Ezekial Reap

Appalachian psychopomp. Feather-scale for hire. Repulsively frolicsome. H(a)unted by something he cannot define. R1bro+H2a.

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

The reason that is rarely articulated, for obvious reasons, but which is nonetheless true: for many this fills a void of meaning. They get be one of the decisive few at the decisive moment in the history of life. Very similar to the emotions that motivated many revolutionaries of days past. All of the sudden the small things one does—the books one reads, one’s office set up, one’s bedtime routine—take on an awful cosmic significance. The whole history of carbon life is culminating with *me* — and what I do, and the few elect here with me, matters, and matters immensely. We are the agents of history, the only people in the world doing something that truly, deeply matters. And if we all die? Well we were all going to die anyway. But this is the one way we might *not* all die. And I get to be a part of it.

[Ezekial Reap @thereapersdesk]

@jessesingal what looks like "normal social network" *to someone inside the network* can look conspiratorial to outsiders. eg JournoList.
also come on guy went from a no-activity no-name to a WSJ exclusive? hmm hmm. PR dark matter, as the saying goes. Sophisticated tho? Seems standard.

[Ezekial Reap @thereapersdesk]

@tracewoodgrains On one hand, honesty is good!

On the other, this particular form of honesty is a bit like painting a target on your own forehead and that of all your coworkers/friends for a Butlerian Jihad.

On the gripping hand, that could be the point.

[Ezekial Reap @thereapersdesk]

so i missed out on preordering the switch 2 zelda edition, and i'm ready to campaign for scalpers to be hunted down like rabid dogs and gibbeted.

[Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 @lymanstoneky]

so, uh, the Lindsey Clancy juror interviews are, uh, pretty damning for the credibility of jury trials

[Ezekial Reap @thereapersdesk]

“Sin is a crime against advertisers,” what a concise indictment of this era’s religion. Recommended reading in full.

[LA\/ENDER @LavenderGhast]

What nobody seems to observe is how next gen puritanism has grown line for line, beat for beat, viewpoint to rule, with online monetization restrictions and requirements on all the content they consume. Same way people pick up phrases and ways of talking from their favourite content creators, they're also picking up what is or isn't ok to see and say. What to shy away from, what to restrict, what to demand goes away or is removed from content and gaming.

To the streamer or content creator, it's simply to make the stuff they use rule compliant. It's not art criticism but income compliance. Example "if they would only remove all that unneeded fan service from gacha games chat, like mannn I don't even know who it's for" they don't really care, they only say it because they can't use it for monetized content and know it's popular with viewers, so they're missing out on revenue. Which is why all these content creators are shying away from and treating these things like complete no goes. Things to avoid like it's life or death. Throwing their hands in front of the screen and yelling "no, no, no skip, skip!" when they see some side boob, it isn't values or a moral system (i'm sure most before the regs would have made boob jokes) but just to keep being monetized.

However the people viewing, consuming all day. All the time in the back of their heads are absorbing that as it's a no go subject, it's a bad word, bad thing, it's something we don't like or want to even see anymore. Violence, sexualization, an ever increasing rejection of anything, even the lightest of character femininity showing through is now treat like p*rn, because that's how harshly the regulations on content monetization treat it now. All the shifts into extreme puritanism and moralizing just so happen to line up near exactly with changing online regulations and restrictions about what you can say and show in your content without being demonetization. For the creators its simply compliance, but for their viewers it has become a template of their own moralization. Same way a kid learnt their values by constantly being taken to church every week. They're now being subconsciously told what is sin (a crime against advertisers) by YouTube, by Twitch, TikTok.

It's why you're seeing people say 'unalived' in real life now, when that whole phrase is due to social media rules around monetization. There is no reason to use it in reality with your friends or other people but they do because they have absorbed it being used through all their content, therefor it becomes their character.

They're living their lives unaware they're shaping themselves, their real values, views and acceptability around a monetization system.

When it comes to fictional content, they're not puritans...they're advertiser friendly.

[wanye @xwanyex]

If I’m wrong about immigration, then we lose out on some economic growth. That’s real and significant, but not disastrous. It doesn’t mean the end of your civilization. Europe, for example, has had much less growth than we’ve had. That’s bad. But you still vacation in Europe and return talking about how nice it is and how much better they live and how maybe we should learn a few things from Europe about the good life.

So I think it’s safe to say that Europe hasn’t been destroyed by lower growth (except to the extent that it’s driving them to open their borders).

If Caplan is wrong about immigration, under my view, then he destroys the West. I mean, a lot of people living in that destroyed West won’t know that they’re living in the destroyed west. They’ll grow up in a lower trust society. They’ll grew up in a society in which jury trials no longer work and there’s rampant fraud and mass inequality driving conflict. And they just won’t know that there was ever an alternative future.

[Oilfield Rando @Oilfield_Rando]

Harvey Weinstein was swiftly imprisoned for having consensual sex with women who didn’t enjoy it.

Lindsay Clancy will probably never go to prison for murdering three children.

Yet we are told that society unfairly favors men. Fascinating.

[Dr. Dad, PhD 🔄🔼◀️🔽▶️ @GarrettPetersen]

@politicalmath Just as a general principle, if your mental state makes you unable to be convicted of a crime, should you commit one, then it is not safe to have you out in society.

[Inez Stepman ⚪️🔴⚪️ @InezFeltscher]

This is the dichotomy that makes ordinary people go absolutely blackpill and insane. YOU have to follow the rules, and accidental or eminently reasonable deviations are NOT allowed for you. Meanwhile, a bunch of drugged up homeless (or insert other leftist victim group) sit in open violation of the whole rule book with nary a bureaucratic form in sight. Crazymaking.

[Ezekial Reap @thereapersdesk]

If you aren't willing to defend your civilization's norms when they conflict with somebody else's, in what meaningful sense are they your norms?

[wanye @xwanyex]

If you think through this, it’s not even clear under this way of thinking why it’s bad to be conquered. Like, presumably what’s bad when you’re conquered is that you lose political power and all your norms and customs are replaced with something else.

So, what are we saying? So long as that’s done slowly and democratically, then it’s fine?

Sure, we diluted your political power and changed all your norms and customs, but we did it through the legitimate channels, so you can’t complain?

[Don Shift (buy my books) @DonShift3]

@ChristianHeiens What’s gonna be even more disturbing is I would not be surprised if incidents of mothers committing infanticide increases in the near term.

[Ezekial Reap @thereapersdesk]

@tracewoodgrains @ZyMazza @demiurgently Altruistic surrogacy is barely even a rounding error.
Argue that it's a pro-human market if you want, but denying the reality of the market dynamic leaves you open to attack on this front.
You're also assuming away controversial cases. Ignoring them does not make them vanish.

[Jack @tracewoodgrains]

who is Hasan Piker? he is a lying communist who hates America. when he tries to interfere in American elections, it is because he hates the country and wants to harm its interests and help its enemies.

it’s ok, we can say it plainly.

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

Throwing rubbish in a landfill is (usually) better for the environment than recycling it. With few exceptions, recycling ends up emitting more CO2 and costing more money, while landfills are cheap and secure.

- Recycling mid-tier plastics (like plastic bottles or butter tubs) costs thousands of dollars per ton of CO2 saved. It's cheaper to do direct air CO2 capture than that! And there is no shortage of plastic, nor any problem with sequestering it in the ground once we're done with it.

- Modern landfills are extraordinarily secure and are *much* more than just big piles of trash. They capture 75%–95% of methane gas. Groundwater contamination is doesn't really happen with landfills built since 1990. A study of 31 landfills built since 1988 in NY found no adverse effect at all on local groundwater quality.

- The crusade against single-use plastics has driven us to products that use far more materials and energy and would need to be used an absurd number of times to actually be an improvement. A steel straw needs to be used 150 times to be worth using. A ceramic mug needs to be used 1,000 times to beat a polystyrene cup. A cotton bag needs to be reused 173 times to beat single-use.

- Some things ARE worth recycling. Recycling metal saves a huge amount of energy and material – recycling aluminium saves 95% of the energy spent on making fresh stuff. So we do a lot of it already: about 30% of steel worldwide is recycled.

Modern, well-run landfills cause minimal environmental damage. We have plenty of space for them – less than 0.01% of the US is used for landfill and only about 0.02% of Germany. We can even build on top of old landfills, so the land area is not spent permanently.

New in @WorksInProgMag, @robertwiblin and @chalmermagne on why it's usually best to just bury your trash. https://t.co/TsGJdcwG76

[Hunter Ash @ArtemisConsort]

If you set up your phone camera, check the angles, then record yourself having an emotional meltdown, you are not ensouled.

[wanye @xwanyex]

Like, I would just simply not have a bunch of different categories for people who killed their three children on purpose. Once we’ve established that they did it, I would just go ahead and hang them. These categories don’t seem all that relevant or interesting to me.

[Jarvis @jarvis_best]

Every 6 months or so all of academia takes a break from their important scholarship in order to remind us that each and every single hillbilly luddite stereotype about higher education being a cocoon of berserk shrieking Stalinist savages is 100% correct.