starjello

Space Dessert

[starjello @starjello2]

@memeticsisyphus Did you mean "define personal vices as rights"?

[Steve Sailer @Steve_Sailer]

It's remarkable how one of the ideologically dominant words of our age, "racism," didn't exist in English until about 1940.

[memetic_sisyphus @memeticsisyphus]

On one hand you have people who discussed disenfranchisement as a hypothetical, on the other you voted for a party that brought in millions that actually think rape is often not a big deal.

[a mercury sable @2006Sable]

This is all firmly millennial stuff. “Zillenials” just don’t want to admit that they’re actually a part of the quirk chungus funko pop craft beer generation. Sorry guys

[Mr. S.T.A.R. @favelaoverlord]

Bezmenov (a hack soviet reporter who was stationed in India and regarded as unreliable by western intelligence) is a perfect example of the phenomenon I’m describing, the ultimate grifter there to tell American conservative types what they want to hear: that they are soooo much smarter than their liberal opponents because they didn’t fall for the “ROOSKIE PSYOP” (er… Chinese now or whatever).

Do you want to know what the problem is with Western liberals? the problem is that they are wrong. They are not psyopped, they have not been tricked by shadowy KGB operatives planted throughout our institutions. They are simply wrong, and arrogantly so. They have a set of beliefs about the world (e.g. crime is caused by poverty and alienation, wealth is produced via exploitation and should be redistributed, 等等) that are simply incorrect. Because these beliefs sound very nice, and because their believers can somewhat insulate themselves from the consequences, and because of demographic replacement/welfarism that allows for the de-facto purchasing of votes, these people also have managed to finagle themselves into possessing immense power and influence over the course of the country/your city council/your local school board.

Liberals are not hoodwinked little victims ready to slap their heads and go “D’Oh!” when you finally stop the Chinese/Russian/Cuban/North Korean/Angolan propaganda operation. Their ideology is homegrown and self-perpetuating. It exists at the nexus of immense reserves of money (provided by domestic billionaires, heiresses, and corporations), status (elite institutions of every stripe), and ideological context (vast volumes of philosophy and theory designed to justify itself).

‘Foreign adversaries intelligence agencies’ are not, have never been, and will not be necessary to start, support, expand, or activate this system. Whatever extent they do influence it to is minuscule compared to the dangers of a single post-divorce tech CEO’s wife that you might as well just completely ignore it. Liberalism isn’t some Chinese guy slipping back alley briefcases to antifa, it’s McKenzie Scott-Bezos (oops scratch that part) openly bankrolling organizations whose stated mission is to “eradicate whiteness” or whatever to the tune of tens of millions a year.

[wanye @xwanyex]

People have to be free to build things, to tinker, to invent, to trade, to buy and sell things in markets. This is fundamental to human flourishing

But I think that even some of the most visible and vocal proponents of this idea are confused about why. The flourishing is in the doing way more than it is in the products it produces.

People would need to be free to do this, even if it didn’t make us richer. And when we think about what we want for the future, what we’re willing to restrict, we should always be keeping this distinction in mind.

Just to take an obvious example of where this matters, even if reducing immigration results in less technological output, the flourishing is in the doing. So long as the people who remain here are free to build and tinker and invent and trade, we will not have lost as much as you think.

Because the flourishing is not actually in the outcomes (especially beyond some pretty basic improvements to the standard of living that are in the rearview mirror) it’s in the doing.

[Coddled Affluent Professional @feelsdesperate]

The new trend in our politics is people making $80k-$100k demanding the same perks, privileges, and payments that people making $25k receive so that living in the most desirable real estate in the world can be ‘affordable’ for them too.

[VB Knives @Empty_America]

It's like there are 2 different Trump administrations.

One is focused on perfecting the Monroe doctrine, winning the Anglo-Slavic forever war, forming the Empire of Man.

While the other is made up of plastic surgery victims, nerds, podcasters.

#2 runs domestic affairs.

[Freedomain - with Stefan Molyneux, MA @StefanMolyneux]

Imagine how many relationships a homeless man has to burn through in order to end up on the streets.

Friends, family, extended family, ex-lovers, you name it.

Not one person will give them even a couch to sleep on.

Mostly truly terrible people.

[wanye @xwanyex]

This is of course true, but just to add to this point, what AOC and other more recent arrivals to the United States fundamentally misunderstand about the heritage American experience is that I can only conceive of myself as White American. My family has simply been here too long. We have no remaining direct connection to England or to Germany or to Scotland.

Nobody in my family ever referred to themselves as English or German or Scottish. Nobody talked about the “old country.“ There is no relationship to any old country. Again, everybody has been here simply too long.

We of course carry on the culture and traditions of those places in various large and small ways, but mostly unwittingly, unconsciously.

Saying “whiteness isn’t a coherent concept, but feel free to celebrate your English heritage” is an insight into the mind of an AOC who has a recent and direct alternative identity that so-called Heritage Americans simply do not.

[Mike Bird @Birdyword]

People get angry at this point but aggregate American spending on eating/drinking out or having that food delivered is at a record high, and the proportion spent on store-bought food is at a joint-record low with the peak housing bubble era.

[wanye @xwanyex]

You can put the whole “how could anybody vote for Trump” thing to rest with a simple hypothetical:

Imagine Donald Trump is a democrat. Everything about him is the same, but he’s running as the Democrat nominee. On the other side, the Republican says that if he wins he will return the US to segregation and he has the Supreme Court nominees ready who will allow him to do it.

That’s it. That’s literally all you have to imagine. On the one hand you have Trump. On the other hand you have a policy landscape that is beyond the threshold that any liberal would be willing to tolerate.

In that scenario 100 out of 100 liberals votes for Trump.

This very simply proves the point that literally everybody understands that there is some policy threshold beyond which you would vote for a candidate like Trump. Many ordinary Republicans feel like the current liberal platform is beyond that threshold.

This isn’t at all complicated or weird or difficult to understand, so anybody who rejects it is either a liar or dimwitted. We all understand this framework. We all accept this framework. There isn’t a single person reading this who wouldn’t in some situation adopt this framework.

[Wæs @watchingspirals]

guy who was posting "nı̇gger" on Something Awful in 2001: "intelligence agencies invented internet racism in 2011"

[Bussy Keaton @BussyKeaton]

People have no concept of history lol. They read "dark" or "brown" in a novel by an English woman from the 1800s and think it means 21st century American racial dynamics. Heathcliff was "dark" because he's like half Romani or Italian. They were so white that Italian was ethnic lol

[𝖓𝖎𝖓𝖊 🕯 @atlanticesque]

There is some room to reasonably discuss the (limited) impact of built environment on family formation and fertility, but that's not how it usually goes. It's just a way to launder aesthetic and social preferences using this latest whackstick now that Climate Change™ is uncool.

[wanye @xwanyex]

A lot of people, especially conservatives, who can very easily see why this is stupid will nevertheless revert to shock and surprise when they see a poor person smoking a cigarette or eating fast food or otherwise spending frivolously.

But the same logic applies.

If your income is very low, too low to take the next step up into a better neighborhood or to meaningfully save for the future, then it’s not really possible to make up for that by saving whatever small monthly excess might exist.

Poor people mostly behave rationally, given their (lack of) abilities. You cannot save your way out of poverty. If you are poor, but nevertheless smart and capable, then the way forward is through figuring out a way to earn more.

[Sólionath @Anarseldain]

$12k: that’s all it took for him to sell out his country, endanger the lives of every person he served with, disclose real-time locations of military assets, to sell thousands of documents. The other Chinese man charged, Wenheng Zhao, was sentenced to under THREE YEARS. And Wei’s mother will face no consequences. Why wouldn’t people sell out America, after all, if they’re treated with kiddy gloves?

Wei was born in China – why are we allowing Chinese nationals access to our military documents AT ALL, and why are we treating them with kid gloves when they inevitably sell those secrets to China? The death penalty is still on the books as a punishment for espionage. The Biden DoJ was never going to pursue it, but the Trump DoJ MUST provide actual consequences for traitors.

[Stella @ubiquitousnewt]

Creativity is a mixture of high openness to experience, lower conscientiousness and higher neuroticism.

Personality researcher @AdamPerkinsPhD believes that neuroticism is the engine of creativity and I would say he is correct.

https://t.co/fhOFsw75Ta

If one is to be a creative genius, whose creations in science, music, literature or art are to be remembered across generations and history, outlier IQ is highly likely if not certain. Plus the personality traits above. With added autism and dark triad traits depending on the area of genius.

[the Rich @Duderichy]

> personal finance "hack"
> it's just saving money and investing it