TBash 🇺🇸

@mjjk_matt Live your life with the whimsical audacity of a Sci Fi Prime writer from 1999

@justalexoki Have some cheese delivered from another hemisphere

i want to buy something. what should i buy

Hard money is democratic money. It makes the welfare/warfare state a lot harder to spend frivolously on, because it's so much harder to obscure who's carrying the burden (gotta tax it directly). This also means it is harder to hide your political spoils system under layers of financial indirection. Those financial shell games make the post-FDR administrative state possible. Which is probably why democrats prefer not to think about this too hard.

@HistoryBoomer I would also add: inflation is a _regressive_ tax, plus a subsidy on those closest to the credit spigot (the rich) and democrats are gigantic hypocrites for pretending that's not an enormous scandal

We do.

@HistoryBoomer Almost exclusively

@HistoryBoomer Insensitive? What? Property destruction is a less direct form of life-destruction. The people mad about the headline must still have a lust to destroy, and they don't like being made to feel guilty about it.

What is too offensive to show? Editor Wischnowski had to resign after anger over an "insensitive" headline. Religious people can be offended by nudity, Muslims by depictions of Mohammed. I think all the outrage is stupid, but is anything too offensive to be shown? (And why?)

If someone was waging fifth-generation war on the west via social media engineering, sowing the resentment and derangement it takes to generate this kind of random destructive outburst, how would we know?

People! The man is far enough up there in years he knows he doesn't need to spend the heartbeats he has left on resentment and angst. Hats off to Bill 🖖

You're right! I hate to do the Jordan Peterson thing and say "It depends what you mean by..." but again it depends what you meant there by Capitalism. The Anarcho-Capitalists think private property + markets is 100% of what you need for a functioning healthy civilization. I would say they are wrong. The market economy is the best tool for transforming resources into net human advantage (unevenly distributed), but that process is NOT the highest good!

@TBashscripts In an idealized world, capitalism could work. But we do not live in idealized world. Greed exists and is cultivated as a virtue, and pure capitalism simply does not and cannot exist. It's a pie in the sky ideal.

I find that when anti-capitalists complain about "capitalism," they are complaining about forms of corruption, conflicts of interest, manufactured scarcity, or anti-competitive behavior that no self-described "capitalist" supports. The two camps use the word to mean different things. To the anti-capitalist, the word refers to a regime where Capital presses a finger on the scales and manipulates the state to its benefit. You could describe "crony capitalism" and "communism" both as special cases of this failure mode. To the pro-capitalist, the word refers to the complex of virtuous cycles in which a free society self-organizes into greater and greater wealth and success: commerce, division of labor, freedom to contract, freedoms of choice and exit, sanctity of property, etc. (We can regulate these things at the margins and it can be good to do so, but they behave something like fundamental forces. You can't defy them forever.) IMO, the latter is the better definition. It provides a name for all those things that communism tries and fails to extinguish.

@jaradkoby @HistoryBoomer If you do the job training & education thing to reduce recidivism, fine. It seems to have a positive ROI. But for those who re-offend anyway after being given all this education, it seems appropriate to me for the punishments to get worse.

@HistoryBoomer Depends on what we mean by "soft" and "hard" on crime. I think we collectively agree one murder case is not automatically equal to another Same for assault and theft Obviously do the crime do the time, but our prisons being based on punishment is not reducing repeat offenses

“Soft on crime” remains one of the stupidest positions of the progressive left. Crime is bad. We need to be smart about it, but cracking down on crime is good.

@Fuzzy_Reasoning @gynepareidolia @HistoryBoomer Aye, but it does happen to be true that I REGULARLY hear center left people IRL speculate out loud that 2x Trump voters must have some diagnosable mental illness, or deep seated antipathy that makes them equivalent to rabid dogs only good for euthanizing The contempt runs deep

Is like to direct you to exchange I was referencing. Your statement “liberals believe x” is part of the problem. No one group is a monolith and every person is an individual. While I do not disagree that there are people on the left who are dogmatic in their views, to a fault the idea that this personally type does not exist on the right is absurd. Utterly absurd.

94% of people on Twitter are delusional. Arguably, 94% of everyone is delusional, but mostly you don't hear it. When I get an egg and cheese on a roll at my bodega, Luis just says, "Hot out, right?" so he seems sane. At home, he might spout, "Girlbosses with email jobs are subsidized by illegal immigrants let in by our government that wants to destroy the family, and to get HR ladies to their jobs, they're fast-tracking Waymos that'll put hardworking Latino drivers out of work and clog our streets with murder robots," but I don't have to hear him. Yeah, sure is hot out. And 94% of folks shouldn't be allowed near a keyboard.

@Fuzzy_Reasoning @HistoryBoomer Demonic possession is a spectrum okay?

This reminds me of an exchange with someone earlier who was seemingly convinced that every democrat, even those who only voted D even one time are literal demons. Setting aside that demons don’t exist, even if they did could you imagine if actual multiple millions of your fellow Americans are in fact demons?!? That someone never even stops to think that of the all perfectly normal interactions they have on the daily irl a certain percentage of those are with folks who have conflicting political opinions. It’s crazy to me that you don’t even want to consider real people in the real world before making such asinine assumptions.

I felt like I was seeing American politics clearly for the first time couple weeks ago when someone wrote that nearly every voter operates off of folk myths rather than any attempt to reason about ground facts. They aren't going to stop, and so that's why politicians will do things like call each other hitler or say the illegals are eating people's pets. You couldn't sell the truth if you tried. Too boring. All because that 94% gets representation

@OmarBessa @RokoMijic @ericweinstein I have found one of my people

@RokoMijic @ericweinstein a fleet of o'neills makes a lot of sense i have simulations of the cylinders, i built my startup specifically with the moonshot idea of building them this is all the fault of reading the Rama books as a kid

I'm sorry @ericweinstein but the idea that humans will live on the surface of a planet is an extremely boomer take We're going to disassemble the planets

@sazu_samalox 🫂

так странно видеть, что иностранцы в твиттере, как оказалось, не ненавидят русских. чувствую себя как человек, которого впервые в жизни обняли, а не избили

@patobonato The goggles are just showing this on loop for 5 years

Un científico de Yemen mostró un concepto de prisión de IA del futuro Cognify propone encerrar a los criminales en cápsulas especiales y reeducar sus cerebros con falsos recuerdos generados por redes neuronales. El resultado son nuevas personas que no querrán violar la ley. ¿Qué dicen ustedes?

@dirtman Hurrah, in a billion years there will still be people getting lost in the Louvre

My hot take is that when the time comes, we will move the earth to save it

@HistoryBoomer @TesseractUnfold @AllSidesNow Ever try Ground News?

@TesseractUnfold @AllSidesNow I like the AllSides approach (of course, they use mainstream sources).

Rejecting all mainstream news is foolish. You should assume the NYTimes, WSJ, et al are written by humans like yourself (not by communist demons). I have met a few reporters and they seem very similar to me! I know that when I write stories, I do my best to be accurate. I assume reporters and editors do the same. Being human, they are biased, but most seem to share my ethos of wanting to accurately describe the world. They also have institutional tools designed to catch errors. I try to stay aware of their biases while I read stories, but I assume basic facts are usually correct. “But they wrote ‘mostly peaceful protests’!!!” Yes, and while that was sometimes a bit silly, it was also largely true. The protests WERE mostly peaceful. I was also annoyed by some media attempts to downplay violence but I took that into account as I read. “And they got trans issues wrong!” Yes they did, but they corrected. By 2022 the mainstream media was writing intelligent articles on the topic (and getting attacked by trans activists for doing so). Mainstream legacy news has problems, of course, but you’re still far better off getting your news from the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist, than BigBalz420 on your Twitter stream. Just keep a reasonable bit of skepticism as part of your filter while you read.

Indeed. They are humans-like-me and that means they are just as susceptible as any other normal person to the effects of "high conflict." Ironically perhaps, I get this term from journalist Amanda Ripley. Journos can get into a High Conflict spiral and lose critical thinking, and spread it to each other, just as easily as plebs with red baseball caps can.

in other words, steer clear of arguing politics on reddit