You really need to study fascism more if you think communists and socialists finding success is a step away from that.

French people being totally retarded is par for the course. That’s why they’re on their fifth Republic while many other countries are still on their first.

Eating sentient mushrooms slow your aging. That’s the real reason for the battle between peach and koopa.

Then you slowly start to realize how shallow our pop culture is, and it’s an existential nightmare you never awake from

I’d like to know how many of these economists failed to predict inflation being a problem back in 2020, how many of them claimed inflation was going to be “transitory” when it did show up. Nobody who failed to predict those two predictable things gets any say in economic policy moving forward because they’re stupid.

Real talk: Biden and Trump will be doing similar things in terms of not doing the stuff actually needed to not destroy the economy imminently. They’ll both run up debts like they did, they’ll both rack up spending like they did.

Honestly, a lot of people are quite happy seeing this happening because Trudeau is becoming immensely unpopular.

The Conservatives lost the last election in part because they weren’t presenting a differing vision of how to run the country. The PPC got more votes than the green party in the last election in part as a protest vote because Erin O’Toole got off to a good start by contrasting his worldview to the Liberal Party worldview, but as the election neared he started to pivot the Conservatives into liberal lite while Trudeau steered the liberal party into being the more leftist NDP. I said at the time that we had a choice between the red NDP, the blue NDP, the orange NDP, the Separatists, the PPC, and the green NDP.

Besides the PPC, the other option on the ballot was staying at home watching Netflix, and if people got the impression they were going to get the exact same stuff, Netflix would win the election.

Poilievre is hammering hard on the differences between how he wants to run the country and how Trudeau has because that’s what a lot of people need to see. They’re going to be mobilized to get out there if and only if they think heading to the polls next October actually stands a chance of changing something. They don’t want the Liberal party Lite, they want someone who they think is going to try to get the car back on the car because it hit the ditch a long time ago and we’ve been driving through some farmer’s field for several years now.

As a study in contrasts, the NDP’s Singh barks like a little Pomeranian dog, and he’s shown the entire country he’s a lap dog living in Justin’s purse. He’ll bark, but then he’ll accept a treat from his master and do as he’s told. That’s why the NDP isn’t doing much better than it is despite the Liberals getting killed in the polls.

Now, do I worry that Poilievre will take this dickish nature into being Prime Minister and then start to take it out on Canadians similar to how Trudeau already does? Of course, that would be really bad. On the other hand, people across the country want to feel like someone is standing up for them, and this to me looks like that strategy at work. Trudeau is an abusive leader, so it’s appropriate to push back.

Far too late for that.

Justin Trudeau spoke of anyone who disagreed with him with all kinds of names. Racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, American, Russian, or bots. He called people who disagreed with him a “fringe minority”. He spoke of how upset he was at the unvaccinated “taking up space”.

You might like him, but he’s acted how he’s acted, and the entire world saw.

You might be thinking “Oh, this stupid conservative for life loser, what does he know?” – Well that’s fine to think, but I voted for Chretien’s liberals, and I voted for Martin’s liberals, and I voted against Harper’s conservatives, and supported Trudeau in 2015 because I’m a liberal, and over the past 8 years I’ve gotten to learn Trudeau isn’t one.

Yeah, and it’s not because it’s diversity but because it’s more about the message than about the art – you remember ever watching one of those horrible Christian movies? Very few were even watchable because they were so busy literally sermonizing. That’s fine, but it makes for crappy movies.

And on the other side of that, there’s lots of works out there that integrate Christianity as a theme that are first and foremost about making something good, and often they’re awesome.

https://youtu.be/5Iby1gVnBXo

Your post contains a potential basic logical fallacy. “A is B, therefore it is also C”

There’s a couple old songs that investigate such fallacies and how they can apply to a legal context. “I shot the sheriff” describes a criminal who admits to shooting the sheriff but it was justified, but did not shoot the deputy. Another song, “Hurricane” by Bob Dylan similarly tells the story about a guy who happened to be at a crime scene, and was robbing the register, but did not commit the murders found at the same crime scene. It’s a story about an actual black man who claims he faces systemic racism in his prosecution and was seeking justice. The man the second song was about got a second trial and the conviction stood, but in 1985 the conviction was reversed based on the idea that he did not receive a fair trial due to racism.

I don’t think that anyone can deny that Weinstein is creep, and we’ve all heard the recordings, we know that he’s a sex pest, but is he a rapist? He can be guilty of many things, including abusing his position as a powerful person in media in a way that is not allowable under labor laws, but the time of his trial, everyone on the face of the Earth had heard the media effectively complaining that he was guilty of any sex crime that they could throw at him. Regardless of the facts of the case, how could you possibly get a fair trial under some circumstances? Him being a sex pest ended up becoming a flashpoint for an entire social movement #metoo that took the entire world by storm shortly after, being the face of social movement like that how exactly are you supposed to get a fair trial?

He did things wrong, again there’s no doubting that, but in the same way that the hurricane could not get a fair trial in the racist 1970s America, even if Harvey Weinstein was pure as the driven snow which I am accepting he not, what’s your name and face is synonymous with all sexual impropriety committed by any powerful people on earth it’s pretty hard to get a fair trial. What else could they have accused him of and just got in a conviction because of course you’re going to convict him, hes Harvey Weinstein and everyone knows he’s a creep!

Now, am I saying that he definitely didn’t do the things that he’s accused of? I’m actually not. I don’t know, and I certainly didn’t sit through all the evidence. What I’m saying is that for justice to be blind in the same way that it needed to let the hurricane go when there was evidence he was being mistreated due to racism, it must also let Harvey Weinstein go if and only if there is evidence that he was being mistreated due to being made the centerpiece of some new global movement.

There have been instances where Reddit detectives went out and thought that they’d solved the case, and in the end ended up convincing a website of millions of people that someone was guilty of some atrocity that they didn’t commit. So for the justice system to actually work, it has to be very careful about being fair and balanced even to the people who are guilty of something.

I don’t think that my standpoint on this is particularly unreasonable, though it may appear so if one is emotionally charged and wants to get the bad guy.

Pawns don’t have values, they have marching orders. Get back to writing the next smear piece, nyt content monkeys. We have an election to win.

To play devil’s advocate here, Lynch mobs arent justice.

The satanic panic in the 1980s and early 1990s was a movement where kids claimed daycare workers were committing atrocities. It led to something like 170 people getting charged with crimes and some of the accused committed suicide. Once the stories hit scrutiny the problems became clear – the kids said people were killed and eaten who were still alive. They talked about secret tunnels that didn’t exist. They talked about secret ultrasonic stealth planes that could land in a neighborhood could land secretly in a neighborhood in the northwest so kids could be kidnapped and sent to Mexico, then be flown back before their parents returned. It was a movement, but it was a false movement.

Historical Lynch mobs are a other example. Black men would be targeted by a mob for having the audacity of touching a pristine white girl (who nonetheless often fully consented and there was nothing illegal going on), and the mob would go string the guy up by the neck. It was a movement too, happened a lot, but it was just the personification of racism, and not justified by principles of justice.

A lot of people mistake moral indignation for righteousness and as a result seem to think that if a lynch mob shows up at your door you automatically deserve its full wrath. Really goes to show humans never change, even if we think we do.

It’s been busy but going well. Glad springtime is finally here.

The nature of power is such that it isn’t self-sustaining. Many people see something that has been powerful for a long time and particularly neo-marxists think power is the lens through which everything is viewed, but such a lens ignores where power comes from.

When I say “neo-marxist”, I’m referring to the ideology that all there is must be power and we must view everything through that lens. Marxism split the world into the working class and the owners, neo-marxism split the world instead into the powerful and the powerless. Neither viewpoint is accurate enough to be a useful model of reality, even if both do touch on truth. By basing your actions on these models then, you’re going to be acting wrong because your models predict things incorrectly.

You can get power through raw force, but it never lasts. Examples exist all throughout history. The first imperial dynasty of china was extremely legalistic, the punishment for most crimes was death. The dynasty ended when one of the generals was late for a meeting, and when faced with death anyway chose to take his men and rebel. The Assyrians used brutal repression to become a powerful player in their region, but as a result every other player in the region banded together to take them out because they were too dangerous to be left. The same for the National Socialist Germans – they used a lot of force, and as a direct result everyone else ganged up on them and tore them to pieces.

Lasting power comes from mutual service. Even dictators who last end up having to live by this playbook. Dictators who last end up building coalitions of people within the nation because to do otherwise will just mean the next person will use slightly more force and become the next one. China as an example was a dictatorship, but the people tolerate it because many people felt the dictatorship was working in the interest of the people (more or less), and did supervise the greatest increase in the middle class in china ever.

All of this applies to the movie industry because people think the movie industry has power solely because it has power, when in reality it had power because it was producing films and TV shows people wanted to see and were willing to pay for. As the neo-marxists have come in and changed the industry into the left-wing equivalent of making those hokey Christian movies nobody likes it has lost much of its power because a screen nobody is watching is meaningless and powerless. Meanwhile, Japan as an example has lots of great media coming out of it because they’re making stuff people like first and foremost and then if they have other goals they come with that (and they’re great capitalists, using media to sell all kinds of stuff)

People think the problem is diversity, but the real problem is that diversity has become the centerpiece of the western media landscape, when it’s a boring centerpiece. Just being a different race or sex or sexuality isn’t interesting by itself, and all these new priorities come at the price of making unwatchable tripe.

To give further examples, there was a lot more popular media from black people in the 1990s, and A-list actors like Wil Smith came from those backgrounds. It worked because those black people were telling stories that involved them and were about them, helping audiences learn a bit more about the world around them while being entertained. By contrast, today we have black snow white, black little mermaid, and girlboss Aladdin. It’s a meaningless display of token diversity that is disrespectful to the source material as well as to the talent who could be doing something more relevant.

The west can’t make movies anymore, but it just goes to show the destruction of western infrastructure. Increasingly, people are looking to asia (japan, korea, and india in particular) and I’m sure they’re going to keep growing until the west remembers that it’s the viewers that allow the film industry to exist.

I wish I could claim it’s all original ideas, but it’s a synthesis of two ideas I saw, one being about the secular cycles idea from Peter Turchin where elite overproduction is one of the problems, and another video about the french revolution and inflation which was really eye opening. It’s not the first time any of this has happened, and it doesn’t end well.

The polarization is part of a larger rush due to this being a difficult time economically as well. There’s too many elites being produced and not enough normies, and so everyone is clamoring all over each other trying to get into and stay in the upper class.

That’s what this is all about, after all.

Lots of parallels between today and the time right before the French revolution, including lots of inflationary spending making fake rich people and effectively harming the poor and middle class, and instead of not doing that, the group claiming to represent the poor and middle class call for policies that help the upper classes such as perpetual inflation forever.

Man, if I were in a public position, I’d have to have all fake accounts with my name and face run by my social media manager, then Id have my ‘real’ accounts totally pseudonymous. All the ado about liking posts would be tiring.

The internet is a mirror, it reflects back what you put into it.

Of course, some people want to inject politics into every single thing that we do, and some people want to inject bad lessons into everything we do, but you can use it to learn math, science, crafts, skilled trades, you can learn about literature, history, philosophy.

On the other hand, the one thing that I think that you’re absolutely correct about is that you should eventually step away from the screen, and go do some of those things that you learn about online. My beloved Soviet canuckistan is presently an Arctic hellscape, but when we end up getting our 37 minutes of summer, I intend to go out and play with a new kiln I bought for firing pottery and melting different metals.

Earlier today I made a post on fbxl social about the concept that the state owns you as opposed to you owning yourself. If you own yourself, and I think that most people should want to, it ends up becoming contingent upon yourself to come up with plans. The world is an adventure, there is so much out there, and so many things you can do without a penny, but just as you said, you need to get out of the house in order to actually participate, and you need to put in the effort to find those exciting things because no one else is going to do it for you.

In Plato’s allegory of the cave, is the understanding of the forms which releases you from your bonds and sends you into the wilderness, but I think in postmodern society it is actually embracing your personal autonomy. For many people, if they see you doing something that they don’t like, if they hear you saying something that they don’t like, if they think that you think something that they don’t like, and they get all of their opinions and actions from someone else so they don’t need to and don’t get to choose their opinions or their actions on their own, and they see someone else thinking for themselves and acting for themselves, and of course it enrages them because they know what they’ve lost even if they don’t understand it.

Hey mob! Nice to see you here.

The one thing I found annoying about OSM isn’t even wrong, it’s just different – I’ve got one on my nextcloud, and everything is named locally. So if you’re somewhere in China, everything is in Chinese. If you’re in the middle east, everything is in Arabic. So if you don’t read those languages you can’t use the maps.

There’s a decent app on android called OSMAND~ which lets you download the OSM maps for your region and navigate offline. I find it really neat on plane trips because you can see exactly where your plane is by the second.

Depends where you are.

If it doesn’t get that cold outside, you can get back considerably more heat than you put in energy. If it does get quite cold outside, there’s a point it becomes first as efficient as electric and eventually it stops working altogether. I live somewhere that routinely sees -40C, by that time you basically are fully on a normal furnace.