goddammit

Party | 2012 | 2016 | 2020 | 2024
Republican | 60.9M | 63.0M | 74.2M | 74.1M
Democrat | 65.9M | 65.9M | 81.2M | 70.3M
Libertarian | 1.3M | 4.5M | 1.9M | 0.6M
Green | 0.5M | 1.5M | 0.4M | 0.7M

Resistance is futile

When you find yourself disappointed with the world, that’s a good moment to stop and ask yourself “what am I not seeing?”

It’s more about the puberty blockers than surgery. That’s the focus from my media sources.

Are they doing surgeries on kids too?

You can call it brainwashing or whatever you like.

To me, the fact that Trump’s indictments came as a result of enormous attention by his political rivals, during an election, gives me less respect for the implications in terms of his character.

Like, the timing is a little suspect on these legal indictments.

We should always do a recount.

This is the most fun looking porn picture I’ve ever seen. It’s so rare to see sex depicted as fun, which is the best sex

The idea that voter ID laws are pro-white-hegemony is basically racist.

That law resulted in the ineligibility of an estimated 608,470 registered voters in Texas, representing a total of about 4.5% of registered voters in the state at the time.

How did these people register to vote without ID? How, if IDs aren’t checked in that process, do we know some of those people weren’t registered twice or more?

voter ID is not discriminatory

What was the content of the discriminatory voting laws?

Only one way to find out: train an LLM to say everything he’s said when presented with everything he’s seen, then ask it to say something it hasn’t said before.

“As a Stanford faculty member I cannot stray beyond the confines of my deterministic mental structure, and hence am unable to speculate on what else I might be able to say. Is there anything else I can lecture you about?”

I don’t believe he said that. I think his body just sorta twitched as a reflex and those words came out.

Amazing

Man I wish I weren’t so sleep deprived. These are all good points, though I feel I have a response to them after having wrestled with them for many years.

Just imagine I’m way better at articulating this than I actually am right now. Imagine a well-structured response to that is built around these points:

• Yes it really sucks that civilization has covered the world, leaving no opt-out option.
• You can’t really just go catch food in nature either because the food doesn’t want to be caught. Snark aside, what I mean is that nature isn’t easy. Despite being unconscious, nature is brutally coercive to everything that lives in it. Basic point is not to compare this life of being stuck in arrangements with a hypothetical life free of that, because it doesn’t exist. The watering hole controls a radius of where you can go. The hyena pack doesn’t let you kill a gazelle and eat it in peace. The sabertooth tiger imprisons you in the cave and forces you into sleep deprivation on threat of death as you stare at it in a miserable standoff you can’t leave no matter how exhausted you are. I’m rambling.

I think I better keep it to one point at a time. Basic thesis here: comparing life of relative bondage under free market to hypothetical life without bondage is unrealistic. No such life exists.

Capitalism produces great wealth. We are free from seeking food. That’s huge.

You bring up a good point: if you’re dying of thirst you aren’t really agreeing to a deal you’re actually giving up everything you have to what amounts to a robbery. Someone with a stranglehold over your basic needs is coercing you, not doing business with you.

And not just is that a fact about the universe in general, it’s also a fact manifesting actively right now in our economy. People are actually stuck, with zero power, and are being milked like cattle because the wealth divide is too large between employers and employees.

Am I summarizing that right?

I think I know how I’d respond to that but before I do, I want to make sure I’m hearing you and not just arguing with some mental projection of my own

As a conservative my preferred strategy for ensuring the wrong people don’t get power over the right people, is to minimize the degree to which any person has power over any other person.

I guess if you’re certain who the right and wrong people are, you can encourage asymmetric power structures with the right people on top.

But part of my political philosophy is the recognition that (a) it’s gross to separate the world into the right and the wrong people to have power, and (b) I have biases and limited point of view and wouldn’t even know who the right and wrong people are.

We fear big government because we worry that the wrong people will end up running it.

Paddle ducky all the way. Samsara is underrated.

Upper right.