Jump to content

Captainant

Certifiably Surly
  • Posts

    17913
  • Joined

  • Days Won

    6

Everything posted by Captainant

  1. NASA is giving up on it's Earth science mission now. In violation of its chartering 1958 law https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/08/nasas-acting-chief-calls-for-the-end-of-earth-science-at-the-space-agency/ "All the climate science, and all of the other priorities that the last administration had at NASA, we’re going to move aside, and all of the science that we do is going to be directed towards exploration, which is the mission of NASA," Duffy said during the appearance. "That’s why we have NASA, to explore, not to do all of these Earth sciences."
  2. It really is something that the current crop of fascists are still benefiting from the intellectual dishonesty of the "ur" crop of fascists. There is no humor in it, they don't give a shit about their words being lies. They know only their enemy believes in words and they are delighted by acting in bad faith. When you press them, their arguments amount to "many people are saying", but pressing them only leads to them saying it's not the right time or place to talk about it and delay infinitely. You're talking about reasoning people out of a position they weren't reasoned into, and are proud of their irrational stakeout. The only way is for the leopard to eat all their faces. In 1930s Germany all the small business owners LOVED how the nazis got the economy humming, and then they got consumed by the machine they built in the 40s, by way of private state sanctioned cartels ran by the old money they hated in the first place. They've learned their lesson. I can't help but think we're gonna be getting our turn in the barrel the more we FAFO
  3. Hitler named the nazis "national socialist workers party" as a troll against the communists - there's been a ton of academia on it. Even Encyclopedia Britannica has an article on it. Their use of red for their flag was also poking the soviets in the eye, not to mention everyone who joined the nazis thinking they were a socialist group were killed during the night of long knives. Classic leopard eating faces moment
  4. My HS had a couple of gun scares and full campus lockdowns from shootings or home invasions near the HS. And, a gunshot wound is a rather more serious proposition than possibly losing in an athletic event in the one in ten thousand chance a trans person is competing at all. But if to you school shootings and trans people competing in sports are equally dangerous to students... I simply cannot agree that both sides are the same
  5. You don't "combat" it by retreating the position and rhetorically saying "yeah you're right". I don't disagree that you should redirect to real issues though. But that doesn't mean you #bothsides and say their fake issue is real just to get them on your side. That's still pushing the Overton window farther right.
  6. Well you're using their bad faith arguments, so it wasn't clear you meant what LChorn had posted. I was getting more of a "let's just give him Poland and they'll be happy" vibe
  7. You're right, appeasing the fascists will surely work
  8. Like, what the fuck do you think will happen after they finish off trans folks? Call it a day? Historically speaking, they fuckin don't.
  9. Nobody but the republicans are making this an issue. Where it does happen it's a singleton case that is an exception. Making a rule to chase edge cases is dog shit systems management. Like, can you name an instance of it happening in your school district? Or in any way that has actually directly impinged upon your life in a non-rhetorical way? What I'm saying is you're buying into and propagating feels>realz and doing the fascists work for them by complying in advance.
  10. It's fucking wild that a handful of singleton cases is enough to convince you that you should treat millions of Americans like subhumans. By your logic, we should have never had a civil rights movement either. The average person disagreed with abolition, or something too amirite?
  11. Yes and children shouldn't have litterboxes in classrooms, of course! Any other fringe or non issues that have been fabricated by the right? We gotta do something about those chemtrails making everyone gay too!!!
  12. That's pretty infantilizing to say that they've got zero agency and are 100% just the sum of choices that other people made for them. I have friends and family that are incredibly technically smart, but would believe the sky was green if enough people from their bible study told them. Some folks CHOOSE to be so blinkered by their community, despite easy and ample access to verifiable facts. It all comes down to being easier to just turn off your critical thinking and go with the flow, and folks are so worn out from the constant firehose of catastrophe and scandal that they're more than happy to just check out and focus on fun instead of the ugly reality they prayed and voted for.
  13. I don't feel like I'm reading that sort of thing here or in IRL discussions? And I'm mainly seeing that discourse in faceless social media forums like Twitter or reddit - places that I doubt are genuine reflections of sentiment given what we know about online influence campaigns.
  14. You're right, the Internet is much better when hate and racism and dehumanizing speech are left unchallenged to crowd out other discourse. We should just let magicsoccerspray and pronghorn post whatever disinformation they want because we don't want to be divisive!
  15. I think that's a bit of embellishment, considering that it's in response to some pretty outright horrible things being posted. Your framing is impressively inequitable in that the inciting trolls get a pass, while the ire is saved for the response. Because truly, policy-wise the left had more to say and propose for economic issues. And yet, of it's as important as you claim, they choose tariffs and shrinking the economy with trump? Make it make sense, aside from "strong man"
  16. My thesis is: what if that """dem division""" is outside agitation to incite divisions? Much of this insanity is faceless online people thrashing up an online shitstorm, and then that being used to characterize the entire "left". Conversely that is working to favor the right, in which their evils and wrongs are actively hidden by the firehose of falsehood and simply moving on to the next thing, rather than trying to address everything in good faith. I feel strongly that the magnitude of unity of the right and disunity of the left is synthetic, or at the very least being artificially amplified. It's the same algorithmic playbook we've been subjected to since 2016, just applied across LLM's and more mechanisms of evangelizing that worldview. and "sizzle" is exactly how we get into this mess - easily faked and promised up-front, and just as easily betrayed and never delivered on. It's trump's entire election strategy, and we've seen multiple cycles of the pattern of all sizzle no steak... But people keep thinking uncritically and ignore that it's ONLY sizzle because mAnY pEoPlE aRe SaYiNg
  17. I'm sure there's SOME asshole out there saying that, but do you really think that's the tenor of this board or progressives in general? I feel like progressives are defined by whatever charicature is most absurd, not by objective reality. Feelz > realz I guess
  18. like I said - it all fits together nicely when you frame is a work. A dude fucking died, so I'm inclined to believe it was a shoot. But bruh. That whole thing played like a custom show from WWE 2k
  19. In WilCo, police fucks you!
  20. Being on the "other" side of that push onto workers, I don't see it lasting much longer. Most organizations have dismal uptake and usage rate for all their $20-30/head tools. I think we're still in the hype cycle of idiot MBA's playing buzzword mad libs to their BOD's and senior leadership, and they're all polishing up their resumes to leave before the chickens come home to roost. In my anecdotal cases, it's the same idiots that are always pushing the next big thing pushing AI assistant services. And for me the frustrating thing is, the botched rollout of AI assistants is going to harm other actually valuable AI projects that are already delivering value, like a contract analysis stack that reads decades old PDF's to true up rates on existing contracts that never got adjusted to match the paper. Just very very annoying that there's so much noise and so little appetite for stopping and thinking critically about things.
  21. WWE hall of famer taking a blade job to get put over? Yeah that would certainly add up
  22. I did a quick search and the spread is bigger than that https://www.statista.com/chart/34534/median-house-price-versus-median-income-in-the-us/
  23. It really is insnae the degree to which perception trumps objective fact, pun intended. Trump's whole image of success is completely fake - it's gilded paper mache. He's destroyed basically every enterprise he's ever touched, but because of his reality TV show people think he's smarter than god. That sort of idiocy is how you fall into despotism. Which is exactly where we're headed.
  24. The Pacific Railway Act signed in 1862 by Lincoln would disagree that roads and airplanes was the basis of our national infrastructure. Where are you getting your numbers on rail expenses? Upfront costs are indeed higher for a railway, but the throughput is much higher at a lower cost per ton of cargo. It scales better Edit: ah twice clarified it for me, high speed rail not just rail. Derp. That said, of course a single run isn't efficient! Rail lines benefit from network effects, and being isolated really reduces the utility of a specific line
  25. Crazy how the mods encourage this sort of strife by allowing their preferred trolls to have a free pass on TOXIC(!!!!) behavior
×
×
  • Create New...