’t donate, and didn’t help in any way to get her elected. Same vibes as the news reporting an “officer-involved shooting” as if everything can be explained in the passive voice.
re: #67 teleskiguy
Florida was the key state where the votes made the difference.
re: #65 Decatur Deb
For a little while I thought of it, but my FIL was his fan. Then Perot let the Crazy slip.
His running mate “The Admiral” just cracked me up for some reason. I think I was voting for The Admiral more than Perot. :-)
re: #47 sagehen
I voted for Anderson. Waste of a vote.
That is the only election I threw my vote away. I was mostly a Rockefeller Republican, just like Hilary. I voted for Ford. I could not vote for Reagan because he had done so much to harm Ford in 1976. I could not stomach the conservative wing of the GOP but I was not yet ready to vote for Democrats. So I took the third party route.
Last time I did this. Been voting Democratic since 1984. No matter what.
I am thinking that the reverse might happen with a third party candidate this time.
re: #54 Captain Magic
And now my beloved friend plans on voting for Corner West. People just don’t get that such votes are complete wastes. Had Perot not gone off the deep end he may have actually won.
Perot was brilliant, not a racist, and had the absolutely the best commercials. His VP was unabashedly pro-choice. He may have been a disaster as President but he would not have been a danger to our democracy.
re: #46 teleskiguy
[Embedded content]
Damn. I tought that with that butt it has do have been done by Frank Frazetta.
re: #71 Eventual Carrion
The Admiral was great, and politically spot on when it came to social issues.
re: #69 Unabogie
They’ll tell you that Hillary Clinton was some reason an exceptionally bad candidate, even while admitting that they didn’t vote for her, didn’t donate, and didn’t help in any way to get her elected. Same vibes as the news reporting an “officer-involved shooting” as if everything can be explained in the passive voice.
There was a brief period in 2016 where I actually contemplated voting for Trump. If you don’t know me, I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh and having my head filled with all the Clinton Body Count rumors and slander. It was a post on here, somewhere, that linked to an article that debunked the whole thing, that swung me around. I would’ve voted for Clinton, if we had voted in that election.
Barn owl family 🥰🥰. Not the greatest photo as light fading and at limits at what camera (and I) can do. Beautiful to see. 😀 pic.twitter.com/1VFbE9nD8K
— markdodd1310 (@markdodd1310) August 27, 2023
re: #78 Decatur Deb
Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat 7th Grade.
7th grade is where the classes separated (English, science, PE, algebra, etc.) and I suddenly became the only girl in the science class.
That’s my favorite picture of Elizabeth Warren.
re: #82 teleskiguy
BTW, welcome back. All okay out there in ski country?
re: #81 wrenchwench
7th grade is where the classes separated (English, science, PE, algebra, etc.) and I suddenly became the only girl in the science class.
You would have been the only girl in all of my 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, and college freshman classes. It would have been fun.
re: #85 Decatur Deb
You would have been the only girl in all of my 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, and college freshman classes. It would have been fun.
I was in public school.
re: #66 silverdolphin
your community is not organized to deal with that, well, you get the MAGAs.
“Electrification is how the big government gets in!”
re: #84 Nerdy Fish
All okay out there in ski country?
I’m not going to say yes. Too much uncertainty for my tastes, including with Dad and the job at the ski company. Truth be told I feel like I’m on a razor’s edge. It’s weird and I don’t like it.
re: #88 teleskiguy
Sorry to hear that, my friend. If there’s anything we can do to help you, let us know.
re: #87 jaunte
“Electrification is how the big government gets in!”
Don’t forget the “milk money” for schools.
re: #90 lizardofid
Don’t forget the “milk money” for schools.
And now there’s free lunch… will the horrors never cease?
re: #87 jaunte
“Electrification is how the big government gets in!”
One of the great quotes to come from William Gibson is “The future is here – it is just not evenly distributed.”
Which explains a lot. Some communities simply cannot adapt and are left behind. But slowly, the future does eventually get distributed to them and they can move forward.
The infrastructure bill the dems passed has a huge amount for rural infrastructure wrt the Internet. This will change them as much as electrification and indoor plumbing did 100 years ago. That is why the MAGAs are done for, eventually*. The past has no future.
*how long “eventually” is depends a lot on just how hard we fight back. I personally think we are over halfway to that endpoint
At the ski company, the Operations Manager quit last month, so it’s me (Assembly Head and whatever else), the Customer Service guy who works remote, two bookkeepers, and the owner. We’re looking for people to work Operations and also Marketing. My boss has been putting some of these tasks upon me and it’s not what I signed up for. I’m not a great organizer and I think marketing is a bullshit job.
This will all go away once all our parts arrive and I build telemark bindings, maybe?
re: #58 Belafon
I would suspect riding a broom nude is like riding a motorcycle nude: you feel the wind through your whole body, for sure, but the first crash is your last.
The splinters would be horrible…
re: #93 teleskiguy
At the ski company, the Operations Manager quit last month, so it’s me (Assembly Head and whatever else), the Customer Service guy who works remote, two bookkeepers, and the owner. We’re looking for people to work Operations and also Marketing. My boss has been putting some of these tasks upon me and it’s not what I signed up for. I’m not a great organizer and I think marketing is a bullshit job.
This will all go away once all our parts arrive and I build telemark bindings, maybe?
I think Boss wants to keep you more than ever…maybe pick 2 things to say ‘no’ to?
re: #94 TedStriker
The splinters would be horrible…
Hair in the slipstream says she’s riding it backwards. Show-off.
re: #91 Nerdy Fish
And now there’s free lunch… will the horrors never cease?
The inability to adapt to changes is a hallmark of the MAGAs. They are a personification of Tofflers Future Shock. They want everything to be like it was back in the days when they could deal with the slower rates of innovation adoption.
The problem for them is that there are communities that CAN deal with these rates of change (ie Gen Z) and do it quite successfully. That is why we fight - different communities organized to deal with different rates of change. Only one has a selective advantage in the current social environment.
That is why I know the MAGAs will lose. The successful communities will eventually surpass them and force therm to adapt, die or remove themselves from society in some sort of MAGA Galt’s Gulch, likely in Guyana ;-)
re: #97 silverdolphin
or remove themselves from society in some sort of MAGA Galt’s Gulch, likely in Guyana ;-)
Do they have a GoFundMe?
re: #66 silverdolphin
According to your first chart, only about a third of the things in it have hit the 90% mark. And it looks like there are a few things in every epoch that spike really fast, while the others take a while.
But the rapid changes a lot of people freak out about aren’t technological but social, such as minorities becoming the largest group or Christianity losing it’s grip on society.
Ross Perot. Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a very long time.
I thought about voting for him. I don’t remember exactly what did it, but at some point I realized he was a crackpot who shouldn’t be anywhere near the presidency.
re: #101 Charles Johnson
Ross Perot. Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a very long time.
I thought about voting for him. I don’t remember exactly what did it, but at some point I realized he was a crackpot who shouldn’t be anywhere near the presidency.
CIA sabotage of his daughter’s wedding, IIRC.
re: #96 Decatur Deb
Hair in the slipstream says she’s riding it backwards. Show-off.
She’s a witch.
She can do what she wants
re: #58 Belafon
I would suspect riding a broom nude is like riding a motorcycle nude: you feel the wind through your whole body, for sure, but the first crash is your last.
Knew a guy who was known to skydive naked thru a raincloud.
His friends said yes it’s true.
Always wondered about the dangly bits, and having driven motorcycles at speed in the rain, are you falling at the same speed as the rain drops?
re: #96 Decatur Deb
Hair in the slipstream says she’s riding it backwards. Show-off.
That’s artist license to protect her modesty.
re: #73 Hecuba’s daughter
Perot was brilliant, not a racist, and had the absolutely the best commercials. His VP was unabashedly pro-choice. He may have been a disaster as President but he would not have been a danger to our democracy.
And the hit job the media did on Stockdale was unforgivable in my book. I knew of him before Perot chose him, having read his and his wife’s book “In Love and War” when it came out in 1984. He was a brilliant man, and the media was brutally unfair.
Beware of #GabrielCaswell. He was caught on camera killing 80 kittens! https://t.co/kAVnsOw1Lh pic.twitter.com/fx9MVayjUf
— Phaedra (@PhaedraXTeddy) August 27, 2023
Here’s the original story in the Weatherford
Democrat.
Former shelter employee arrested on animal cruelty charges
re: #70 Captain Magic
Florida was the key state where the votes made the difference.
The tripping point was Palm Beach County’s butterfly ballot.
(yes trip)
re: #99 Belafon
According to your first chart, only about a third of the things in it have hit the 90% mark. And it looks like there are a few things in every epoch that spike really fast, while the others take a while.
But the rapid changes a lot of people freak out about aren’t technological but social, such as minorities becoming the largest group or Christianity losing it’s grip on society.
A great point and, in my presentation, I have an explanation. Essentially social animals have two basic ways to organize themselves - hierarchical authority (ie gorillas) and distributed democracy (ie bonbons). Humans organize themselves with the most complex balance of each in order to succeed in a particular social environment.
Over at least the last 250 years or so, the groups that are able to adapt to the more complex social environment created by disruptive technologies have been the ones that are less hierarchical and more democratic (the Yankees, the North, the Allies). That is, they work to increase the size and diversity of their communities to more easily deal with the more complex social environments. Heck, I beleive one eason the small nation of Britain took over the world is that it had a more democratic society than any of the other European nations, allowing them to more easily find wise solutions.
This, of course, freaks out those that have a hard time adapting. But, increased diversity is an emergent property of adapting to a new and more complex environment. Much harder to come up with solutions when half the population is excluded, or people of color are excluded, or disabled people are excluded.
We now live in such a complex social environment, one that has to find solutions to climate change and pandemics, that any attempt to limit the diversity of the group lessens tremendously the chnaces of solving those problems.
Because of the way out social networks are designed, a diverse network will more easily move large amounts of information around rapidly to make sure the right information gets to the right person at the right time to make a wise decision. Hierarchy moves information too slowly (up and down in silos). But social networks ae truly organized to follow the six degress of separationm=, allowing huge amounts of information to be moved around easily, where a hierarchy would fail.
The losing side is almost always epistemically closed, not allowing anyone who does not already belong to enter. And its increasing hierarchy means it is only as smart as the person at the top. This means that they will not adapt well and will make stupid decisions (ie Gettysburg, Battle of the Bulge)
This is one reason I expect the US to win in the end. It is the largest, most diverse country to ever exist. No one else comes close. And because of its fundamental design (something the MAGAs want to destroy), it has the most complex social networks that allow rapid adaption to disruptive change.
Chuck Todd to Vivek Ramaswamy: “Your argument comes across as blaming those that are trying to create equality for the rise in racism” pic.twitter.com/zla9JUMriW
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 27, 2023
I realize I’m on a tear with the same points recently, but I want to highlight this interaction because it illustrates what I’m going on about.
The conservative position is that they’re proposing true equality by creating color-blind institutions, a position that requires denying any systemic racism, or even that racism exists as something beyond “hate” as an individual choice. Racism is over, except for when morally-compromised individuals are racist, and thus there is nothing for a government to do…but that racism would be better if conservative values and institutions were allowed more license to control and regulate culture.
That racism is an excuse for theft, and to address racism is to address that theft has occurred or is occurring, is anathema, because in their “traditional” hierarchy there are entitled castes that can take labor and resources as a right of their caste, and many castes that have less rights to their own labor and property.
In advancing this position with rhetoric, what conservative repeats is that the flaw of the current world is the product of inequalities in favor of minorities…hence there is racism, just racism against white people that must be “solved” by removing accountability systems that enforce civil rights and aid programs that materially address the effects of long-term discrimination.
Let’s line that up:
- there is no inherent racial hierarchy
- but there is an inherent hierarchy that is meritocratic and capitalist
- governance and social organization should ideally be structure to allow meritocracy to function unimpeded
- but people that will fail in “true” meritocracy rig the world to keep the above from attained it’s ideal form
- and minority groups as a collective are attempting to warp the natural order of society through acts such as: observing racism, discussing racism, reacting to racism, and attempting to create legal frameworks that adjust racism
- the government and social organizations that facilitate the actions of minorities are therefore unjust, and their enforcement of antiracist norms is tyrannical
- the appropriate response is to vote for a conservative government that will use state violence to restore the social hierarchy
- which inherently involves mistrusting and monitoring minorities because they have rigged systems to their benefit
- but also individual conservatives must be armed because insurgent violence may become necessary at any time
Now let’s compare that to justifications that racist shooters use:
- there is a racial hierarchy
- injustice is minorities being granted license to exist with dignity and freedom
- injustice is whites having reduced license to deprive others of dignity and freedom
— the current system of both governance and social order must therefore be understood as unjust, even tyrannical, because it does not actively restore the caste system and enforce it with state violence
- therefore an appropriate response is insurgent violence that will eventually produce a state that acknowledges inherent hierarchy.
What’s notable here is that they’re arguing for the same end-structure: a state that incorporates race into it’s application of state violence and it’s sharing of rights.
The conservative position is filled with implication—
why do minorities act as collectives to disrupt natural and just meritocracy?
where the unstated answer is simply the racism stated allowed by the shooter, or a deeper conspiratorial position in which some third force has made this happen such that minorities have no agency (and is thus also racism).
But both propose a state that functions the same way: there are inferior types of people that must handled different, kept from having full license, franchise, and dignity, because they pose a threat to the preferred norms of the conservative. The solution is to implement a -slightly- softer version of what the terrorist demands, because the terrorist has accurately diagnosed the crisis of modern society.
Effectively, the rhetoric of the shooter and the rhetoric of the conservative observer* form a ratchet. The audience is presented with a false choice—violence on a leash or violence roaming free—when in reality the former depends on the latter to justify itself, and thus has no incentive to stop the process. Which precisely explains conservative institution’s indifference to gun violence generally and phobic terrorism in particular. They actually need the violence as a carrot for their followers that crave a state in which they can personally enforce hierarchy.
What we’re watching is the slow selling of Fraenkel’s dual state (the normative and prerogative states) as the de jure formal structure of government as a solution to a de facto dual state in which terrorist and conventional politicians coordinate their rhetoric to achieve common ends.
* and for that matter the “centrist” or “liberal” observer that presents these killings as apolitical, reflective of individual failings such that the shooter can themselves be deemed a loser, and thus not reflective of a systemic problem reproduced through existing norms.
re: #111 The Ghost of a Flea
Recall the screaming fit the GOP were ready to throw over a report under the Obma Admin about the rise in Right-Wing terrorism.
To the point that they withdrew the report
Imagine the nerve of them politicizing political violence.
Goddamn right it can.
Order a second mug, I’ll be right over. https://t.co/GPVjhVH5U5— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) August 27, 2023
re: #99 Belafon
According to your first chart, only about a third of the things in it have hit the 90% mark. And it looks like there are a few things in every epoch that spike really fast, while the others take a while.
But the rapid changes a lot of people freak out about aren’t technological but social, such as minorities becoming the largest group or Christianity losing it’s grip on society.
Also, I use this as a simple model because, as you point out, some things are adopted faster. I expect that a lot of this is due to infrastructure needs. That is, the adoption of refrigerators requires the presence of electricity.
But as a first approximation, I was fascinated to see that a curve could actually be generated.
re: #93 teleskiguy
At the ski company, the Operations Manager quit last month, so it’s me (Assembly Head and whatever else), the Customer Service guy who works remote, two bookkeepers, and the owner. We’re looking for people to work Operations and also Marketing. My boss has been putting some of these tasks upon me and it’s not what I signed up for. I’m not a great organizer and I think marketing is a bullshit job.
This will all go away once all our parts arrive and I build telemark bindings, maybe?
If you have an aware boss, he may already know that.
At least let him know that you’re good with customer relations, but marketing future sales isn’t your mojo.
re: #47 sagehen
I voted for Anderson. Waste of a vote.
I voted for Jimmy Carter. I was sorely disappointed he lost.
re: #52 Nerdy Fish
I voted for George W. Bush in 2004. (Sorry.) In 2008, I didn’t vote; logistics were difficult, being newly married and still settling into Minnesota. In 2012, I did vote for Barack Obama.
I didn’t vote between 1996 and 2007 (homeless, ineligible). I didn’t vote in 2008 because I had not yet established residency requirements in Oklahoma.
re: #57 Belafon
Why write a diary if no one else is going to read it?
I see you haven’t seen my LiveJournal blog then. /s
Jill and I are praying for the victims, their families, and the people of Jacksonville following yesterday’s shooting.
As we continue searching for answers, we must say clearly and forcefully that white supremacy has no place in America.
Here’s my full statement. pic.twitter.com/tdxxnZnPGk— President Biden (@POTUS) August 27, 2023
So at the local roadside produce stand one more fucking hard guy strapped up with a pistol on his hip as his wife and daughter stare at the produce.
I stared a hole through him and when he looked at me I just shook my head.
I was almost hoping he would say something.
THAT sets me off.
In what fucking world does he live where a local produce stand run by women would be a spot to strap up?
jfc what a pussy.
Him with a piece on his hip protects nothing and nobody and I want to punch them in the throat, empty the piece and throw it on a roof or under a truck or shove it up his ass.
rant off.
Relax.
Chill.
I had friends shot as a kid.
I had guns pulled on me.
I was on a corner that was unloaded on, nobody hit luckily.
Then I have to witness this stupidity?
Eff off, all the way off.
Back to the day.
re: #66 silverdolphin
I’ve been working on a presentation examining how communities adapt to change. Here is something I created that I find both horrifying and interesting. The rates at which new innovations penetrate the market place is exponentially increasing.
Here are the market penetration curves for refrigerators, cars, microwaves, etc.
[Embedded content]
So, in 1900, it took a new technology 100 years for go from 10% to 90% of the market. Thirty-five years later, this was down to 50 years. By 1970 it was 25 years. 2005 it was 12 and by 2040 it will be 5 years!!Now, this is just a model and there are things to do to make it better. There are not a lot of data regarding market penetration 100 years ago compared to today. So all this could be an artifact. Or the actual rate could be a little different.
BUT, it certainly fits the way many of us feel - the world is changing to much faster today. You barely get used to something when something new comes along. Should you stick with the old way or move to the new one? where before you had years to make the choice, now you have days. And it your community is not organized to deal with that, well, you get the MAGAs.
None of the other things (except autos and telephones) could happen without an electric network first.
A flip to this is it’s a lot harder to build out an electric network for a continent-wide nation than it is to sell refrigerators, radios, or cell phones which are all built in one place then shipped.
re: #119 Backwoods Sleuth
As we continue searching for answers, we must say clearly and forcefully that white supremacy has no place in America.
Typical Leftist tactics: politicizing white supremacist gun violence!
re: #112 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))
Recall the screaming fit the GOP were ready to throw over a report under the Obma Admin about the rise in Right-Wing terrorism.
To the point that they withdrew the report
Imagine the nerve of them politicizing political violence.
Obama shouldn’t have blinked on that.
re: #121 nines09
So at the local roadside produce stand one more fucking hard guy strapped up with a pistol on his hip as his wife and daughter stare at the produce.
I stared a hole through him and when he looked at me I just shook my head.
I was almost hoping he would say something.
re: #119 Backwoods Sleuth
There is a sad tradition of white supremacy in America, upheld by many American institutions, and believed in by a too-large minority of Americans.
But it’s time to put away childish things.
re: #120 Backwoods Sleuth
great headline
[Embedded content]
He’ll never catch Kim Jong il.
That MF got 11 holes in one in a single round.
/
re: #126 jaunte
There is a sad tradition of white supremacy in America, upheld by many American institutions, and believed in by a too-large minority of Americans.
But it’s time to put away childish things.
It’s time to call it out by name, not to mainstream it nor to give it any cachet of intellectual viability or legal authority
re: #128 jaunte
Obviously Muhammad Ali level physique.
[Embedded content]
He might’ve been an ok golfer, but here’s a recent shot by this “club champion”
tiktok.com
re: #111 The Ghost of a Flea
Okay, so I forgot an important ellipsis in that dissection:
By their own reporting, conservative values are individualistic and meritocratic, but when you open how “merit” is actually assigned it is full of base assumptions that trans-individual systems that provide value are acceptable…but only for specific kinds of people.
Mostly basically…”merit” is heritable, both literally in the sense that you can have merit just by virtue of having inherited wealth, but also more diffusely in that a family’s merit can effectively be loaned to an individual who is otherwise not creating value. But more generally, “merit” calculations occur while directly denying context and systems—as Sauron said, “there’s no such thing as society, there’s only individuals”—but only for individuals at the top of the hierarchy.
Hence why we encounter “centrists” making excuses for conservative policy that amount to theft or…and this is far more common…abhorring leftism as impossible, unserious, and dangerous, you’ll probably find arguments rooted in merit that refuse to acknowledge systems and context acting over time as factors in who has power and money. What is acceptable redistribution and unacceptable redistribution hinges on the premise of capital accumulation as individual merit, but pay no attention to the ways that individuals are embedded in systems that grant inherent advantage. It works the same as the conservative argument about racism: the end result is
Neoliberalism is just conservatism with more sophisticated euphemisms.
re: #132 The Ghost of a Flea
Also our entire society is just infested with half-assed notions from eugenicists such that ideas that back-channel into racism are constantly reproduced as social norms.
For example, the entire premise of “Idiocracy.”
re: #132 The Ghost of a Flea
Okay, so I forgot an important ellipsis in that dissection:
By their own reporting, conservative values are individualistic and meritocratic, but when you open how “merit” is actually assigned it is full of base assumptions that trans-individual systems that provide value are acceptable…but only for specific kinds of people.
Mostly basically…”merit” is heritable, both literally in the sense that you can have merit just by virtue of having inherited wealth, but also more diffusely in that a family’s merit can effectively be loaned to an individual who is otherwise not creating value. But more generally, “merit” calculations occur while directly denying context and systems—as Sauron said, “there’s no such thing as society, there’s only individuals”—but only for individuals at the top of the hierarchy.
Hence why we encounter “centrists” making excuses for conservative policy that amount to theft or…and this is far more common…abhorring leftism as impossible, unserious, and dangerous, you’ll probably find arguments rooted in merit that refuse to acknowledge systems and context acting over time as factors in who has power and money. What is acceptable redistribution and unacceptable redistribution hinges on the premise of capital accumulation as individual merit, but pay no attention to the ways that individuals are embedded in systems that grant inherent advantage. It works the same as the conservative argument about racism: the end result is
Neoliberalism is just conservatism with more sophisticated euphemisms
I mean, Don Jr. has a going business in spite of his drug addiction and general lack of smarts or character. He “inherited” wealth and thinks that makes him a winner.
re: #110 silverdolphin
It’s noice to hear a breath of optimism once in a while over all the gloom-and-doom.
re: #132 The Ghost of a Flea
Mostly basically…”merit” is heritable, both literally in the sense that you can have merit just by virtue of having inherited wealth, but also more diffusely in that a family’s merit can effectively be loaned to an individual who is otherwise not creating value.
As if George Dubya Bush got into Princeton on his academic merits
re: #122 Anymouse 🌹🏡😷
None of the other things (except autos and telephones) could happen without an electric network first.
A flip to this is it’s a lot harder to build out an electric network for a continent-wide nation than it is to sell refrigerators, radios, or cell phones which are all built in one place then shipped.
Yep, infrastructure is important for many of the points. But even infrastructure penetration has shown similar increases (I’ve also graphed it using infrastructure and we see a similar decreasing curve. Public roads to plumbing/electricity to internet).
Carlota Perez’ models of disruptive change always have a new power source that create new infrastructures and economies that need to be adapted to. So, autos used fossil fuels and created roads. Trains used steam and created railroads. This leads to a lot of other innovations that can use these new power sources and infrastructure to create new, more complex economies.
So it is expected that a lot of new technologies would show up when a new economy is created due to new disrutive technologies, one that almost always need infrastructure.
A first approximation is that those technologies that enhance information flow in human social networks are adopted faster . This makes it more likely that wise decisions are made because the right information gets to the right person easier.
I’ve been writing a lot of weird and alarming shit here. I’m sorry to those I’ve distressed. I’m going through things. Out of all of my Dad’s children I get to bear the brunt of all the horrible shit he’s going through. Hell, my sisters didn’t even know my Dad had cancer until quite recently, I was told to keep it a secret.
re: #112 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))
Recall the screaming fit the GOP were ready to throw over a report under the Obma Admin about the rise in Right-Wing terrorism.
To the point that they withdrew the report
Imagine the nerve of them politicizing political violence.
A report that was requisitioned by the Bush admin, it took several years to research and write, and was finally ready for release early in the Obama admin.
re: #139 teleskiguy
I’ve been writing a lot of weird and alarming shit here. I’m sorry to those I’ve distressed. I’m going through things. Out of all of my Dad’s children I get to bear the brunt of all the horrible shit he’s going through. Hell, my sisters didn’t even know my Dad had cancer until quite recently, I was told to keep it a secret.
c0lOdEtaa1pNcWRzVzJwM3VCQUNockVmcGV5ZktJeUdlUW9wNU9UWnRzZzlBWkJ1SDNJU1BSdjdQTUlHK1lGak5NTmF6TWVHRlllL0hHQ0xJRGFGRC9uaGx1b2p6ZkphRjRITHBVODFxMUU9Ojo7TUHNMZpeYZFox4XTS2/e
re: #142 Unabogie
VnowclpuUzJQM212Ym9ydm5ycXBpdz09OjpSZIpmUKuY9CD3xev9n3/q
re: #132 The Ghost of a Flea
Neoliberalism is just conservatism with more sophisticated euphemisms.
One of the most significant points in the immortal “conservatism consists of exactly one proposition” rant is that we’ve never actually seen (at scale) any politics that is truly non-conservative, in the sense that it really does reject legal bias in favor of an in-group and legal bias against out-groups.
I am way more open here than elsewhere online. WAY.
re: #143 teleskiguy
[Embedded content]
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
re: #139 teleskiguy
Process away. Better to ventilate than hold it in. We got you.
I spent all day yesterday reading about dead people.
re: #132 The Ghost of a Flea
Neoliberalism is just conservatism with more sophisticated euphemisms.
Capitalism had to maintain some pretense of a human face to compete ideologically with Communism. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, Capitalism simply stopped pretending and gave rise to neocons and neolibs, neorandians and generally cynical bloodsucking “corporations are people, too!” predatory capitalists.
Carter 1980 was also the first President I was old enough to vote for.
re: #150 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))
Capitalism had to maintain some pretense of a human face to compete ideologically with Communism. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, Capitalism simply stopped pretending and gave rise to neocons and neolibs, neorandians and generally cynical bloodsucking “corporations are people, too!” predatory capitalists.
Yes, it is crystal clear that capital is hoping for a gilded age 2.0 now that the external ‘threat’ of communism is ended and the media is neutered to prevent any repeat of the muckraking journalism that helped spoil their first attempt.
re: #138 silverdolphin
Yep, infrastructure is important for many of the points. But even infrastructure penetration has shown similar increases (I’ve also graphed it using infrastructure and we see a similar decreasing curve. Public roads to plumbing/electricity to internet).
Carlota Perez’ models of disruptive change always have a new power source that create new infrastructures and economies that need to be adapted to. So, autos used fossil fuels and created roads. Trains used steam and created railroads. This leads to a lot of other innovations that can use these new power sources and infrastructure to create new, more complex economies.
So it is expected that a lot of new technologies would show up when a new economy is created due to new disrutive technologies, one that almost always need infrastructure.
A first approximation is that those technologies that enhance information flow in human social networks are adopted faster . This makes it more likely that wise decisions are made because the right information gets to the right person easier.
Side note: My house got indoor plumbing in the Fifties. The home I grew up in got indoor plumbing in the Sixties.
The newer disruptive technologies are also based on the old. It would have been much harder to build out rural electrification if there weren’t already railroads and at least a few decent roads to transport the necessary materials and personnel.
The eight so-called State Aid Bridges built here during the Great Depression used a modern model (a single architectural design for steel trusses and wooden decks) and an old-fashioned construction method (construct the bridges at the site of the bridge and use local materials).
Two are still in use as road bridges today (the one in my town was replaced in 2011): Just east of me in Lisco (the former alignment of US-6) and the next village east of that Llewellyn.
re: #153 EPR-radar
Yes, it is crystal clear that capital is hoping for a gilded age 2.0 now that the external ‘threat’ of communism is ended and the media is neutered to prevent any repeat of the muckraking journalism that helped spoil their first attempt.
Now that they are free to outright own the media, yes.
re: #139 teleskiguy
NXlQYmlDWi9QdTQ0emFPZlBtS1kxSGMwSDhHbGRSWlBlKytGbWdUVHM5OGJacnlGSmpEWjdYNTErVlNET3VNNkMyVW05elBHUnJKcUpJejNJUmtRMHZCUkRSbHhrSDFBcnlKcnNuYXNRNG91VTlmZXoydEc3NTNJZkxHbk5JRENWcE9EMlJzYjN1S3J1RVdvRFBtUmsyRDNDZVMrSTNTTjAzekdIanAxMjRNbFQrNXRJMk1TVnVLTjNTUTVaSlNaUVRvZUNiZDFZRkIwWlN1QThCbUJjRnUzQWxBQjg0VGpzcmFwbENmUzBrUDNRbVVTQ0h5YzVTcFR2aW9ZUVhDeDo6bUUfA2QRxzqD9VqR/gSc2Q==
re: #82 teleskiguy
A great photo !
We are 1 degree of separation from each other - through Senator, Elizabeth Warren! Was on a flight with her in 2017 to TX I met her at National Airport in DC in 2019.
Deep breaths and blessings in caring for elderly parents I am in second decade of such things. I gots some stories …
re: #136 Anymouse 🌹🏡😷
It’s noice to hear a breath of optimism once in a while over all the gloom-and-doom.
One thing I have seen when looking at the previous transition periods we are now living through (there have been at least 4 and maybe 5 in the last 250 years). During the debacle it was never obvious who would win. But in hindsight, it always seems obvious.
The losing side always makes stupid mistakes because they are not organzed to adapt rapidly to the complex battlefield they find themselves in. Gettysburg. Midway. Attacking Russia. The Batlle of the Bulge. The losing side is always more hierarchical than the winning side. This means they cannot adapt rapidly because the guy at the top has to be involved in the decision. The winning side always pushes power and decision-making to the edges, allowing them to rapidly adapt to the fog of war.
A small group of Union soldiers at the end of the line make the decison to fix bayonets and scream while charging downhill, routing the South and changing the course of Gettysburg. A handful of sharpshooters, ostensibly collecting intelligence, stay behind and successfull stop the Nazi tank advance for 18 critical hours during the Battle of the Bulge. Neither needed orders from above.
The losing side is always too hierarchical, striving for an epistemically closed community that excludes others. The winning side is always more democratic, striving for wise solutions no matter where they come from. (For example, the Red Ball Express during WW2. The Allies did not just induct white males. They had a lot of African Americans also. Even in a segregated military, important roles for the minorities were found. The Red Ball Express, 12 ton vehicles that had priority even over the transportation of generals, was critical during the Battle of the Bulge. They emptied virtually all of the
fuel dumps needed by the Nazi tanks to move forward. They eventualky ran out of fuel and that was all she wrote.)
SO we are seeing the same thing play out now as the losing side is too hiearchical and is making stupid mistakes (ie history will see that overturning Roe v Wade as a stupid decision as it activated a huge number of people). Imeaching Biden? Shutting down the government? Stupid.
SO I am hopeful because the same general arc is playing out as it as before.
Hell I think even Jared Kushner is heavier than 215.
Perot jumped in for the last prez election before I could vote. I was… enchanted at first. Here’s this guy who is willing to talk numbers, with real charts and trends to back him up. Someone willing to park his butt behind a desk and talk about details to the whole country for a half hour. Someone willing to engage with the way I thought about the world. Someone willing to be skeptical about the national parties.
Then he dropped out of the race temporarily - still don’t understand why - and I looked back on all those things he’d said and realized that while he pointed out things which are problems, he never really said what he would do about them. So his argument boiled down to “I’m a smart guy, I’ll fix the intractable big-numbers problems.” And unstated but strongly implied was “no, I’m not going to raise [my own] taxes”. So I started cheering for Clinton, and maybe yelled at my mother when she admitted voting for Perot.
Strangely, Trump originally scanned to me as a less-impressive Perot figure when he showed up in 2015. I knew Trump was a birther, and engaged in a fairly public case of mutual loathing with Obama, so I never was going to vote for him. But I figured it wouldn’t be all that bad if he won, being a NY businessdude with some ambiguous political background and apparently reasonably successful at what he did. By the end of the primaries I knew better, of course…
I haz a Bluesky code for any interested lizards.
RkNEUk1qTEF0U3BObjNnZG1qMERiUGJWek5IS2RCd0ZQK1RHNWx2eUIrYz06OhddjtnHXf90KcjVi/KPkpw=
re: #161 SandwichKed
Perot jumped in for the last prez election before I could vote. I was… enchanted at first. Here’s this guy who is willing to talk numbers, with real charts and trends to back him up. Someone willing to park his butt behind a desk and talk about details to the whole country for a half hour. Someone willing to engage with the way I thought about the world. Someone willing to be skeptical about the national parties.
Then he dropped out of the race temporarily - still don’t understand why - and I looked back on all those things he’d said and realized that while he pointed out things which are problems, he never really said what he would do about them. So his argument boiled down to “I’m a smart guy, I’ll fix the intractable big-numbers problems.” And unstated but strongly implied was “no, I’m not going to raise [my own] taxes”. So I started cheering for Clinton, and maybe yelled at my mother when she admitted voting for Perot (after he got back in the race).
Strangely, Trump originally scanned to me as a less-impressive Perot figure when he showed up in 2015. I knew Trump was a birther, and engaged in a fairly public case of mutual loathing with Obama, so I never was going to vote for him. But I figured it wouldn’t be all that bad if he won, being a NY businessdude with some ambiguous political background and apparently reasonably successful at what he did. By the end of the primaries I knew better, of course…
And the GOP alternative to Trump for the past decade has essentially been some flavor of Ted Cruz. As in for policy talk or the patter in general you could switch any of them with Ted Cruz and it would sound exactly the same.
I’m confident that abortion will doom the Republican Party. Politically, the Dobbs case will be as significant as the Dred Scott decision. We won’t see another Civil War, fortunately. Even the most conservative women on my FB (especially those in Texas) are pissed.
re: #150 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))
Capitalism had to maintain some pretense of a human face to compete ideologically with Communism. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, Capitalism simply stopped pretending and gave rise to neocons and neolibs, neorandians and generally cynical bloodsucking “corporations are people, too!” predatory capitalists.
The most awful parts of what is called capitalism are really rent-seeking behavior which Adam Smith abhorred because of its distortive effect on capitalism. It makes nothing and only takes from others.
So much of what neoliberalism did was to make rent-seeking behaviors easier for the wealthy. So many of the barriers put in after the Depression to curtail rent-seeking behavior (which arguably caused the Stock Market crash) were removed in the 90s.
One of the first things we will likely do when we are through this transition period is r-regulate much of the res=nt-seeking behaviors.
re: #161 SandwichKed
My husband and I were automatically suspicious of Perot, because of who he was. And at the time, my brother worked under him (well under him!) and he was a horrible manager of that division. It was like he wanted it to fail so he could dump it and the people, after milking their knowledge from them.
re: #82 teleskiguy
I voted for Joe Biden.
[Embedded content]
I don’t think she could have won, but she was my favorite — my primary vote went to Joe.
re: #169 Hecuba’s daughter
I don’t think she could have won, but she was my favorite — my primary vote went to Joe.
I voted in the Colorado primary that year in jail. I voted for Liz. Bernie won.
re: #158 silverdolphin
The losing side is always more hierarchical than the winning side. This means they cannot adapt rapidly because the guy at the top has to be involved in the decision. The winning side always pushes power and decision-making to the edges, allowing them to rapidly adapt to the fog of war.
For the Yom Kippur War, all the reserves units (organized mostly geographically) were activated through a nationwide broadcast. But specific intel and comms were spotty at best. So each unit just did… whatever seemed like a good idea at the time. “Hey Shmuley, do you see what I see?” “Yeah Avi, let’s do yadda yadda yadda.” “Okay, whatevs, seems worth a try.”
re: #167 silverdolphin
The most awful parts of what is called capitalism are really rent-seeking behavior which Adam Smith abhorred because of its distortive effect on capitalism. It makes nothing and only takes from others.
“Loan us all your money and we’ll use it to buy everyting you own and lease it back to you!”
This relentless heat is screwing with my mental health.
Thank god it’s supposed to end tomorrow (this heat dome has lasted almost two weeks).
On the topic of spoiler candidates, Perot was running during my first ever election and I loved, loved, LOVED him. That is, until he dropped out and started making crazy conspiracy noises. Looking back, he was a nut and would have been terrible. He also made strange statements about doing things that would be effective at stopping crime but “wouldn’t be pretty.” I think he would have been a fascist.
My next mistake was Nader in 2000. I was convinced that Gore and Bush were basically the same. I didn’t realize that both were running more to the center than they actually were, and I didn’t look carefully enough at their actual records, and I have since used that experience to ensure I don’t repeat mistakes like that. I vote for the Democrat because the Republican will be terrible.
re: #166 teleskiguy
I’m confident that abortion will doom the Republican Party. Politically, the Dobbs case will be as significant as the Dred Scott decision. We won’t see another Civil War, fortunately. Even the most conservative women on my FB (especially those in Texas) are pissed.
I completely agree. One hallmark of the losing side during these times of transition (there have been at least 4 in the last 250 years) is that the losing side makes stupid decisions.
Dred Scot. Secession. Gettysburg. Midway. Attacking Russia. Battle of the Bulge. Dodd.
They make stupid decisions because they are not organized to make wise decisions in the more complex socdial environment they inhabit. Usually because they are too hierarchical, meaning they are only as smart as the guy at the top.
The winning side always pushed more power to the edges, using larger, more diverse groups of people to make wiser decisions.They are as smart as the entire community, not just one guy. I can tell just by how the sides are organized who will win.
It always looks dark DURING these debacles. But history always makes it seem inevitable. Because it is.
The MAGAs will fail. They simply are not organized to make the wise decisions necessary to succeed. We are.
re: #161 SandwichKed
Welcome, dead-thread rehatchling.
re: #173 Eclectic Cyborg
Houston weather people are predicting cooler weather for SE Texas in the latter half of Fall, (i.e. January).
.@jrpsaki responds to Republicans’ misleading claims about late-term abortions: pic.twitter.com/cAXwvxCv91
— Inside with Jen Psaki (@InsideWithPsaki) August 27, 2023
re: #166 teleskiguy
I’m confident that abortion will doom the Republican Party. Politically, the Dobbs case will be as significant as the Dred Scott decision. We won’t see another Civil War, fortunately. Even the most conservative women on my FB (especially those in Texas) are pissed.
The Dred Scott case was an example of “conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, &c.”
The Lost Causer argument was always “States’ Rights” to hide that their cause was really about owning people as property. But when the Dred Scott case came up, the state’s right to say “no slavery is permitted here” was taken away from Mr. Scott and that state. On top of that, it legalised their bounty-hunter slavers to cross state lines and enforce their laws in other states (and engage in outright crime, like kidnapping free Blacks in free states).
re: #166 teleskiguy
I’m confident that abortion will doom the Republican Party.
There are two major currents in the party, the Bible-Thumpers and the Government-Haters
And what does Dobbs give us? More government interference in our lives!!!
Their own ideology is coming to bite itself in the ass
re: #78 Decatur Deb
Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat 7th Grade.
Those who do study history are doomed to watch. those who didn’t repeat it.
re: #171 sagehen
For the Yom Kippur War, all the reserves units (organized mostly geographically) were activated through a nationwide broadcast. But specific intel and comms were spotty at best. So each unit just did… whatever seemed like a good idea at the time. “Hey Shmuley, do you see what I see?” “Yeah Avi, let’s do yadda yadda yadda.” “Okay, whatevs, seems worth a try.”
Such a great point. That is why Ukraine will beat Russia. The Russian army has no Non Commioned Officers. No one to help the soldiers operate tactically. So no one at the front does anything unlesws specifically ordered to by the top. This is why so many Russian generals have been killed. No one would do anything unless they went to the front to order them.
Ukraine is organized like we are ) or like Avi was ;-) STrategic orders are given by offiers who rely in NCO and the soldiers to deal with tactically. In an era when a single brigade can carry multiple tank killers and launch drones wirh bombs, this is the best approach,
re: #170 teleskiguy
I voted in the Colorado primary that year in jail. I voted for Liz. Bernie won.
This goes to show that there are a lot of liberals in Colorado. This wasn’t the case 30 years ago. Things have changed, bigly*.
*I hate that I use ‘bigly’ in my writing but goddamn it it works
re: #178 Joe Bacon ✅
[Embedded content]
I really love Jen Psaki. Such a sharp woman who can think on her feet like no one I’ve seen in a while.
Georgia electing not one but two Democratic senators. That is a big deal. And to a great extent the GOP’s own fault for nominating such a complete dud. Of and from whom we have not seen or heard a peep sense and rightly so.
Right now we’re at 91 in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles.
The drapes are drawn and the air conditioner has been going full blast since 11AM.
re: #185 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))
Raphael Warnock had to win TWO elections to get where he’s at.
re: #176 wrenchwench
Welcome, dead-thread rehatchling.
I was posting waaaaay way too much in the 2020 election, burnt out, and bailed on political blogs for a couple years. …then it was a mess recovering the password.
re: #177 jaunte
Houston weather people are predicting cooler weather for SE Texas in the latter half of Fall, (i.e. January).
Growing up in Houston, I loved the people and hated the climate. It would be uninhabitable without air conditioning. My mother always laughed about attempts to build ‘walkable’ communities in Houston. No one was going to walk around outside in 95º weather.
re: #185 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))
Georgia electing not one but two Democratic senators. That is a big deal. And to a great extent the GOP’s own fault for nominating such a complete dud. Of and from whom we have not seen or heard a peep sense and rightly so.
And just remember who is waiting for the next Georgia Senate Election to take out Jon—Empty Green!
re: #179 Anymouse 🌹🏡😷
The Dred Scott case was an example of “conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, &c.”
The Lost Causer argument was always “States’ Rights” to hide that their cause was really about owning people as property. But when the Dred Scott case came up, the state’s right to say “no slavery is permitted here” was taken away from Mr. Scott and that state. On top of that, it legalised their bounty-hunter slavers to cross state lines and enforce their laws in other states (and engage in outright crime, like kidnapping free Blacks in free states).
Dred Scot also is an example of Court overreach. Taney thought he could single-handedly solve the slavery problem by deciding on things not in evidence in the case. Such as overturning the MIssouri Compromise and mandating that slaves could not be kept out of ANY territory. This led to a run on the stocks of east-west railroads because everyone was afraid of a repeat of Bloody Kansas. This led to bank failures across not only the US but into Europe. The first Worldwide recession. This economic debacle could also be seen as leading to the war as the South was not hit nearly as much by the recession as the North, So they thought they could last longer in a war than the North.
They were wrong. One of the stupid mistakes they made.
re: #187 teleskiguy
Raphael Warnock had to win TWO elections to get where he’s at.
4; there were runoffs.
re: #190 Joe Bacon ✅
And just remember who is waiting for the next Georgia Senate Election to take out Jon—Empty Green!
My hope is that Cruz loses in Texas. He won by less than 1% point in 2018. Beto was a great candidate but a curent Dem running is a black former football player. Always a good thing in a Red State. The difference is he went to law school, worked in the Obama administration, and has been a voting rights advocate at a niultinational law firm.
Colin Allred is a 4th generation Texan. He won his House seat in a normally Red district but one seeing rapid demographic change. I am hopeful.
Maybe Russian propaganda is so used to gullible MAGAts they’ve forgotten how to even try for credibility with normal folk.
The MQ-9 Reaper has a maximum speed of approximately 400 kilometres per hour. The Russian fighter jet can fly several times faster. Therefore, it is not quite clear how the drone was able to get dangerously close to the manned aircraft.
Most sources give the MQ-9’s top speed as 300 mph, 480 kph, which is slower than most World War II fighters.
From a short while ago. Summer races past as time and tide wait for no man.
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
re: #189 silverdolphin
When my father’s oil company transfers brought him to Houston, he paid more than he could afford for a house that had this at the end of the back yard. We managed to stay cool swimming with the snakes and turtles.
re: #145 teleskiguy
I am way more open here than elsewhere online. WAY.
I’m sorry you have all this to cope with. It will get better.
re: #201 nines09
The old neighborhood is now filled with giant houses owned by people too rich to swim in the lakes.
re: #178 Joe Bacon ✅
Jen Psaki can run my country anytime.
If Trump played Kim Jong Un in a golf competition who would win, or would it be a tie at 18 holes in one a piece?
Judge a man by the company he keeps:https://t.co/O7Vbt0RVxC
— Philip of Burgundy (@Phil_Burgundy) August 27, 2023
re: #199 jaunte
When my father’s oil company transfers brought him to Houston, he paid more than he coud afford for a house that had this at the end of the back yard. We managed to stay cool swimming with the snakes and turtles.
[Embedded content]
Nice. would have liked that. Ever have any problems with flooding. When my father was transferred by his oil company (Getty), he bought a house in Sprng Branch.-Memorial. But it was also in a subdivision that was the highest land in the area so we never flooded.
re: #121 nines09
So at the local roadside produce stand one more fucking hard guy strapped up with a pistol on his hip as his wife and daughter stare at the produce.
I stared a hole through him and when he looked at me I just shook my head.
I was almost hoping he would say something.
THAT sets me off.
In what fucking world does he live where a local produce stand run by women would be a spot to strap up?
jfc what a pussy.
Him with a piece on his hip protects nothing and nobody and I want to punch them in the throat, empty the piece and throw it on a roof or under a truck or shove it up his ass.
rant off.
Relax.
Chill.
I had friends shot as a kid.
I had guns pulled on me.
I was on a corner that was unloaded on, nobody hit luckily.
Then I have to witness this stupidity?
Eff off, all the way off.
Back to the day.
Yesterday, when we were zooming with our brother, my sister went on one of her regular tirades against gun violence (especially in the schools) and expressed her admiration of David Hogg with a hope that when his generation takes power (like Maxwell Frost and the Tennessee Justins ) that they will stop this madness.
Meanwhile our brother proudly shows the small handgun he was taking with him to run his errands in the Dallas area and offered to send me one to use as protection. He then cites some report that claims that Dallas is the safest big city in the nation (what the report actually showed was that people felt it was the safest — not that there were statistics proving that). And talked about Texas providing 2 police officers to stand guard at every school to protect the students. Like that worked so well at Parkland. And as though the 376 officers at Uvalde stopped the slaughter.
re: #205 silverdolphin
The houses at the end of our street backed up to Buffalo Bayou, and some of them took water during the last big flood event, but not my parents’ house.
re: #207 jaunte
The houses at the end of our street backed up to Buffalo Bayou, and some of them took water during the last big flood event, but not my parents’ house.
A lot of houses got flooded when they released all the water from Addicks dam due to the 500 year storm and it worked its way down to Buffalo Bayou. One thing that I though Houston did require new houses built after the 60s to be several feet above grade to prevent house flooding. But subsidence has messed that up.
re: #202 jaunte
If you swan in any creek, stream or river in the 60’s in Philly, you got Hep.
Had a buddy fall into Frankford Creek, which we called Tacony Creek, and he got Hepatitis.
“Looking yella Jeff. Whas up?!?”
Oh and before they cleaned up detergents, towers of suds at every fall and pond with drops.
Never ate a fish from any water in Philly. Gave them away. Good luck.
re: #116 Anymouse 🌹🏡😷
I voted for Jimmy Carter. I was sorely disappointed he lost.
I worked for a guy who was major supporter of Jimmy Carter starting in late 1974.
Learned a lot about politics.
Have much respect for Jimmy Carter.
re: #208 silverdolphin
When we first moved to the old neighborhood, the area now covered by Memorial City Mall and the surrounding neighborhoods was marshland; Memorial Drive, Katy Road, and the MKT rail line were all elevated up above the low lying ground.
re: #209 nines09
Our rule when playing down in the Buffalo Bayou ravines was “don’t touch the water.”
re: #214 Anymouse 🌹🏡😷
That forecast moves the storm a bit to the E. We’ll be on the edge of the cone of probability.
re: #128 jaunte
Obviously Muhammad Ali level physique.
[Embedded content]
FWIW, I’m 5’11” my doc office scales say I weigh 222.
I have to admit my waist size (my excuse - my age) has expanded from 34” to 36”.
From downstairs
re: #119 Belafon
Yep:
I just need to figure out how to make it only take up 5% of my life.
But this argument gets the problem exactly backwards. In America, voters don’t do too little; the system demands too much. We have too many elections, for too many offices, on too many days. We have turned the role of citizen into a full-time, unpaid job. Disinterest is the predictable, even rational response.”
re: #120 Backwoods Sleuth
great headline
[Embedded content]
So did Kim Jong-il. Amazing people those 2.
re: #132 The Ghost of a Flea
Okay, so I forgot an important ellipsis in that dissection:
By their own reporting, conservative values are individualistic and meritocratic, but when you open how “merit” is actually assigned it is full of base assumptions that trans-individual systems that provide value are acceptable…but only for specific kinds of people.
……But more generally, “merit” calculations occur while directly denying context and systems—as Sauron said, “there’s no such thing as society, there’s only individuals”—but only for individuals at the top of the hierarchy.
…. you’ll probably find arguments rooted in merit that refuse to acknowledge systems and context acting over time as factors in who has power and money. ……
Meritocracy is a meaningless system if certain citizens benefit from superior education, health, and nutrition because of their family’s inherited wealth or favored racial status, while others are subjected to inferior education, ill-health, and sub-par diet because they lack wealth or are deemed to belong to an “inferior” group. Every child should be given an opportunity at success by making sure that they are provided quality education, health care, and diet — and that was what Lyndon Johnson was trying to implement when he was derailed by the Viet Nam War. If Humphrey had succeeded him, we would be living in a very different world now — and I believe a much better one.
We cannot change the past; we can only try to change the future and that means persuading enough people to throw out Republicans and give Democrats the power to accomplish the vision of a just future for all. Hard to see how that can be accomplished given the poison the conservative media had injected into body politic.
Since you lizards have been itching for a Loomer / Pool debate, I am to please.
The Laura Loomer surrogate for Trump vs DeSantis debate on Tim Pool’s show went exactly as you’d expect pic.twitter.com/8fLzsiyBJ4
— The Serfs (@theserfstv) August 18, 2023
re: #139 teleskiguy
I’ve been writing a lot of weird and alarming shit here. I’m sorry to those I’ve distressed. I’m going through things. Out of all of my Dad’s children I get to bear the brunt of all the horrible shit he’s going through. Hell, my sisters didn’t even know my Dad had cancer until quite recently, I was told to keep it a secret.
I know the feeling. My mother just passed away at the beginning of the month.
Final results of the poll
What is Peterson’s Batman Villain name?
— gocart mozart (@EdMix13) August 26, 2023
I’m donating all profits from these to the legal defense fund. I’m sure others will profit from merch but I’m just doing what I can to help. This will make the boat parades awesome.
Free Trump Flag - 3’x5’ – Shop Don Jr. https://t.co/Dr1IVtMfpD— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) August 27, 2023
re: #222 Eventual Carrion
I know the feeling. My mother just passed away at the beginning of the month.
[Embedded content]
I’m sorry to hear. Mine passed near Christmas last year. Finally figured out with siblings what to do with Dad, who can’t care for himself.
V1Y3Vjd4WjhwNHp5WGFMOVVlWGRjY0tCVmRwV3RBWDVrcVpwTjJ1QlVWTkRJaUtiOXZDWTA0aXNBUUVRdVJGcWRlOXFoTlBnR0hkVllqdlpoazVlaEMwdWM4NEtNbmt3MFNjc013QmplVStHWG92a2RxV082ZExsRU5FdU9STnZLeUx2dlNtL3Vsd0ZJc0JUYXY2ZTZJaGxqZjY2MVRPbDBJaklSSFE1MVptTDRIRkJqdkNpL2UzNU0rUWlkV1ZGQTlpZmFZWVUvdWo4TmMyNjdhYTJpMytXeGk1VE9zcllYRVVzL0grNC9oND06Oo81X/nwfR7KCJJwQlgGQXw=
re: #225 gocart mozart
[Embedded content]
Sooner or later the Trump faction heraldry had to revert to black-red-white.
re: #223 BeenHereAwhile
Couldn’t be more bloated if he washed up on the shore.
Desantis reads his statement today on the Jacksonville racist massacre with the same level of emotion as when he orders 6 Wawa chicken sandwiches. If the killer was a migrant he’d be ranting and raving, but it’s a white supremacist so we get the blasé monotone reading. pic.twitter.com/n6Hon4avql
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 27, 2023
He doesn’t care.
re: #222 Eventual Carrion
{{{Eventual Carrion}}}
re: #225 gocart mozart
[Embedded content]
“This will make the boat parades awesome.” Yep, they’ll look wonderful at the bottom of Lake Travis.
re: #225 gocart mozart
Gee I just can’t wait to see another bunch of boats with Trump flags sink into lakes again.
I guess there’s stuff I miss when I go to the grocery store after sunset. Like this prominently posted on the front door of the local Fry’s market.
While I was at the store, I finally cashed in my lotto ticket and it was worth $8. I won’t be winning the lotto any time soon.
My nephew, his wife and their toddler just touched down at the airport. Eventually they will go over to Mom’s and I will drive over.
re: #222 Eventual Carrion
RUk1VGhSYnlPelJicERUcFNSWlRKRWhrMmhzeFRLVS9TZ1g2WnFFSmFzNFU5aHpueTB1R24wbENrRnVFelN0Sjo6zdi82P0u0iPnMD9u/SqoDw==
re: #189 silverdolphin
Growing up in Houston, I loved the people and hated the climate. It would be uninhabitable without air conditioning. My mother always laughed about attempts to build ‘walkable’ communities in Houston. No one was going to walk around outside in 95º weather.
Not to mention periodic flooding.
Had a Houston BIL with a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and prior to on more than one flood storm occasion, he would have his general manager bring one of his semi tractors to his house and leave it parked it outside his garage.
His reasoning, if the water starts coming into the house, “I figure the semi tractor is a good exit vehicle for up to 3 - 4 ft of water.”
He’s since moved.
Help, neighbors, we’ve raised too much zucchini. And Trump.
re: #240 jaunte
Help, neighbors, we’ve raised too much zucchini. And Trump.
Like Trump, you’re supposed to force zucchini on your neighbors.
re: #241 Belafon
In Miami, it was avocados. I used to bring double paper shopping bags full to the office.
re: #225 gocart mozart
[Embedded content]
Boat parades? Ah, yes, who can forget the Battle of Lake Travis, aka Dumbkirk? To me me this accurately encapsulates the eventual course of MAGAtry: Ignorant privileged people whose arrogance and contempt for the common good will eventually sink them.
re: #196 silverdolphin
My hope is that Cruz loses in Texas. He won by less than 1% point in 2018. Beto was a great candidate but a curent Dem running is a black former football player. Always a good thing in a Red State. The difference is he went to law school, worked in the Obama administration, and has been a voting rights advocate at a niultinational law firm.
Colin Allred is a 4th generation Texan. He won his House seat in a normally Red district but one seeing rapid demographic change. I am hopeful.
What about Roland Gutierrez? He’s also competing for the nomination?
re: #225 gocart mozart
I’m donating all profits from these to the legal defense fund.
The kind of accounting wherein your profits come first.
re: #221 gocart mozart
Tim Pool never removes his knit cap.
re: #110 silverdolphin
A great point and, in my presentation, I have an explanation. Essentially social animals have two basic ways to organize themselves - hierarchical authority (ie gorillas) and distributed democracy (ie bonbons). Humans organize themselves with the most complex balance of each in order to succeed in a particular social environment.
Animals have hierarchies, but those hierarchies exist almost exclusively to control breeding habits, are temporary (an alpha can be defeated or expelled, then replaced, without societal disruption), and seem to always incorporate bypasses (for example, the persistence and ubiquity of “sneaky male” mating strategies) that bely the image that “the one big guy is in charge, most important.”
Indeed, a major problem in ethology is the projection of human notions of static hierarchy and dominance onto animals. Hence the persistent of Meck’s retracted notion of “alpha wolves.”
More deeply the problem with any animal model of human behavior is precisely that human culture is constantly reproduced with small alterations that aren’t necessarily rational, and base assumptions held by humans simply because they have been taught “it is true” hold steady regardless of what is materially happening. The biggest version of the persistence of abstraction through culture, and the one that is a fundamental bias to all analyses of human behavior, is the conceit that property and ownership on an individual or collective basis is a persistent thing, a qualia that objects have, beyond the immediate ability of an individual/collective to hold it.
Most of human history and social organization hinges on the conceit of property; all states are permutations of (1) an apparatus of violence to enforce property rights, (2) an explanatory structure to explains why and when that violence occurs.
This makes us…unlike any other being on earth…but also means that the most “successful” human institutions operate with the base assumption that somehow this is the only possible mode of human existence, to the point that most early anthropology and basically all history is tainted by that assumption: anybody not doing ownership and property is viewed as liminal to human experience, either a throwback or a malefactor.
It’s also, on it’s face, anthropologically inaccurate: Forager societies where ownership is limited to one’s subsistence and some personal items are not democratic, they’re not chartable on a conventional political map because they contain lashings of anarchy (free association is the norm), socialism (there is a collectivist incentive to do mutual aid), but also short-term collaborations in which specialists are granted leadership. Foragers tend to limit hierarchical developments through community shaming, or they just expel the person exceeding norms.
Every social sturcture we can observe that’s hierarchical is effectively a means of evading community norms. You can’t shame a king because his goons will kill you; you can’t shame a priest because a god will punish you; you can’t shame a billionaire because he’ll take away your job and your job is your money and your money is your Not Dying tokens. Hard coded, static hierarchy doesn’t exist because it’s natural or instinctive, but because it’s the most efficient way to justify inequality: these and these are of a different substance. It’s less that there’s two poles of human conduct than one thing that people do reflexively—form communities, do mutual aid, defer to authority in bounded contexts—and a thousand artifically-constructed excuses for being self-serving, none of which cohere together and most of which reference something entirely imaginary to perpetuate themselves.
It’s much easier to explain current human crises as the result of choices necessary to the preservation of ownership…capital…than as part of our nature. The divisions that are now presented as tribal and inherent…nation, race…all have demonstrable starting points as justifications for assignment of ownership, and in current politics are largely identical in assertion with property rights.
Over at least the last 250 years or so, the groups that are able to adapt to the more complex social environment created by disruptive technologies have been the ones that are less hierarchical and more democratic (the Yankees, the North, the Allies). That is, they work to increase the size and diversity of their communities to more easily deal with the more complex social environments.
Okay, but is this a better explanation that just pure logistics, especially given that your three examples have entirely different contexts in which they expand and prosper?
Like…yes…monarchy (or dictatorship) can be incredibly bad at adaptation because there is a property-owning class who’s power is (1) dependent on a status quo that is easily disrupted by cultural change, (2) needs labor conditions to be static because there power is dependent on theft of labor via one strategy, but this is not generalize-able. You have picked examples that are in an incredibly narrow band of time (200 years) and all of which have the same geography (America) but the image falls apart if one looks at, say, the expansion of the empire of Portugal via top-down adaptation of ship designs and financial instruments; or the development of Russia under Peter the Great.
And thing biggest problem here is the WW2 reference, because Germany and Japan were autocratic states that engaged in incredibly rapid development and radical restructuring, and who failed not because of “adaptation” but because they simply lacked the materials available to the older, established empires that could simply turned their colonial holdings into factories…though in doing so most of those empires effectively unmade themselves.
Heck, I beleive one eason the small nation of Britain took over the world is that it had a more democratic society than any of the other European nations, allowing them to more easily find wise solutions.
This goes back to “is this more efficient than an analysis of material conditions?” with the same answer back.
Britain took over the world precisely because it was a latecomer to imperialism and that’s it: the technology available made the administrative state they created possible, more efficient that older ways of managing extraction and terror, but there was no active decision by consensus, no “democracy” built into the decision to colonize. Their competitors were ineffectual because they were old empires such that the money had been spent already, the commodities gained through colonization devalued, and their militaries diminished by a mix of insurgency and dynastic feuding. That Britain itself had some democracy at the time ultimately did not change the stratagems of it’s conquest, which were already laid out in colonization and administration of Ireland.
Furthermore British colonization was explicitly mercantilist, with the right to administer and extract incomes from the colonies assigned to individuals…and eventually corporate entities…that worked for the monarchy. The system of conquering and rule was not democratic, it was national socialist in that a metropole of Britons received an increase in quality of life as a product of state-controlled labor systems that mostly extracted labor and commodities from a periphery controlled through state terror.
Indeed, I’d propose the reversal of cause and effect: British democracy was expanded, but only to the extent that democracy created willing participants in British empire. And in the time since the Empire failed completely there’s been a slow retraction of positive freedoms—the welfare state and nationalized industry that guaranteed good jobs—and now negative freedoms—with speech and press power curtailed—with discussions of who deserve franchise and representation on the block.
This, of course, freaks out those that have a hard time adapting. But, increased diversity is an emergent property of adapting to a new and more complex environment. Much harder to come up with solutions when half the population is excluded, or people of color are excluded, or disabled people are excluded.
But exclusion of people is an deliberate adaptation not an externality caused by failing to adapt. You solve problems by creating categories of people who either can be used, tool-like, or people that can be discarded entirely, and thereby increase the efficiency of your system: the new, smaller clade of “real people” get more capital. Social hierarchies don’t just rely on exclusion, but transform the criterion of exclusion on the basis of material conditions.
When Britain had an empire to extract value from, most Britons were Britons and deserving of certain minimums of care, but when there was no empire the government began inventing criterion for exclusion while retaining the rake-in for the top tiers of the hierarchy. Hence the infamous “there is no society” speech: simply change the boundaries of mutual aid, invent categories of Who Is Allowed to Suffer and Die.
Two centuries ago this meant plantations, serfdoms, and encomiendas; a century ago this involved reservations or concentration camps (developed as a counter-insurgency technique by the Spanish Empire); fifty years ago this involved apartheid and “3rd world” status; in the current day this means being constantly assured by the media that people in poor countries (or poor rural counties) just die from privation and violence because those places are fundamentally broken and corrupt.
Diversity is important because diversity represents an acknowledgement of the systemic effect of exclusion, over time, such that there are people who know what exclusion does, and how systems built on exclusion have glaring flaws and ultimately just…do more exclusion rather than quit hoarding property for people at the top. Opponents of diversity want to “solve” problems with exclusion, and get very mad when you suggest that exclusion is infinitely arbitrary and inherently unjust.
These people “freak out” not because adaptation itself is bad…they’re perfectly wiling to, say, leap from neoliberal models of exclusion to fascist models of exclusion…but because they refuse any adaptation that lessens their power of ownership. Monarchists mostly didn’t like capitalism because they saw competition: when they found benefits from the formation of a bourgeois class they mostly got on board.
We now live in such a complex social environment, one that has to find solutions to climate change and pandemics, that any attempt to limit the diversity of the group lessens tremendously the chnaces of solving those problems.
It’s a very specific group of people with obvious material interests who aren’t interested in diversity of solving climate change. The people who profit off of expanding rings of exploitation and exclusion are uninterested in limiting their short term gain by making decisions in ways that include the people they exploit.
It’s also a reversal of cause and effect: they don’t want to cede power, and therefore resist any kind of consensus formation that could lead to adaptation that include power sharing.
If you look at adoption or non-adoption of climate policy, the things that get money behind them are the things that promise added value…carbon credits and derivative projects like mass forest planting and capture technology…and those that would simply cost are rejected. This stays consistent even after multiple rounds of “value added” projects being scrapped as unfeasible because they don’t generate profit.
(Carbon credits crashed the other day because it turns out they don’t really represent carbon being pulled out of the air, and thus have no speculative value. Algae fuel research was shuttered by major oil corporations because the upfront costs were not justifiable)
Because of the way out social networks are designed, a diverse network will more easily move large amounts of information around rapidly to make sure the right information gets to the right person at the right time to make a wise decision. Hierarchy moves information too slowly (up and down in silos). But social networks ae truly organized to follow the six degress of separationm=, allowing huge amounts of information to be moved around easily, where a hierarchy would fail.
But can you justify the premise that there’s consensus about how one determines the “wise” decision?
To me one of the big struggles…the one that defines, for example, how Twitter functions…is that old cultural institutions that exist to sustain themselves actually do a great job of becoming the interpreters through which other people understand what is true, and thus moral and correct.
Indeed, just to hone in on exclusion…racism itself is a great example of dirtying up the information stream. Exclusion as adaptive strategy has obvious immoral components, whether you’re secular or pious, but since exclusion is such an efficient way to construct beneficial dams in power distribution vast amounts of analysis and (pseudo-) intellectualism have been devoted to deriving a formula in which exploitation…or death…of the excluded is in fact part of a higher order moral good. Sometimes that argument is utilitarian, sometimes that argument is theological, etc, but the function for the arguing party is conserved: they derive power from it.
With perfectly spherical humanoids in a contextless bubble, information might flow in a meritocratic manner, but we’re operating in a context of basically centuries of bad faith compounded with centuries of good faith enactment of bad faith concepts.
The losing side is almost always epistemically closed, not allowing anyone who does not already belong to enter. And its increasing hierarchy means it is only as smart as the person at the top. This means that they will not adapt well and will make stupid decisions (ie Gettysburg, Battle of the Bulge)
But…who are the sides such that their epistemic closure matters?
I don’t think the problem is epistemic closure of equal parties in opposite courts—nations, regions, political parties—it’s the epistemic closure of elites who are all driven by the same axioms: that borders are real, that property is real, that solutions for problems can only be viable if they generate greater value for existing capital holders.
Elites don’t just make stupid decisions because they’re closed-minded, they make destructive and harmful decisions because they refuse to cede power (usually emanating from ownership) and will only choose options that allow them to maintain power. This is another version of “cruel, not stupid”: if your base assumption is your inherent right to what you have as both a moral and reasonable position, then it follows that all utilitarian choices preserve that power.
This is one reason I expect the US to win in the end. It is the largest, most diverse country to ever exist. No one else comes close. And because of its fundamental design (something the MAGAs want to destroy), it has the most complex social networks that allow rapid adaption to disruptive change.
But…does it?
All analysis of American success must necessarily explore the larger system of global economics that America has occupied, and there’s not really a point in history where America’s “success” wasn’t being purchased at the price of labor and capital being extracted from somebody coerced into a down position.
Exclusionary societies and individuals invested in exclusion are highly capable of adaptation so long as said adaptation…social, technological…serve their end, the preservation of ownership and power derived via ownership. America itself has repeated “adapted” technology and cultural frameworks to the exact extent that new strategies could devalue labor and further concentrate wealth. We went from workshops to factories to Taylorism to automation to Jarkartan sweatshops because these thing saved costs. Our agriculture has split into industrial feedlots and state-sized monocultures on one hand, and immigrant hard physical labor on the other because those adaptations devalue farm labor. We’re currently watching the exact same ghouls drool over the prospect of AI devaluing creative labor.
Our societal crisis is not one of efficiency, but callousness.
re: #236 jaunte
It’s come to this. They can’t give him away.
[Embedded content]
“The Ransom of Red Chief.”
re: #246 GlutenFreeJesus
Hides the lobotomy scars…
re: #175 silverdolphin
[snip]
The MAGAs will fail. They simply are not organized to make the wise decisions necessary to succeed. We are.
And the infighting among them (all want to be alpha dog) will hasten their demise.
re: #241 Belafon
Like Trump, you’re supposed to force zucchini on your neighbors.
My mother makes an awesome zucchini bread. The last few years she’s replaced the oil in it with applesauce… and somehow it’s even more awesome. (Though at my birthday she frosted one and called it a cake. I’m… still processing whether that worked or not.) Any time she wants to give me one, I’m happy to take it.
Giving away Trump will not make your neighbors like you.
Piece of shit Chris Christie is at least calling Trump a piece of shit along with others on the stump.
Hmmm…
What does Mitt Fucking Hat In Hand Mr. Trump Does You Have A Spot For Me In Your Fabulous Empire Romney have to say?
Crickets…..
*spit*
This wanted to be posted again. I shall comply.
re: #128 jaunte
Obviously Muhammad Ali level physique.
[Embedded content]
67? That fat fuck couldn’t break 70 on the front nine.
re: #215 Decatur Deb
That forecast moves the storm a bit to the E. We’ll be on the edge of the cone of probability.
Get out your Sharpie and redirect it!
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
re: #178 Joe Bacon ✅
There’s not a woman in the history of planet earth that ever woke up one morning eight months pregnant and said to herself “You know, I changed my mind!”
re: #233 Nerdy Fish
“This will make the boat parades awesome.” Yep, they’ll look wonderful at the bottom of Lake Travis.
They’ll look good on fire.
re: #216 BeenHereAwhile
FWIW, I’m 5’11” my doc office scales say I weigh 222.
I have to admit my waist size (my excuse - my age) has expanded from 34” to 36”.
I have that womanly hourglass shape (36-27-36)
re: #235 mmmirele
While I was at the store, I finally cashed in my lotto ticket and it was worth $8. I won’t be winning the lotto any time soon.
My nephew, his wife and their toddler just touched down at the airport. Eventually they will go over to Mom’s and I will drive over.
MMMIRELE WON THE LOTTO!!! ($8)
So this year I decided to expand my garden beyond…some tomatoes plus one other thing I get at a whim about and the summarily kill.
It’s actually been a really interesting success in learning by doing, but…well, instead of growing of zucchini I put in cuccuzza, so now I have the stupid-big yields of a zucchini grower but with the entwined complications that I have giant, snake like gourds that are eaten like squash (by Sicilians and maybe some North Africans) but nobody I’d give vegetables to knows what the fuck I’m offering them.
re: #262 The Ghost of a Flea
So this year I decided to expand my garden beyond…some tomatoes plus one other thing I get at a whim and kill.
It’s actually been a really interesting success in learning by doing, but…well, instead of growing of zucchini I put in cuccuza, so now I have the stupid-big yields of a zucchini grower but with the entwined complications that I have giant, snake like gourds that are eaten like squash (by Sicilians and maybe some North Africans) but nobody I’d give vegetables to knows what the fuck I’m offering them.
Weapons they can eat…
re: #262 The Ghost of a Flea
instead of growing of zucchini I put in cuccuza,
This may be the first thing I have ever typed into wikipedia and didn’t get a useful answer for.
A more general google turns up what may be the most disturbing-looking plant I’ve ever seen. I’d have nightmares with that growing in a nearby garden.
re: #263 TedStriker
Weapons they can eat…
There’s this facial expression that I swear amounts to “I am afraid this object is in some way dick-related.”
re: #265 The Ghost of a Flea
There’s this facial expression that I swear amounts to “I am afraid this object is in some way dick-related.”
Big Squash Energy
Squash Envy
re: #264 SandwichKed
This may be the first thing I have ever typed into wikipedia and didn’t get a useful answer for.
A more general google turns up what may be the most disturbing-looking plant I’ve ever seen. I’d have nightmares with that growing in a nearby garden.
Doesn’t help that I missed a Z.
I literally grew it because it’s the “‘gugatz” that’s mentioning in movies where mobsters make foods, but it turns out to have a really interesting story, as the species is found throughout Eurasia and Afraid and…likely…would have been the squash-equivalent that existed before the Columbian exchange.
The gourd is eaten young, but also if it’s aged to maturity and dried out it’s used to make tools, and around the world there’s the same gourd in different shapes…hourglass shapped lauki in India, tubular opo in the Phillipines…things which I’ve eaten before but never encountered in European food. Really interesting botanical history there, if lowkey.
re: #225 gocart mozart
[Embedded content]
Flag cost 27.99
Materials10.00
Marketing. 2.00
Handling 5.00
Don jr fee 11.00
Net loss. .01
Legal defense fund owes jr .01 per flag. Trump business math.
re: #101 Charles Johnson
Ross Perot. Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a very long time.
I thought about voting for him. I don’t remember exactly what did it, but at some point I realized he was a crackpot who shouldn’t be anywhere near the presidency.
His wife was glad he lost. She didn’t want move to a smaller house in a poorer neighborhood.
Downstairs, I posted that my Apple weather app showed a temperature prediction of 109 for Sept 5, which seemed way off base. As it turned out, a couple hours later, the prediction was down to 99 and then 92, and now? it’s 95. In any case, Sept 5 will likely be hot but not ridiculously high.
re: #247 The Ghost of a Flea
It’s a very specific group of people with obvious material interests who aren’t interested in diversity of solving climate change
Hmm… I think I disagree with you.
Of late your writings have focused on the wrongdoings of the elite, of some small group at the top who coralle masses to do their bidding.
I do not disagree that a society (as we know it today) is hierarchical, nor do I disagree that those on the top exploit those below them.
But I believe the masses do have agency.
They are not mindless.
They still make choices.
And climate change is a great example.
Almost everything in life that is the result of industrialization is affecting the atmosphere, and a great many things also affect the land surface.
Simply living your life as an American is going to lead to massive climate change.
And here’s the kicker: very few Americans are willing to give up an American style of life.
And most of the world wishes to live an American style of life, at least in the sense of material wealth. Even if most of the world does not want to be culturally American and decry American hegemony in media and entertainment, the appeal of the luxury goods the average American enjoys is powerful.
And that is why climate change is an intractable problem.
And if you say foragers have no problem, because a human is limited in how much stuff one can carry, please note that we gave up the forager way of life long, long ago.
Agency is not the same thing as free will. Perhaps free will does not exist. Yet each person still has agency in that each person makes choices from our human perspective.
Climate change is only resolvable via major changes in both 1) what human society entails, and 2) a scale of innovation similar to the transformation the industrial revolution brought.
Again, we humans have been making hierarchical societies for a very long time. It is now part of us.
It’s who we are.
If we are interested in making a better society, and a better future for our successors, that is the model in which we must work.
re: #43 Captain Magic
Do any of you remember back during the 1980’s presidential election that there was a third party candidate whose hands name wad Anderson? My beloved friend went and voted for that cretin, and lost quite bigly.
In 1992 when Perot was running, he actually did better than previous third party candidates.
Couldn’t vote in ‘82 but worked on the Anderson Campaign. It was a good lesson in the stupidity of third parties in the American system and I haven’t made that mistake since. Other ones to be sure (I could not bring myself to vote for Mondale due to his votes on NASA despite knowing how despicable Ronny RayGun was. OTOH, I also knew Mondale would have only been a protest vote anyway. The rest of that ballot was straight Dem IIRC).
Trump directs Republicans in the House to pass impeachment of Biden immediately: ‘They did it to us!’
On what charge asshole? What charge you fucking Russian stooge?
From his summer home in New Jersey, former President Donald Trump dictated to the House Republicans that it was time for them to impeach President Joe Biden.
Taking to his personal social media website, Truth Social, on Sunday, Trump claimed that the House has already “proven” that Biden broke the law and as such it was time for them to move.
“You don’t need a long INQUIRY to prove it, it’s already proven,” he ranted. “These lowlifes Impeached me TWICE (I WON!), and Indicted me FOUR TIMES - For NOTHING! Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US!”
Republicans have struggled with getting Americans behind them on the Biden investigations. Their far-right base, however, has been very loud on the subject.
The most recent ABC News/Ipsos poll from mid-August revealed Americans aren’t behind the investigations. Only 32 percent were “somewhat confident” the Hunter Biden ordeal “would be handled fairly,” while 48 percent were not too confident.
Thus far, Speaker Kevin McCarthy has been on the fence about moving forward on impeachment, but if he agrees to it now, he’ll be accused of following Trump’s orders.
Jacksonville does not welcome Ron DeSantis pic.twitter.com/nxzkGedZx9
— Benjamin Dixon (@BenjaminPDixon) August 27, 2023
Billions in US Taxpayer Dollars Now Go to Religious Schools via Vouchers Billions in taxpayer dollars are being used to pay tuition at religious schools throughout the country, as state voucher programs expand dramatically and the line separating public education and religion fades. School vouchers can be used at almost any ...
Cheechako
Adobe Caught Selling AI Generated Images Imitating Ansel Adams’ Work Adobe scolded for selling ‘Ansel Adams-style’ images generated by AI Adobe found itself in hot water this weekend after the Ansel Adams estate publicly scolded the company for selling generative AI imitations of the late photographer’s work. On Friday, ...
William Lewis
The Good Liars at The Libertarian Convention [VIDEO] The Good Liars visit the Libertarian Convention in Washington DC. They interview presidential candidates, talk to someone who thinks people should be allowed to own nuclear weapons, and Starchild. SUPPORT US: herohero.co SEE THE GOOD LIARS LIVE!NASHVILLE, TN JUNE ...
teleskiguy
Adam Conover - How Google RUINED the Internet [VIDEO] Google sucks now. Here's why. Get 20% off DeleteMe US consumer plans when you go to joindeleteme.com and use promo code ADAM at checkout. DeleteMe International Plans: international.joindeleteme.com You may have noticed that Google isn't what it used to ... teleskiguy
What Result Will There Be From the Trump Trial?I did my best to boil this down. What say you?
Rightwingconspirator
An Appeal to Heaven An ancient political phrase and a historic flag of the United States has entered the discourse as a flag of Christian Nationalism, insurrection, and the question of Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito's objectivity to rule on cases. So ...
Anymouse 🌹🏡😷
Grocers Are Finally Lowering Prices as Consumers Pull Back Consumers have been grumbling about the soaring cost of groceries for nearly two years. Now, some of the biggest names in retail appear to be listening. In recent weeks, Target and Aldi have broadcast price cuts on thousands of ... Cheechako
A Water War Is Brewing Between the U.S. And Mexico. Here’s Why A water dispute between the United States and Mexico that goes back decades is turning increasingly urgent in Texas communities that rely on the Rio Grande. Their leaders are now demanding the Mexican government either share water or face ... Cheechako
Harper’s Magazine: Slippery Slope - How Private Equity Shapes a Ski Town …Big Sky stands apart for other reasons. The obvious distinction is the Yellowstone Club, a private resort hidden in the mountains above the community that Justin Farrell, a professor of sociology at Yale and the author of Billionaire Wilderness, ... teleskiguy
Ranked-Choice Voting Has Challenged the Status Quo. Its Popularity Will Be Tested in November. JUNEAU — Alaska’s new election system — with open primaries and ranked voting — has been a model for those in other states who are frustrated by political polarization and a sense that voters lack real choice at the ... Cheechako
