thank you, again.
i have queued that up for after tonight’s feature presentation.
(mum wants to watch a movie)
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What you gonna watch?
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Thanks for all this discussion! I’ve very weak on this stuff.
Didn’t some of this cult of individualism in the US come from people wanting to be like their pioneer forebears whom they imagine had the freedom to do anything they wanted? Glossing over the “provided they could find shelter and feed themselves” of course. I’ve often thought of this while driving through the exburbs and seeing these big houses with huge manicured lawns and spotless pickup trucks in the driveways, owned by people who imagine they are self-reliant despite depending on electricity, cell phones, gas stations, grocery stores, roads, etc., etc.
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From the article:
After months of Musk acting as Donald Trump’s chainsaw-wielding right-hand man, Democrats are conflicted about Musk’s pivot Thursday to criticizing the House-passed megabill and its gutting of clean energy tax credits. But they’re slowly starting to realize that they should use him to their advantage.
“Musk and I have had deep disagreements on his approach at DOGE, but on this issue he is correct,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), one of Musk’s chief antagonists in the House, said in an email. “Democrats should be able to recognize that.”
Just because a broken clock is right twice a day doesn’t mean I should toss my perfectly functioning clock out the window and replace it with the broken one. That is one of the dumbest fucking articles I have ever read. It’s literally just “Musk is right that the Big Beautiful Bill shouldn’t have gutted EV tax credits, so Democrats should ally with him.” WTF.
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I have a relative who says exactly that. No concern about her own incipient “popcorn lung” is one thing, but the refusal to listen to my complaints that the vape crap coming out of her mouth is bad for others is a big reason I spend less and less time with her.
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I find vapes less offensive than cigarettes but I am sensitive to certain smells, at best its annoying and in the worse case the smell can give me migraines.
I’ve told this story at TOP. This reminds me of the time years ago when I was a movie theater and “Puff the vaping douche” was billowing giant vape stacks during the movie. I ended up complaining to the manager twice about it before they went in and talked to the guy, who then proceeded to say that he was told he could vape during the movie by an employee and then glared at us for the rest of the movie 
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Kidd Jr. calls vape ‘cancer candy’. GenZ knows what’s up.
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One of several columnists employed by the Telegraph to provoke breakfast spluttering among the gammon classes.
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Curtis Yarvin, from a New Yorker interview, which at multiple times, in just this excerpt, had me screaming, “This is so stupid! How can you be this fucking stupid?” at no one in particular.:
That this absolute idiot is treated like a great political philosopher by the VP and others in power is just… I don’t… this country is so depraved and intellectually degraded right now.
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The article quickly became illegible to me. That man is distilled engineer’s disease, trying to reinvent government from first principles he made up without knowing a trace of history, philosophy, or anything else that might be relevant.
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I really recommend the essay about Yarvin, Land, and the other guy in Elizabeth Sandifer’s book. It’s very long, but worth it to sort through his mess of a political worldview. It really all just boils down to racism, at the end of it. She’s a very funny writer who can make this morass of dumb ideas clear…
He really is. I am so sick of people like him getting long-form essay length coverage as if they’re dumbass ideas about politics and history are worth anything… There are actual smart people who’ve read and thought hard about this stuff and maybe we should listen to them instead.
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Take him back?
Did they ever have him in the first place?
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… would be solved by a secret board with the power to select and recall the otherwise all-powerful C.E.O of each sovereign corporation, or SovCorp.
Just in that one section, two thoughts come to mind.
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“SovCorp”. MiniTrue. Ungood. IngSoc. NewSpeak. Dense motherfucker.
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He’s just reinvented Tainistry.
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To prevent a C.E.O. from staging a military coup, the board members would have access to cryptographic keys that would allow them to disarm all government weapons, from nuclear missiles down to small arms, with the push of a button.
Everything before this point shows he knows nothing about history or psychology or anthropology or philosophy. Which is expected; he’s a tech bro.
But this shit is so bad it doesn’t rise to the level of “wrong”, and it’s in his alleged lane.
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Engineer’s disease is bad enough, but that people who otherwise should know better, who have some education in some of these subjects (like Vance) are fans is mindblowing. I assume they’re just really into the anti-democratic fantasies and wave away all the obvious nonsense.
I wonder, though, if he didn’t so much “reinvent it” as once read something (possibly just the wiki page) and think, “yeah, that sounds like a good idea.”
He’s full of weird fantasies about sci-fi tech that doesn’t exist and wouldn’t ever work (like putting what he sees as superfluous people in VR prisons). There’s a lot of “ideas that an ignorant 12 year old would come up with” from him, which reminds me of Trump. The whole administration and the people they look up to all operate on that level, it turns out.
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