• 7 Posts
  • 139 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • Spoken like someone who’s never lived in a Soviet apartment. f’ing lol.

    There’s just nothing quite as bleak as that same falling apart brutalist concrete block after block after block after block.

    From first hand experience I can tell you all the romance of communal living goes right out the window when they shut down the centrally heated water for the summer for “maintenance” because if you shut it down in the winter, you’re f’ed.

    All that “to every man as he needs” fantasy isn’t real life. All my fire escapes had rusted off from the 3rd floor up to the 10th. So good luck with that in an emergency lol (major Russian City center on the Volga in 2009). Two things can be bad at the same time. Just because the US has a massive social safety net dysfunction, doesn’t mean the CCCP was kind to its citizens.

    People can suck everywhere.



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    This post brought to you by the open source Zotero committee.




  • Yeah…

    Life’s fulfillment is in many ways measured in the quality of your relationships. Frankly, if you want to make meaningful relationships, you need to be the kind of fellow you or a regular person would want to be around.

    You can’t really be a different person and you shouldn’t try. Instead you need to be the best version of yourself you can be. The one who listens well, or does nice things for others without expecting a reward. You have some positive instincts in there somewhere, but if you indulge selfishness, it will drowned out any of the positive aspects immediately.

    Don’t do this attention seeking bs. If you want help, get help. The world is full of others seeking connections and you’ll break the hearts of family if you take the way way out. Maybe that’s what you want? Have an impact just by inflicting harm? I hope not, that’s what bad people do.

    Get into bird watching or any other hobby. There’s tons of poor, interesting, people with deeply filling lives out there. You’re not uniquely suffering I’m afraid. Just pittying yourself.





  • Obligatory crooked timber post:

    https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

    “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

    It’s pretty nakedly just a cult of personality with no other policy platforms that I recognize. For 50 years quality of life for Americans had meaningfully stagnated or declined. It’s brutal paying so much for groceries and gasoline when rent has been commodified. Answering that with mythical “I alone can fix it” is a very attractive and easily understood pitch. A lecture about the nuances of globalization and market efficiency is not. As important as bathroom access and preferred pronouns are, they too are not a sufficient political answer for a minimum wage that hasn’t matched productivity for decades.

    It’s a leadership issue but any sane person would never subject themselves or their families to running for office in a news environment like America’s. That leaves us with a government composed primarily by clinical narcissists and grifters.

    Feels bad.


  • My favorite part of this AEI op-ed (look up the fellows of this august think tank institution if you have a minute) is that the author lists no notes, references, or citations for a single claim in the piece. Now that’s how you do it! Start a Hudson Institute it Heritage Foundation and once you’ve got the banner to put behind a panel of prestigious sounding fellows, bam! You’ve got the patina of credibility! Back it with a couple hundred million in tax-cheat lobbying endowments and you’ve got a stew going baby!




  • CIS had an interesting chat with John Mearscheimer about Israel that’s unsurprising, but worth the listen. The host commented with a running joke that, "having been strongly supportive of Netanyahu after October 7, Joe Biden is seriously invested in the two-state solution—Michigan and Pennsylvania (@1:17:38)

    Tough sell. Sure it’s obvious who will make the situation measurably worse in nearly every way, but it’s really hard to motivate and mobilize a voting block on harm reduction, when the incumbent elicits strongly emotional revulsion right now.

    Recency bias, negativity bias, etc. are so hard to overcome. It’s like trying to logic your way out of an argument someone has emotion’d themselves into. You may know the answer conceptually, but actually feeling ok about it enough to act isn’t a logic proposition. It’s one of the most emotionally charged decisions we make.

    Not a demographic I’d be counting on showing up in large numbers if I we’re a campaign strategist. Sadly, Trump is retaining well over 90% of his voting coalition from 2020, whereas Biden is only retaining a fraction of his (very diverse) block. Since the election will come down to a very small number of votes, he’s going to need all of his 2020 coalition to show up. 4 years of reality make that a hard bargain for Arab Americans and Republicans who held their noses after Jan 6 and voted blue though. Ugh.

    Link to the video: https://youtu.be/kAfIYtpcBxo

    Piped bot, assemble!