Kyrielite

just a cunny guy living in an un-cunny world

[Perry E. Metzger @perrymetzger]

There is a tactic that I call the “hostage puppy.” A group spends much or most of its time and money in horrible, counterproductive ways, but they are also keeping an extremely cute and vulnerable puppy alive. If anyone tries to cut their funding or shut them down, they wheel out the puppy, show its soulful eyes to the cameras, and explain that if their budget is cut or they are shut down, the cute little puppy will die.

The puppy takes many forms and can be more or less literal.

Perhaps a corporate department is actually responsible for some extremely vital function, but does it very badly and does many other things badly besides.

Perhaps there’s a nonprofit that legitimately helps a small number of impoverished children but also spends vast sums causing harm elsewhere.

Maybe the puppy is some important service that people rely on, which, when a budget is cut, is shut down first, in order to inconvenience the greatest number of people to cause pressure for restoration of service.

And sometimes, there’s almost literally a puppy, or a homeless child with cancer, or a starving family.

The puppy can take many forms, but the common theme is that if you try to fix or shut down the failing organization, everyone will learn you’re a puppy killer. Surely you wouldn’t want to be a puppy killer?

(I’ve heard people call something similar “Washington Monument Syndrome”, after the fact that any attempt to cut the parks service budget will result in the Washington Monument being closed to tourists first, but I don’t think the term is sufficiently evocative.)

Sometimes, it’s really important to have a name for something so that you can point out when it’s present. And now that you’re aware of it, you will probably see hostage puppies all around you.

How do you save the hostage puppy? By reminding everyone that it is not the case that there is only one group of people on earth that can care for the puppy. Other means of caring for the puppy are probably available, ones that don’t involve also throwing a lot of resources into a hole in the ground or worse. In fact, you should take the puppy away from the people holding it hostage. They probably don’t actually have its best interests at heart if they’re using it that way.

[aaaaaaaaa @WarmerStoat]

wifewifewifewifewifewifewifewifewife

[Kyrielite @_kyrielite]

@xwanyex Nathan here may as well have obfuscated "rape and murder" to "crime" too. Sloppy, even by the BBC's own standards for journalism.

[wanye @xwanyex]

"Man"

"girl"

[B e a r m a x x e r @centristpeater]

Is inviting a girl to your air-conditioned home in Europe similar to inviting her to your yacht in America

[Neoliberal Akiho ✨🇺🇳🇨🇦 @NeoliberalAkiho]

Leftists say “uhh housing shouldn’t be a commodity” like that magically frees it from the laws of economics.

[DannyCanTalk 🌈 @dannycantalk]

I used to argue that socialists aren't really motivated by empathy for the poor, but by violent hatred and bitter resentment of those who, unlike them, contribute something to society.

I no longer need to argue that, because they just say it now.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

The TL;DR on 'freezing the rent' is that it

- Makes it so there's less housing available
- Increases the rent in unregulated units
- Pulls units off the rental market
- Lowers housing quality
- Reduces the rate of new construction
- Makes it harder for workers to get good jobs

[Savvy ( ˶ˆ꒳ˆ˵ ) @MadamSavvy]

If you need all fiction to tell you right from wrong, sanitized of jokes, cringe, or worse, then you are quite literally less than. You have regressed backwards.

If a person cannot consider fiction a sandbox of endless possibility and needs it to reflect reality because it cannot grasp fiction, that person is a danger to society and themselves.

Fiction is the perfect test. Be disgusted and appalled, but if you treat the pixels as real then you need your rights stripped away and you belong in a padded room.

Elon must hurry on the waifu cat robits so they can staff the asylums that must be filled.

In 2028, give me a candidate willing to be the extremist i need to see through to the utopia.

[wanye @xwanyex]

It’s appealing because you get something that’s not yours for an artificially lower price. What is supposed to be the great mystery here?

[Chris 🇺🇲💦🍑 @Alicoh1]

I don't intend this as a slight to my lefty friends, but it obviously is: more than any other ideology, they have an incuriousness about what the economy is or how it functions.

Which is rich considering Marx's magnum opus was a book on economics!

[Slazac 🇪🇺🇺🇦🇹🇼🌐 @TrueSlazac]

Nothing will make you lose faith in leftism more than arguing about rent control

They simply refuse to learn about the consequences of the policies they support, they can’t conceive second order effects

[PoIiMath @politicalmath]

One of the reasons that I don't accept the "nuking USAID killed millions of people" framing is because most of the people saying this never took the stance that the US was a tremendously good and heroic force for saving millions of people

[John Carter @martianwyrdlord]

Meanwhile, science funding – yes, even in the NSF – is being directed towards frivolous DEI-themed non-research.

A recent Senate committee went through a bunch of NSF grants and found that over a quarter of them were given to diversity nonsense.

This is due to a top-down policy imposition by the “Biden” regime, but the girlbosses are largely thrilled about this – it lets them play mother hen to their surrogate children in the designated victim classes, which is much more emotionally rewarding than determining the electron orbital structure of excited rubidium atoms.

19/22

[John Carter @martianwyrdlord]

If female scholars are less productive, produce less interesting research, and tend to be preoccupied with enforcing consensus, we should see signs of that.

Sure enough,disruptive science has been declining for generations. There are more reasons for this than just women being around – the bureaucratization of science is probably the biggest factor, as can be seen by the decline starting in the early 50s, long before women entered the academy in large numbers. But the presence of risk-averse, consensus-obsessed women in large numbers isn't helping.

18/22

[HowlingMutant @Howlingmutant0]

The crazy thing is you can put in any hobby or art form instead of rap and it’s still true

[CrestDragon @RealCrestDragon]

I don't think a lot of people read the girls' MomoTalk bio but most of them are really cool and in character and I love them a lot
These are some of my favorites

[Kirsche 🥥 🧁 @KirscheVerstahl]

They lost over 15 years ago and have been pushing the extremist policies ever since
This is the bed they made, these are the allies they chose, I don't want to hear shit about "democrat's fear"

If they come around to reality, good, but they are not an ally

[0.005 Seconds (3/694) @seconds_0]

How a "Believe Science!" person looks at you when the science is economics

[Greg Price @greg_price11]

Congratulations! The rent is frozen.

So is your landlord's ability to fix your appliances or do any upgrades.

And when the conditions quickly deteriorate, Zohran will use it as a justification to seize private property.

Welcome to the 'warmth of collectivism,' New York.