sj_zero

https://social.fbxl.net/users/sj_zero

Author of The Graysonian Ethic (Available on Amazon, pick up a dead tree copy today)

Also Author of Future Sepsis (Also available on Amazon!)

Admin of the FBXL Network including FBXL Search, FBXL Video, FBXL Social, FBXL Lotide, FBXL Translate, and FBXL Maps.

Advocate for freedom and tolerance even if you say things I do not like

Adversary of Fediblock

Accept that I'll probably say something you don't like and I'll give you the same benefit, and maybe we can find some truth about the world.

Ah... Is the Alliteration clever or stupid? Don't answer that, I sort of know the answer already...

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nos.lol

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Last Notes

2026-04-07 06:24:46 CEST

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3e5v3zQlpI
relevant

2026-04-07 06:11:05 CEST

I've got that former chinesium android set top box I converted to linux earning its keep today -- It thought it was going to maybe do some light streaming, and I've got it running an entire platform's compile farm. Thing barely has a heat sink.

2026-04-06 14:00:44 CEST

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And?
Do we stop enforcing just this law against spouses of government employees, or should we stop enforcing all laws against them, up to and including things like laws against murder?
Just so we have an understanding of what is implied by this story.

2026-03-15 22:51:50 CET

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It won't be a VPN ban, because of VPN ban would immediately impact millions of people in the laptop classes which includes millions of people who work for the government.
It'll be a ban on using VPNs for unapproved purposes.
Which in some ways is much worse because it's like a digital feudalism.

2026-03-09 16:33:28 CET

Jean Baudrillard's simulations and simulacra describe how you start with reality, and reality is then simulated and eventually the simulation is simulated to create a simulacrum, and the original reality may in fact cease to exist. This toy really reminds me of that. There was once a thing as a rotary phone. The rotary phone was simulated in a children's toy. Then the children's toy itself is simulated in another children's toy, and meanwhile rotary phones have disappeared, and in an example of hyperreality, the reference to reality has disappeared entirely and the toy which is the simulation becomes an icon which is represented separately from its original context.
https://social.fbxl.net/media/f021c6cd2104e9e639d88b0600934b9154ff05524d318ebeb810d52a11caf1d4.jpg

2026-03-03 14:21:58 CET

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But then you'd need a computer and an internet connection, and where is anyone gonna find that?

2026-02-20 21:18:39 CET

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Turns out people die in the winter in New York?
I'm shocked. Shocked!

2026-02-20 00:27:16 CET

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well, yeah.

2026-02-19 01:20:35 CET

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Our prime minster waggled his finger at Trump for the loss of the "rules based global order" when his predecessor of the same party illegally siezed bank accounts of peaceful protesters. Oh, there are rules? Doesn't seem like it.

2026-02-19 00:54:41 CET

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As a foreigner, I endorse this message.
It'd be nice if some of these world leaders would deal with the problems in their own countries rather than talking about what they would do if they were the president of the United States of America, cuz they're never going to be that.

2026-02-07 22:37:53 CET

I spent some time creating a server library and updating my client library for a certain protocol in FreeBASIC.
I really wanted to set it up so it's very simple and straightforward, but you could also use it for more if you wanted to.
One thing i did which is probably normal process for software developers but I'm just a retard from the sticks is I created a validation file that starts a server and a client and tests both end to end by testing each routine against itself and then also testing failure scenarios to prove it fails successfully.
Sped up development a lot, since I could use the client to prove the server and the server to prove the client and I could develop both at once to meet in the middle in the validation program.
Obviously I had to test against a reference implementation (and did), but it's like going through your own books before an audit -- It was easy to find problems before they became an issue I had to troubleshoot against a server or client I didn't write.

2026-02-04 20:14:38 CET

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Not the turtle flu! I hear it can break through very powerful defenses!

2026-01-27 23:49:17 CET

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It took me uncomfortably long to realize you were actually talking about horses.
I thought I'd share because I think that's kind of amusing.

2026-01-26 06:56:06 CET

Imagine for a second, asking Google Gemini what is 1+1. You light up internet architecture spanning thousands of miles to a data center where you activate hundreds of gigabytes of memory, activate multiple top end GPUs, utilize non trivial pumping and water taken from a nearby river, and it responds back
"Hi, I'm Gemini, the helpful AI assistant. I'm afraid I don't know how to do that yet."

2026-01-19 13:41:34 CET

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Trump did the same sort of stuff to canada, and we did the same sort of retarded mean girls bullshit. It didn't work, because it turns out we need them more than they need us.
If Europe broke with the US, first thing they'd have to negotiate is Ukraine's surrender.
I very much doubt that there will be a hostile takeover in the sense of troops on the ground, but in the New York businessman sense of a hostile takeover, I can absolutely see it happening. He doesn't need to put a single soldier in harms way, just play hardball and make them an offer they can't refuse.
Now will he successfully do that? No clue.

2026-01-18 16:39:26 CET

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I think the most interesting thing is realizing what the Pharisees are intended to represent. Their greatest sin is mindless adherence to the rules without proper concern for what is just, or what is true.
There's obviously direct parallels with today. A lot of people are so focused on following arbitrary rules that they don't care about the justice or truth of their actions, only that they're following the rules.
And of course some people misread that criticism and assume that it means we never have to follow the rules, but the reality is of course we need to follow rules, but we also need to use our brains to make sure that the application of the rules is both just and true.

2026-01-18 16:11:39 CET

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It's true. Imagine an America where I'm a citizen.

2026-01-16 00:23:59 CET

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People who have to make stuff on their own and convince someone else to buy it know that you really have to think about your audience, or at least try to make something you think people would want to buy.
Most of these idiots grew up thinking that wet roads cause rain, so the only reason big companies had stuff that was so popular is that they have lots of money for advertising, so if they get into the big companies they can make whatever they want and the big companies can advertise it and everyone will have to watch whatever dreck they puke up.

2026-01-16 00:09:40 CET

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The Democrats lost the last civil war, why are they trying to start another one?

2026-01-15 11:48:29 CET

LLMs can be clever at times, but anyone who has ever tried to use one to solve a hard problem and gotten "This proves it. We're on the right track" for a few hours where it is clearly not on the right track knows agentic AI isn't necessarily such a good idea.

2026-01-15 04:09:26 CET

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Satan isn't clever or evil enough to come up with something as horrible as online dating.

2026-01-15 02:47:07 CET

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Honestly, every year that this doesn't get done is another year you know that the government doesn't do anything good for anyone.

2026-01-13 15:04:39 CET

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That's poor logic, since it could be applied directly to bikes and cars. "The roads are for cars, not for riding a bike. Yes a crash at 50kph night not sound like too much but it can still be deadly if the cyclist is hit wrong."
If 25kph is too high, then make the speed limit on bikes slower, and cyclists must dismount on busy sidewalks. They separate pedestrians and motor vehicles for a reason, and they reason applies equally to bicycles.

2026-01-13 14:23:56 CET

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I didn't get my license until I was in my mid-20s, and so I have a lot of sympathy for cyclists.
But man, I don't care which vehicle you're in, nobody likes the two vehicle types sharing the road. Cars and bikes are different things. Even Cars and motorcyles are different things, but at least a motorcycle can usually out-accelerate a car.
I'd prefer cyclists be allowed to stay on the sidewalk as long as they're not going excessively fast and not running into anyone.

2026-01-12 22:32:41 CET

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It's going to be like the Dare program. Within three generations they're going to legalize the rule of thumb.

2026-01-10 16:25:40 CET

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I might have misunderstood you then, I'm glad I did because I think that it's an important distinction that a lot of people aren't going to make, so I added a couple paragraphs about it to my broader analysis.

2026-01-10 16:15:59 CET

I generally like spiked online magazine, but I've now seen two articles about the Good shooting calling on the right to be nicer about things and admonishing people criticizing Good for her actions, and I have to disagree.
For those living under a rock, Good was a woman living in minneapolis who was shot by an ICE officer during an arrest. Sources say she was trying to block ICE but allow protesters through, and two ICE agents left their vehicle to arrest Good. Once they reached her vehicle, she put the vehicle into reverse. One officer was at her window, one was in front of the SUV. While the police were telling her to stop the car and get out of the car, her wife yelled "drive baby, drive!" and she slammed the gas. The front wheel spun on the ice. The officer in front of the SUV started bolting to the side to try to get out of the way of the vehicle whose wheels were now spinning. After a few tenths of a second, the tires grabbed and the vehicle began to move forward, and the officer in front of the car began pulling their firearm. As the vehicle began to move, the officer in front changed direction with both feet slipping backwards. The officer is pushed aside, and the officer, while in physical contact with the vehicle, shot the driver first from in front of the car through the windshield, and then through the open window. Good died later at hospital of her injuries. The officer who was struck by the car was hospitalized, though that may have just been prophylactic because of contact with the car.
One thing that isn't important, but could be treated as important by some people, is the race of the driver. Good was a white woman. Statistically speaking, white women are the least likely to be shot by police of any demographic, so if racial impact was doing anything here, it would have likely been in her favor. That could be why she felt empowered to act as she did.
A couple points that matter. First, the question of whether the vehicle "made contact" with the officer isn't really up for debate. The only question there is whether it made offensive contact with the officer. There were two officers, one at the window touching the vehicle, the other clearly the officer was close enough that there was contact, and the officer in front changed direction sideways because he was being pushed by the moving car. They were touching. Second, at least two of the bullets entered the vehicle through the windshield, meaning that at the very least the gun would need to be in front of the windshield.
There is a big difference between Charlie Kirk and Good. Kirk was killed in a premeditated murder caused by political speech. Good was killed because she hit the gas while she was under arrest while police were actively touching her vehicle.
The judgement and catharsis on the right isn't necessarily because Good disagreed with the right (Most people in Minneapolis do according to polls), it's because she did something which was obviously going to result in her getting killed, and then she got killed.
I've been comparing it to behavior around a black bear. If you see a black bear, there are things you do, such as looking big, making lots of noise, keeping your distance, never getting in between a mother and her cubs, and if you treat the dangerous situation with the proper respect you have an overwhelming chance to make it through the interaction in one piece. Likewise, if you are under arrest by law enforcement personnel, there are certain things you do, such as following orders from law enforcement such as "stop the car" or "get out of the car", and not making sudden or aggressive moves. People survive being around bears and police on a daily basis.
Bears have the power to kill you just like a cop, let's not mince words. And sometimes bears abuse that power. Sometimes innocent people get hurt by bears despite doing everything right. All that is true. But if you see a bear and start manhandling her cub and then get hurt, it's hard to blame the bear, even though the bear was the one who took the action.
If someone mistreats a black bear and gets mauled, is it a tragedy? Of course. But it's also an understandable consequence of that person's immediate actions. The same goes for someone who gets shot after gunning the gas in their SUV when federal law enforcement are telling you to stop the car and are already at your car.
One can definitely argue that there's more complexities with cops than with black bears, and that one is a wild animal and the other a human, but at the end of the day, most of those complexities come later. The big question here is: Do you catch a bearclaw or bullet, or not?
I saw the video and heard analysis from multiple lawyers, one of whom was Andrew Branca, whose specialty is this field, and Branca in particular sees it as cut and dry. There was no conflicting directives here, the officer told her to get out of the car, and to stop the car. The cop was already at her window giving these orders, and in spite of that, she first backed up the car in such a way that the vehicle turned towards the officer, then put the vehicle in gear and jammed the gas. This is a textbook way to get shot by law enforcement.
To law enforcement, especially law enforcement during an arrest (which this had become when she was ordered to get out of the car), a vehicle is a lethal weapon and she had just pulled the trigger.
Some people have focused on "the wheels were turned in this direction so he wouldn't have gotten hit", but there's major problems with that. First, the officer wasn't looking at the tires, he was looking at the driver, who had just put the vehicle in drive and hit the gas. Second, the vehicle did in fact contact the officer. If you're any reasonable person, and you see a vehicle pointing generally at you and you hear the engine revving, it is fully reasonable that you would take that as an imminent threat to your life, and in many places in the US, even if you weren't law enforcement you'd be justified in using force to protect your life.
Even objective reasonableness isn't about whether he's right either. It's about whether a reasonable person with the same knowledge could come to the same conclusion. Seeing things from 100 feet away vs. living and breathing the moment, the objective facts can change a lot -- for example, by letting you see where the wheels are turned. The objective conclusions from subjective data can lead one to incorrectly but objectively reasonably believe something that isn't true. In that case, it's tragic, but legally and morally defensible.
In the days since, we have seen situations that prove that the threat isn't academic. In one situation, a man rammed a police car with this SUV, then ran over the police officer after they left their vehicle, and after running them over went back to run over them three more times. That also happened in a very short period of time.
Generally, law enforcement officers are trained to consider vehicles lethal weapons and to treat potential for harm during interactions that way. This means that not only is the individual officer's decision to treat the moving vehicle as a threat internally reasonable, it matches the training such an officer may be given.
Another thing that's important is empathy, in the sense of being able to put yourself in the officer's shoes. The video was taken from 100 feet away, and we're watching it on a computer monitor perhaps thousands of miles away. There's a world of difference between watching a video on your computer or phone and experiencing a vehicle you are presently touching and next to moving when it's supposed to be stopped, and it's your body parts on the line right now if you make the wrong call.
One of the arguments made in the spiked article was "There should not be a death sentence for fleeing from police", and I think that's asking the wrong question. Of course we can all agree that there should not be a death sentence for resisting arrest or for fleeing from police. The question here isn't about that. It's about an officer opening fire on a vehicle that they perceived (rightly or wrongly) as a threat of serious injury or death in that moment.
I'm focusing on the legal argument here, but that's because it's a more straightforward one to make. The moral argument, however, is similar. Both parties have a right to life, but if one party believes the other is threatening that right and is imminently going to attack them with lethal force, typically morality allows someone to fight back with equal force. There's another moral argument to be made that ICE shouldn't have been there at all, but I don't think there's a good moral argument that'll hold up under scrutiny here. Ok, so you don't believe in immigration enforcement so you think federal law enforcement shouldn't be in your city. How about food safety standards as administered by the FDA? How about drug safety at pharmacies? How about abolishing slavery which was once pushed against using similar arguments? I don't think you can make a universal moral argument that federal law enforcement should leave, so that leaves the idea that federal immigration should not be allowed to enter. If you just believe that immigration enforcement shouldn't be allowed, do you believe that so strongly that it overrides one's right to not be killed, or rather, their right to defend themselves if they think they should not be killed?
Of course, one could make the argument that civil disobedience ought not to have a death penalty. However, if one is engaging in civil disobedience such as blocking ICE, then getting peacefully arrested is part of that process. You block ICE, get arrested, and your punishment is accepted as part of demonstrating the unjustness of the law.
Which brings us to another point: The officer doesn't need to be correct that they are at risk of serious injury or death. Let's say the twitter keyboard warriors are correct and there's no way she could possibly have used the SUV as a weapon. It only matters that in the same situation an objective reasonable person would feel like there is a threat, and that subjectively it appered that the officer felt there was a threat. You can't charge people for lack of omniscience. Really, we don't know how else this would have played out even with the third party video footage.
There's a question of proportionality, but if a vehicle is considered a weapon with a threat of lethality or serious injury, then lethal weapons are the proportionate reaction. The officer met potentially lethal force with potentially lethal force. If the officer was able to use less lethal means that would have been preferable, but what is preferable is not the same as what is proportionate.
There's also the question of de-escalation. The event took place over a few seconds. Perhaps there's a method of de-escalation that could have taken place, but in that moment it was also an arrest, whereupon the officers intended to escalate to arrest. If they had reasonable cause to believe a crime they could make an arrest for had been committed, it was a solid arrest. The situation went from warm to hot so quickly I don't see how any reasonable action could be taken. The car was moving, the officer was clinging to the car, the time to take action was that moment.
New footage came out yesterday from the phone, and it showed how quickly the escallation happened. Good and her wife were jeering the officers with smiles on their face but otherwise compliant, and in a fraction of a second, you hear "Drive baby drive!" and the car moving and the officer's phone flying in the air. That detail matters, it shows that there wasn't time for much. In a fraction of a second, everything changed.
Older studies from the 1980s and 1990s found that law enforcement officers who are involved in a shooting in the line of duty tend to leave the field within 5 years at rates between 70-85%, though there isn't great newer data and there have been advances in terms of the counselling available for officers. Regardless, only about a quarter of officers ever need to fire their weapon. Using lethal force is less common than you may be led to believe, and at least in the past it was traumatic for the officer who used it as well.
Tragic or not, her actions are the sort that would put her at risk in most countries on Earth, including countries generally considered to be less prone to use of force such as Canada, The UK, or Japan.
On the other hand, even if it wasn't a solid arrest, even if it was totally wrong and illegal, that still doesn't make fleeing the right choice. Attempts at arrest must be presumed to be legal, and if it turns out it wasn't, then your lawyer can deal with it afterwards and make a 1983 civil rights claim later. Gunning the engine and trying to escape, even if you're in the right, is a situation that can lead to death, and did in this case.
Apolitically, doing what she did is a good way to die. If you're left or right, male or female, latino or white or black, gay or straight, don't mess with cops or you might die, and lots of people do die every year from interactions that go bad. Incidentally, so do many cops.
Beyond even this, calls to "not politicize the death" are going to be futile. The left was always going to politicize a video of an ICE agent shooting a car that goes viral regardless of the facts. One thing the Trump administration has done in his second term that he didn't do in his first is get much more aggressive about maintaining narratives. That does mean that in this situation, which is probably more complicated than either narrative would suggest, they have to call her a terrorist committing sedition and personally attack her. To do otherwise is to let the left entirely define the narrative, and we've seen that such narratives have no basis in reality.
Her death was political. Political second (practical first), but still political. She was actively in the act of opposing ICE agents in the commission of their duties. She was in the vehicle so she could block ICE vehicles travelling down the road. She wasn't an innocent bystander quietly driving home after dropping her kids off from school. She was about to be arrested because of her activities (which were unlawful at that point, arguably), and then she decided to try to gun the engine instead of be arrested. Immediately afterwards, her death was made political by local officials. The mayor of Minneapolis told ICE to "Get the fuck out". Governor Tim Walz threatened to use the national guard to eject ICE (Apparently none of these people have read up on the US civil war and its implications). Establishment news articles all rushed to paint the now dead woman as a martyred saint for the cause of opposing the Trump administration. Latenight comedians have all rushed to politicize the situation.
Given that the press literally took a press conference where Trump said "White supremacists and neo nazis should be condemned completely" and twisted it into him saying the thought they were very fine people, it makes sense they'd be much more aggressive this time around, because losing those narrative skirmishes really reduced what his first administration was able to get done.
"Independent fact checkers" didn't bother fact checking the very fine people fraud until 2024, years and years after it occurred. Joe Biden used the line to run for president, and he won. I'm sure that moments like that showed the Trump administration that they had to get in front of political issues like this, and even if conservatives find it distasteful (because it is), it's politically expedient.
As for others, Laura Loomer called Good a "commie" "Rug muncher", which is in poor taste for certain for someone whose body is barely cold. By way of explanation, she's got an audience because she found a niche who like that sort of behavior.
It's political, and that's a further tragedy for what's certainly a tragedy for her child who as I understand it has lost both birth parents (first the father died, now the mother died). Friends, family, and children are grieving the loss of their friend, wife, mother, sister, child, and all they see online is reminders. I can't imagine how tough it must be.
In an article I read about Good, her former brother in law through her deceased husband said she was a nice and friendly woman, even if they disagreed on things. I could honestly believe it. I can also imagine that she had a lot of scars from what sounds like a life that got tough at times. My wife often wonders what she'd do without me, especially now that we have a kid. It's not something we like to think about, but it is something we have contingency plans in place for. Unfortunately for this young woman, she won't get a chance to build more memories with her child, and she'll be mostly remembered by history as a footnote in an era of political strife.
One more thing I'd like to note before I conclude, is that the questions here are not about whether a better outcome was possible. Honestly, if you were God and had unlimited knowledge about the universe, then it probably would have been the better move not to shoot. In that case, the woman wold be alive (and charged with assault with a deady weapon), and it's unlikely that we'd get a repeat of the white SUV which went back to run over the cop 3 more times. However, we are not like God, and we can't be expected to make decisions that are infallible, only reasonable. The shooing was justified, even if it might have not been the optimal outcome. Consider two video games: One where you can save and load at any time, and another where you have one save that is deleted after you die and you can't load except when you quit the game and come back. In the former, you can go back and replay decisions that have outcomes you don't like, but in the latter you have to live with bad outcomes. In the former you can take risks like not shooting someone who might have let you go, but in the latter you have to be much more careful because in the former you can reload your save, in the latter you just die (or go to the hospital, perhaps have lifelong disabilities).
Tying this back to my introduction, you can see here, the shooting was a justified self-defense action based on the driver's stupid actions and not a political assassination, it's not the same. And while it would be nice if we could all turn the temperature down, it's the prisoner's dilemma in game theory terms -- Either everyone does and things get better, or one side does and one side does not and the side that turns the temperature down loses, or both sides do and everyone is better off. Until we start to see more John Fettermans out there trying to be reasonable, unfortunately it's off the table.

2026-01-10 15:27:16 CET

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I haven't posted it yet, but I did a full analysis on this. The thing is, proportionality still lies on the cops side, and it would probably be on the cops side no matter what, even if it wasn't a cop.
When you try to run someone over with your car, or at least if someone believes that you are trying to run them over with your car, proportionality says you are already using deadly force, so using deadly force back is justified in defense.
And I would push further, and say this isn't an America thing. If you try to run over a law enforcement officer in europe, or in the uk, or in japan, or in china, or in canada, pretty much every one of those places would consider that police officer justified in pulling their gun on you. You just don't have a right to run people over with your car. Don't do it, it's a bad idea.
Earlier mountain_jay talked about the fact that the shooting wasn't necessary, and and I think that that's a separate question from whether it was justified. Legally and morally speaking, when that lady hit the gas when someone was immediately in front of her car, if she got shot it was her own fault almost anywhere. But I would tend to agree that this isn't like that white SUV that happened the same day where the guy turned around and went to run the cop back over three more times. I'm guessing that based on the fact that the police officer did survive, that things would have turned out much better if he hadn't. She would still be going to jail, but she would still be alive. But, that's something that's easier to say with perfect hindsight.

2026-01-09 11:43:54 CET

In the situation with that lady who FAFO'd, I have the most sympathy for the young child.
I read that the woman was a widow, so that child already was growing up without a dad. Then this lady left her home in Colorado to get involved with something that had nothing to do with her in Minneapolis, and now that kid is an orphan.
You can have all the political opinions you want, but confronting armed federal agents is a young person's game. It's still dangerous and stupid, but at least you aren't digging two graves.
When you're a parent, your life no longer belongs to just you. You have a responsibility to this life you created. Heading out and getting mercked by driving your SUV at federal agents, you didn't just give up your life for something stupid, you just gave away something that was no longer entirely yours to give.
Now that young child has to grow up without either parent.
Honestly, raising your children ought to be the meaning of your life. It has far more actual impact than some stupid protest in another state. It's a full-time job with 2 parents, and more than that if you're a widower with the father. I know that even being married, I wake up in the morning doing my duty as a father, spend the day doing my duty, and might get an hour or two at the end of the day to relax. It's a double marathon, even with a great partner. There's no time to be trying to run down federal agents.
Incidentally, this isn't a hypothetical. I agreed with the trucker protests in Canada, I had time off during them, and guess what? I didn't go. I watched viva frei attend them on YouTube with my son drinking his bottle on my arm, because that's where my place was.
New relationships happen, but data consistently shows that birth parents are wired different.

2026-01-05 14:59:38 CET

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All the way back in aristophanes: "we will have a society where everyone is equal and nobody needs to toil!" "but who will do the work?" "The slaves!"

2026-01-05 13:32:36 CET

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Once you make free food, Free water, free shelter, free healthcare human rights that must be provided or you're satan, why not free sex?
I'm not even necessarily saying that from for example the standpoint of saying that universal healthcare should never exist, but there's a difference between making something available through the state because it's a nice or useful idea and making something available through the state because there is a duty or obligation to provide that thing, and if they are failing to then they are committing some crime against humanity.
In the example of healthcare, it's a nice thing to have while society is Rich enough to provide it, but if society ceases to be rich enough to provide it then that service has to go away. In that case it ends up being a government provided service that is not a fundamental human right.
As fundamental human rights, both healthcare and sex require a specific person in the sense of an individual with certain attributes that are not common. Institutions do not provide health care, doctors do. The doctors are particularly intelligent and particularly hard-working people, energy universal sex care system, the state prostitutes would be particularly attractive men and women.
And then you get into the stickiness of making healthcare a human right and some healthcare procedures are effectively murder. For example, if doctors are forced to provide medical assistance in dying or forced to provide abortions, then they are being forced to engage in murder. Is it really so morally different forcing someone to have sex versus forcing them to commit murder against their will?
A lot of people will argue until they're blue in the face as to why not free sex, but perhaps the more important question is, why free murder? Demanding that we take resources from everyone regardless of their moral view to pay for this, not because it is a nice thing to do but because it is becoming human right that is a crime against humanity if you don't provide it, in both cases seems really suspect.

2026-01-04 00:06:16 CET

I'm sure there's nothing important going on. It'll be fine.
#note1wjg…0fdj

2026-01-03 15:41:17 CET

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But let's be real, not really.
I can get on board with the general message you're trying to send here, but the United States has been fucking around in South America since Trump was in diapers -- and the political doctrine probably predates Trump's grandfather.
Munroe doctrine goes back to the early 1800s, and is the doctrine that says "we reserve the right to fuck with things we feel are our interests abroad".
As for south America in general, lots of regime changes and other fuckery occurred during the cold war without any formal declaration of war. Lots of regime changes and the like in the 1950s onwards. Lots of "police actions" that weren't declared by Congress, and nobody got impeached.
Presidents of both parties have done similar things in the past without being impeached. Kennedy, johnson, nixon, Reagan, for the majority of the past century it's just how things were done, and generally people didn't like it but there were no consequences. You just call it a police action, and I think that Trump has, and a lot of people uncomfortably sit with that.

2026-01-03 05:35:47 CET

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I wanted to take a trip to Minnesota to do some learing, but since the center shut down I'll take my business elsewhere.

2025-12-31 11:35:37 CET

Almost nobody is talking about the Renewalageddon in Canada.
60% of mortgages are set to renew in 2026. Unlike the US, where mortgage terms can be up to 30 years fixed, the overwhelming majority of mortgage interest terms are 5 years or less, fixed or variable rate.
Variable rate mortgages have survived with similar payments so far because they stretched amortizations to 50 years, but the CMHC (canadian home mortgage corporation) is not allowing them to renew at those amortizations, so payments will rise more than the amount of the mortgage increase would imply.
Fixed rate mortgages will be renewing at rates going from as low as 0.99% if renewed at trough mortgage rates for 5 years to 4-6%, which is going to massively increase house payments for millions of Canadians.
For a sanely priced house (200-400k), that might be painful but managable. House prices in Canada peaked around 2021 at over 830k, and on a mortgage that big, moving from 1% to 4-6% will mean huge increases in monthly payments.
Mathematically, it looks like we're facing one of the biggest financial crises in Canadian history and even though it's operating like clockwork, nobody is talking about it.

2025-12-30 10:57:39 CET

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The end of world war 2 was actually brilliant, but it was built for a specific purpose that hadn't been applicable in generations.
After WWI, you had trained killers who were feeling disconnected from the country and so in the US you got the bonus army, in Europe you got fascism and national socialism as well as armed revolutions elsewhere, leading to WWII.
The purpose of the postwar order was demobilizing after universal mobilization. Once the greatest generation aged out of wartime, the purpose had been fulfilled. Unfortunately, all the wise leaders aged out too and people just started thinking this insane system was supposed to exist forever, and that's suicidal over time. There just aren't enough resources to keep doing it for nothing.

2025-12-30 10:42:20 CET

If any company causes the AI apocalypse, it'll be Google with their Gemini.
My Google homes recently updated, and I'll be like "hey Google, count from 0 to 30" and it goes "I can't count" -- despite counting just fine an hour ago. "Hey Google, sing the alphabet." "I can't sing" you did it an hour ago! I go "reduce volume by 10%" which is something it's fully capable of doing, "I can't change device volume" yes you can you wanker!
Then you call it out and it's like "I am google Gemini, a helpful AI!" -- the hell you are!
Gemini will nuke Moscow and I'll be like *what the hell Gemini you nuked Moscow!* And it'll respond "I'm Gemini! A helpful AI assistant!"

2025-12-29 05:51:27 CET

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I don't understand, these guys love it when people get arrested for political speech. What's the problem?

2025-12-28 16:15:23 CET

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When these politicians say stuff like this, usually you can go back and find some huge lie that they've said. I always want to ask: "what punishment are you willing to accept today for your misinformation and disinformation?"
Oddly enough, that doesn't seem like they thought that far ahead.

2025-12-20 14:54:46 CET

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The history of section 230 is that prior to 230 it was the law of the land that most internet services were not moderated at all and therefore the people operating the services had limited liability for anything posted on them unless and until it was reported.
There was one early case involving compuserve, and because that server and didn't moderate editorial, they were treated like a newsstand that sells newspapers other people published, and so CompuServe was not liable for the individual things written by the posters. By contrast, There was a case involving Prodigy I think, where the service claimed to be moderated and thus safer for young people to go on to. This opened them up to liability because they asserted editorial moderation and some of the content they allowed through was found to be defamatory. Therefore, the state of the internet prior to section 230 was this: limited editorial moderation which limited liability for the things said, or editorial moderation where the website provider took on the liability for the things that were posted and also took on liability for damages when they moderate.
If suction 230 were to be removed, this would be the way things would go back to. Legally, if you never made any pretenses of moderation, you would be protected from the individual things that people post. And if you did choose to moderate, you would be personally responsible for everything that was posted on your website.
This is why a lot of free speech people were pushing for the abolishment of section 230 altogether, because at that point either everything becomes usenet again and largely unmoderated for editorial, for what remains becomes so fully locked down it would no longer be interactive. In other words, individuals who believe that abolishing section 230 would result in moderation that they like becoming the norm are likely incorrect. The more likely result would be that once section 230 was removed, remaining services that didn't immediately lock down would not have any editorial controls at all.
But I should tell you that if you are on the political left, there's an awful lot of stuff that would immediately get taken down because no company would want to potentially be treated as the speaker of a lot of that speech. In particular, accusations that a certain company did X or that a certain individual did Y would almost certainly be banned out right because the company's running the platforms would not want to be "saying" such things in court.
Of course on the political right there would be a lot of stuff taken down too, but not the stuff most lefties would want. Legally, there's generally nothing wrong with what is called hate speech, at least not in the United States. Therefore, we're talking about a certain company dumping talk to chemicals into a river maybe actionable defamation and therefore might be moderated, or making statements of fact about a certain politician maybe actionable defamation and therefore might be moderated, you can legally talk about your opinions on different races all day long.
A lot of politically neutral services would likely be up in the air as well. Things like recommendation algorithms or monetization decisions could have to change to accommodate the elimination of section 230 and the resulting legal regime.

2025-12-20 08:25:42 CET

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From a superpositional standpoint it's pretty obvious.
People support the police because they do a bunch of things that people do respect and want. If there's murder to be solved, people want the police to be in there. If your house gets robbed, they want the police to come find the guy who did it and lock them up.
At their best, police are protecting people's individual rights from being infringed by others.
People hate the police state because instead of providing basic order and thereby protecting people's rights, they end up using the pretext of order to harm people's individual rights on behalf of the government system.
In a sense, it's similar to left wing arguments against guns: the tool can be misused and often is so we should eliminate the thing. There's a nice first order logic to it, but we live in a multiple order world with multiple effects to an action.
Of course, it could be that having a tool like the police will inevitably mean it gets corrupted and break it's mandate, and that may be true too. Power corrupts, after all.
But it's also true that without some force capable of using force to enforce societal norms, someone else will come in and use force to enforce whatever they want and thus use of force is required.
Does that have to look like contemporary police forces? Not necessarily, but I don't think people who support police are necessarily so fixated on a specific form.
I do think a healthy society is one with mechanisms other than violent enforcement of norms to maintain order. A healthy society has cultural norms and mores, values and concepts such as honor or guilt that serve to get people to act in ways that don't need enforcement in the first place.

2025-12-18 22:54:03 CET

Physical media is irrelevant. You can have physical media that's so locked down that you don't actually own it.
What's actually going to make a comeback is media that you control. If you have a Sony rootkit CD or a DRM-free floc file, the latter beats the former every time. If you have a physical disc of the video game spore which requires you to call into Central servers before writing your video game, or you have a drm-free copy of a similar game that you bought off of Gog, the latter is the only one you actually own.
To that end, I've got a multi-disk NAS in mirroring mode with all my media, and I host jellyfin so I can watch it or listen to it using my own personal hardware, without any need to ask a corporate overlord permission to listen to my own music.
I do have a large library of ebooks, but I've also got a a very real library of paper books on shelves, and short of coming around door to door, nobody can change the contents of either, but particularly not the dead tree books.
It's a big contrast to physical media like what you can get on playstation, xbox, or the Nintendo switch. You can own the physical media for any of these consoles but without an internet connection be totally incapable of playing your games.
Something that you increasingly need to pay attention to now is whether the hardware itself requires internet access and access to a central server you do not control. There have been a number of instances where for example people owned thermostats in their home and could not operate their furnace because the servers for the thermostat company had been shut down. Anyone with a Google video game unit should know that since the streaming service has been shut down they can no longer ever play any of the games that they bought for that. Even someone with an old Nintendo Wii my plug it into the wifi today and discover that many of the items on the home screen are like an old shopping mall that's about to shut down -- the old signs are there, but the real estate has been vacant for years.
I was fairly lucky because I got to experience with this looks like firsthand over 15 years ago. Around 2008, there was a video game streaming service called gametap. It proposed that you would pay a subscription fee and be able to get access to an entire game library on your PC. Had some really good games on offer too, including the original fallout games. Two things occurred: first, is that streaming service lost the license for that video game, you could not play that video game any longer. Second, if you stop paying the subscription fee, you will lose access to all of your video games, and they also locked your saved games behind a paywall as I recall. That was a very early lesson for me how about the dangers of outsourcing ownership.

2025-12-16 11:21:52 CET

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Assuming there's a set number of education dollars, making sure everything is everywhere means you're taking dollars at crowded schools where a course is wanted and instead using them at sparsely populated schools where a course isn't particularly wanted.
That would result in the people in places where something is wanted being in worse shape, and the people in places where a course isn't particularly wanted being in far better shape artificially. Imagine if you had many departments with no students or almost no students, and a rural university being required to fully fund equally resourced versions of those programs. I imagine the rural Montana university urban planning or outreach degree programs being harder to get qualified teachers for than the University of Chicago equivalent. Meanwhile, the university of Chicago ranch management program would need to be funded like the Montana university program as well.
One real question is whether universities are appropriate for purpose anyway. Prior the WWII they were mostly finishing schools for elites, and they were democratized as part of a (brilliant, if we're being honest) regime intended to prevent repeats of the rise of Hitler or Mussolini or the American Bonus Army, basically giving places for trained killers to go and find opportunities for upward social mobility. You can see that in the tiny number if courses that are relevant to your job that are required to get a "degree" in that field. It makes sense for an elite ruling class to be well rounded in the sciences and humanities, but I can't say it makes similar sense for someone who wants to get vocational training to get a well rounded education when what they want is a job. Notably, the post-World war conditions that made the move necessary hasn't been true for generations. Most of the people the system was intended for are dead of old age, and so are some of their kids.
Another question is whether secondary schools are doing their jobs, since university is increasingly taking the place of high school in establishing basic competence employers can rely on, and some public schools have failed to graduate a single person reading, writing, and doing arithmetic at grade level. Part of the problem is Goodhart's law, that bureaucrats look at high school graduates making more money than drop outs and concluding that therefore we should help more people become high school graduates, which drives down standards and results in the value of such a diploma being diluted among all graduates, which ultimately results in the credential inflation we see.
But I'm just a blue collar schlub, so what do I know?

2025-12-15 18:42:18 CET

Breaking news that Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered, and at this point it looks as if the murder was committed by their son.
I was listening to the introduction to an edition of Paradise Lost and Paradise found. It went through the life of John Milton. One of the most interesting points of John Milton's life is that in spite of his greatest work being about God and satan, heaven and hell, and you might assume that he did his very best to live a virtuous life, it is evident from the behavior of his daughters that he was not fulfilling his duty as the family patriarch in the absence of his late wife. They grew up and grew old resenting the man, and through that reflection of his own behavior towards them they ultimately mistreated him in his old age and disability when he lost his sight. Even after death, his daughters were spiteful towards him, and fought his widow for the remainder of his estate, ultimately succeeding at taking most of his assets.
In the current era, I feel that there is no more salient lesson than this. The sins of the father do get passed down to their children, and the wages of sin is death.
Of course, that's not the whole story. Absolutely, parents can neglect and abuse their children, or spoil them through excess, or simply fail to impart proper values upon them. However, even in the best of circumstances with the best parents available wanting for nothing and being given the best in instruction, some children choose evil, or through physical malady haven't chosen for them. When the parents pay the sins of the children in such a way, you can hardly say it is anything but tragic.
I don't know what's the truth of this story is, whether it is 1, or the other, or some combination of the two. But for me, it is a whisper in my ear: Memento Mori. The only way we live on is through our children, and though we have not perfect control over the lives that they live after us they are reflections of us. More than any political advocacy, it is what we leave behind immediately surrounding us that defines our legacy. So if he was the architect of his own destruction, I feel pathos and pity for him, and if he was not the architect of his own destruction, then I feel deep sorrow at hearing of someone's good works crumbling within their lifetime.
After a very tiny bit of research, it looks as if that son had been struggling with substance abuse since he was a teenager, even to the extent that he spent quite a bit of time homeless. Those struggles were apparently the subject of one of Reiner's films. The world is vast and broad and you can never really say with certainty anything, but the idea that a teenager with multimillionaire parents becomes addicted to drugs or alcohol does suggest me that it is by the fruit of their tree that you will know them. It isn't mandatory, it isn't written in the stars that substance abuse from their son is automatically the parent's fault, but typically you're going to be looking at either a child who is trying to fill a hole with drugs and I'll call that they can't fill with family life, or a home environment where drugs and alcohol are so readily available that even a teenager can quickly get their hands on it. A third possibility is just that the kid made some very stupid choices very early on and there's nothing anyone else could have done.
I can't imagine being an old man slowly bleeding out because my son stabbed me in my life to death. I feel like the thing I would remember the most would be this thought that not only would I be dying but my son would end up dying in prison. The metaphor from Exodus about boiling a calf and it's mother's milk comes to mind.

2025-12-05 20:54:21 CET

"youth unemployment" is something near and dear to my heart because I know how hard it is to take off if there's no available runway.
I came of age during a recession (the 2001 recession right after the dot com bubble burst. It caused my rust belt town to finally get massive layoffs at the local factory), and to me, youth unemployment meant losing a year of earning because all the people laid off from the town's factory ended up working menial jobs to keep the lights on. It had big effects on my health because I basically surfed the internet in my parents basement for a year, and also kept me from going to college for much longer than I would have liked because I wasn't able to save enough for college.
Ironically, I did eventually end up getting a full-time job, and it was at a job that paid significantly less than minimum wage. In spite of the illegal wage, I was happy to have it because at least I could save money for college.

2025-11-27 02:58:12 CET

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Patel always looks so surprised. Like "what the shit you guys actually made me head of the FBI?!"

2025-11-26 23:10:32 CET

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Honestly, even the COVID shot was insanely harsh. I slept a full 24 hours with a fever with it, and my dad had to quit a job he has lined up because it knocked him on his ass for a month. Then we all got COVID anyway!

2025-11-24 15:46:49 CET

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Stop eating you fat fuck(r)
Ingredient: none
Frequency: all the time
Dosage: less food
Mechanism: not eating so much
Ask your doctor if stop eating you fat fuck (r) is for you. Not covered by most HMO or drug plans.
I lost 80kg on stop eating you fat fuck.

2025-11-18 13:23:07 CET

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I've got one machine where I do a lot of my routine stuff in a VM running Linux on top of windows 11. Media can be a little dodgy since it needs to pass sound through but besides that it's perfect.

2025-11-17 17:24:41 CET

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A bear with a bluetooth speaker I'm ok with, but I agree with you that an AI toy for a little child is really concerning. In fact, most technology given to young children without parental guidance is really concerning.
I've heard reports of kids who go to kindergarten not knowing their own name. That seems stupid until you remember there's kids who are on tablets for hours and hours a day -- they're never referred to by their own name!
Manmade horrors beyond our comprehension? ✅

2025-11-17 16:16:57 CET

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My mom got an "AI teddy bear", but it turns out it's just a Bluetooth speaker that uses a shitty app to produce shitty ai stories.
So you can just use other apps using Bluetooth!

2025-11-17 13:50:36 CET

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Kind of really weird that people are calling trump a Nazi for eliminating state funded media.
The Nazis loved that shit.

2025-11-13 20:05:09 CET

Freedom toons successfully funded their new animated series. That's nice to see. The more we support media from people who don't hate us, the better off the future will look.

2025-11-10 17:14:51 CET

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The original PS3 could play PS3, PS2 and PS1 games. It played PS2 games by having PS2 hardware integrated into itself, but it played PS1 games using a built-in software emulator.
I think a lot of the discussion of backwards compatibility is related to business models.
If you have the console naturally support your game, then you can sell a console. If you don't, then you can sell an overpriced re-release effectively every time you put out a new console. The overpriced re-release is often just an emulator and rom packaged together.
The SNES Classic and Playstation Classic I have are both consoles running modernish hardware and a software emulator underneath.
Many games were sold on the Wii and Wii U from the NES, SNES, and N64, and people were able to extract the game roms to use on non-commercial emulators as I recall.

2025-11-10 17:00:04 CET

In the late '90s, I wrote into PC Games Magazine after a story talking about PCs vs. Consoles.
My letter suggested that game consoles aren't going to be necessary in the future because emulators could play the video games.
Ironically, I ended up being totally right. Even game consoles run emulators of other game consoles, and a lot of games you buy on PC are just a rom with an emulator.
I think at this moment it's looking like PCs won a decisive victory. Microsoft is looking like they'll leave the console business, Sony's generation is sad, Nintendo has screwed up hard, and PC handhelds are better than ever.

2025-11-07 01:10:50 CET

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Like what I often say about socialists hate boner for Hitler:
There's nobody who hates socialists more than other, slightly different socialists.

2025-11-06 05:12:10 CET

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Eliminate the income tax, watch how much more gets done and how much less needs to get done.

2025-11-04 14:31:39 CET

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Skilled people are the means of production.

2025-11-01 16:56:17 CET

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When you think about it, the threats to steal if people don't get their SNAP are kind of futile.
"Either we steal from everyone or we steal from someone" uh ok?

2025-10-23 18:11:32 CEST

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If matter and antimatter are both incredible amounts of energy organizing themselves into particles, and having all this energy in one place is what helps that organization, and if matter and antimatter destroy each other and result in a return to energy, then it seems to me that you could have a scenario where matter and antimatter form again and again, flipping the coin until eventually it lands on one side or another due to minutae between the formation of both, which might even be totally arbitrary. Flip a coin enough times, and eventually you likely don't always get exactly 50%. All you'd need is 50.1% and if the energy is going through a cycle of stabilization into matter and antimatter, meeting, annihilation, restabilization, because the coin would keep flipping until you get enough of a 50.1% to have a final outcome.
I suppose the matter antimatter creation/annihilation cycle could happen so fast that as humans we might not have any conception of the number of particles that were created and destroyed -- it could be ten to the power of 200. Given that there's about ten to the power of 80 particles, then that means that you could have only one asymmetry after an unfathomable number of cycles and still have a final answer.

2025-10-22 13:20:26 CEST

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I find it very hard to wrap my head around the fact that 99% of cases don't have drive bays anymore.

2025-10-21 13:28:31 CEST

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Trump's prayer before bed each night:
Dear Lord in heaven,
Please let my enemies be really stupid
Because it would be so funny
Amen

2025-10-20 14:24:31 CEST

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De Niro.... That's Italian, isn't it?
Just saying, maybe the Italian should watch which world war 2 allusions he makes to a Jew.
Funny thing. Apparently DeNiro's parents were born in the city of Ferrazzano, a small town near Campobasso in the Molise region of southern Italy. So any of his ancestors who didn't move to the United States during that generation likely would have been involved with Mussolini's regime the hear DeNiro's Dad was born.
If I was a 4 foot tall actor doing something this embarrassing, I would cast myself from the top of my platform shoes.

2025-10-19 15:34:15 CEST

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A lot of things that the left claims were invented by capitalism are pre-human. Things like hierarchy, territory, family, and many other concepts that they claim were invented by capitalist humans to subjugate others can be found in many other forms of life that never had a chance to learn it from humans.
Part of the problem is that the left relies on scientific narratives that we now know to be objectively wrong. Rousseau's noble savage narrative assume that when completely left alone human beings will always be good and it was only society which makes them evil. This was based on science that was even kind of dodgy in his time, and now it's completely debunked and ahistorical, anthropologically speaking.
That's a big deal because one of the reasons for example that leftists think we need to abolish the family is writings by Marx and Engels which incorrectly assume family is essentially a construct of late humans.
Did you see this carried through in some anthropology, where they will find one female who was given a burial in warrior paraphernalia and they extrapolate that one thing to mean that before writing everything must have been in egalitarian and all of their ideas about gender existed. By that logic, the world must have been fully egalitarian in the 1900s because Marie curie and queen Elizabeth existed.

2025-10-19 14:58:39 CEST

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My boomer dad regularly puts Linux mint on people's computers for them because it's like getting a brand new fast PC even on old hardware.
It's been good enough for a long while now.

2025-10-13 23:40:09 CEST

DS9 is a paradox. It is some of the best storytelling in Trek, but it also fundamentally broke Trek. What it did was fundamentally break Trek by proving Roddenberry wrong; it turned out there is no utopia in the future, it just looked that way until an enemy came along that forced Starfleet to fight back for real. Shortly after DS9, that happened to the western neoliberal world order.
Nothing else has ever come out since then that's really the same as what came before. Kirk and Picard, even early Janeway, they were no longer possible in Trek and that's one reason it's never truly recovered since.

2025-10-13 17:51:29 CEST

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For all the slavery that happened in California.

2025-10-13 06:49:10 CEST

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I really hoped the trump administration would invoke the insurrection act because it would be really funny.

2025-10-12 23:44:22 CEST

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Mongolian throatholioioioio

2025-10-12 15:04:03 CEST

I saw Jeff Cliff on here this morning.
Hard to believe he's still going on about COVID in late 2025.
Especially after we're years in and many of the predictions made about the lockdowns turned out to be entirely true. A generation of young kids have had their reading severely crippled. Another generation of young adults have had their social foundations severely crippled. The Wall Street economy exploded but the Main Street economy was crippled and never really returned to normal. Homeless encampments that started during COVID never truly went away. Normal people are still visiting food banks at unprecedented levels, and a lot of food banks are having to turn away people because their use rates are so much higher than ever before and the cost of food has skyrocketed.
One thing I do tend to want to correct people about is they blame COVID for things like the lower literacy in classrooms, but it is in fact the lockdowns that caused that, not COVID itself. In fact, for a good chunk of the lockdowns, most places didn't have COVID (by design -- that was the purpose of the lockdowns), and the harm of lockdowns was occurring independently of any harm from COVID.
In medicine, often we need to modulate the immune response in a person because the immune response is what kills us, not the illness itself. We take Tylenol and Aspirin to reduce fevers because the fever is worse for us. We also take Tylenol and Aspirin to reduce inflammation responses because inflammation is often more damaging to the local tissue than the infection itself, and we can let the more sophisticated parts of our immune system deal with infections instead. Through this metaphor, we can see the fever and inflammation response of lockdowns, masking, and presenting our papers like every restaurant is a soviet checkpoint may have been more harmful than the infection we were trying to resolve. Chronic fever can cause brain damage and organ damage that can take far longer to recover from than the infection itself, and arguably that's exactly what we're seeing from our civilizational fever.
Yet he's still talking as if there's only one truth and that truth is that COVID is the worst thing ever and we never should have ended anti-COVID measures. I recall him also arguing that the downsides I discuss above would never come to pass, and perhaps today would argue they didn't come to pass.
It almost looks like a modernist idea of COVIDism. That isn't to say it's a cult of COVID, but rather a totalizing worldview where one and only one thing matters at the top of the grand narrative hierarchy, and that's COVID.
Part of the risk of the original COVID-19 is that it was a novel coronavirus -- something our immune systems had no defense against. One major argument for the lockdowns is that people didn't have any chance of not getting COVID, so if everyone got sick at once there'd be big implications to that. The problem is, it's been 5 years, and most people have had COVID. In fact, it's a sick joke regarding the vaccines -- where I work, definitionally 100% of the people working there were vaccinated, yet tons of people got COVID anyway.
Honestly, at first I wasn't against the lockdowns, since the argument seemed sound -- we didn't know how lethal it was, there were videos out of China of people dropping dead in the streets (almost certainly fake we now understand), and there was a risk of virtually everyone getting really sick with a bad illness right away. Later we learned that many of the fatalities we saw were a result of bad treatment options such as intubation rather than the inherent lethality of covid. The thing is, by the end of 2020 we already had achieved the goals of the initial lockdowns, but then to totalizing narrative hold to "defeat COVID" had taken hold. People felt like it was possible to totally eliminate a virus that had travelled across the entire world, and wouldn't accept anything but total eradictation. This meant that 14 days became a month became 6 months became 2 years before things finally started to go back to normal.
Ironically, although the vaccine didn't prevent covid, it seems that natural immunity did ultimately do its job. I don't see people getting routinely sick with COVID anymore. A few unusual people got it multiple times, but most people seem to have gotten it once and after that been OK.
I don't know what Jeff's story is. Maybe he lost some important family members early on and never really psychologically recovered. If that's the case, I can sympathize with him, but empirically we can say it's time to let go -- Continuing to fight this fight isn't going to bring your loved ones back, but if you ever got what you wanted a lot more people would suffer because of it.
Maybe he's just keeping up a joke. If it's a joke on his part, he needs to find a new joke because it really isn't funny anymore.
Unrelated to Jeff, some people think 2020 was an exercise in societal compliance. They wanted to see if they could push people to do act insane and they succeeded. That may be the case, but I'd argue because human relationships aren't digital, it's a measurement that changes when you take it -- A lot of society changed as a direct result of 2020, and I know a lot of people are quite sensitive to any similar event occurring again. To enact what they did took massive capital: social capital, political capital, and monetary capital. The scale of what it took to enact the lockdowns was similar to how in order to measure an electron you have to bounce another electron off of it, changing the state of that electron you're measuring -- it doesn't matter what result you get back, the system is fundamentally changed afterwards. You only proved it could be done back then, not that it could be done again.

2025-10-12 13:49:42 CEST

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Sure is a good thing Canada is in great shape and there's nothing troublesome going on at all so they can focus on erasing people from the internet secretly.

2025-10-11 15:21:33 CEST

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>Then again, I doubt a "true" capitalist economy ever exists, because culture is such a huge force.
I have something very much like this is a core piece of something that I'm writing for my next book.
The idea that culture is a mediating force between both the state and capital. The so-called culture war is that you're seeing in my opinion are better characterized as forces outside of culture itself trying to sublimate the power of culture which doesn't need money or a centralized bureaucracy into either the state or markets. It doesn't really matter which side is doing the pulling because it's like two predators fighting over a fresh carcass. Once you realize that culture is the more important and much larger element, I totally changes every question about the world today.

2025-10-11 15:10:30 CEST

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In countries where the government makes up 60% of GDP (Italy for example), can you really even consider it capitalism of any kind anymore? That 40% that isn't government isn't just the companies and rich folks, it's also the entire labor market put together -- so every single individual working for a wage. Which is nuts when you think about how insanely huge and powerful government is. (The US is about 30-40% if you include all 3 levels so less but still historically at totalitarian dictatorship levels historically speaking)
We can never forget that there was no income tax for most people on Earth in 1900. Today, a blue collar guy can be paying 50% tax on the last dollar he earns, and that's before the many other forms of taxation that didn't exist previously. Include all those taxes and that same blue collar guy might be paying 50% tax on every dollar he earns.

2025-10-11 14:45:59 CEST

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Unless you're requesting asylum from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, France, or Spain, I don't see why you'd have a claim to asylum in the UK.
Now, I can understand why you'd request asylum from France, but for the most part people from those countries are happy to sleep in the beds they've made.

2025-10-10 11:47:14 CEST

Should people take life seriously or just be happy?
I would say it's a false dichotomy. To be truly happy, you have to take life seriously.
Taking life seriously doesn't mean taking every single thing you can't control seriously, of course. The wisdom of the stoics is important, but not focusing on things you can't control isn't the same as not taking life itself seriously and taking the things you can control seriously.
I became a father in 2021 after a lifetime of thinking that was impossible. I released my first book about a month before he was born. Most fathers wouldn't publish a novel length book to their son, but I felt like it was important to get started.
Being a father is one of only a few things in my life that have ever made me truly happy, one of the other things being my marriage. These two things are a big part of my life, and I take them both deadly seriously. That totally changes the calculus of things. Going outside, going for a walk, going to the park, they stop just being something you do for your own happiness, and start being something you do because you're serious about your life and that makes it important. By doing the things that aren't fun in the moment, by taking life seriously and treating it like something that matters, you do these things and fundamentally become happier because the things you care about succeed.
Meanwhile, while I got to the park with my son 7 times a week some weeks, I see we're living in ghost world. The sidewalks are empty. The parks are empty. Everywhere is empty. Where are the kids? Obviously there's a lot fewer kids now that we aren't in a baby boom, but the truth is there's still plenty of kids but nobody takes live very seriously so they're just at home playing on their electronics and watching slop videos.
In fact, I think taking life seriously and acting like it matters is how you make sure you're doing the right things and ensuring your happiness continues. Doing the right thing when nobody's watching is serious. Deferring gratification when it can pay off is serious. Raising your kids is serious. Staying connected to your wife or husband is serious. You ultimately end up with what Aristotle called eudaimonia, human flourishing. It's a deeper happiness than just being able to say you enjoyed doing something transient briefly.
I finished my second book and first novel this year. I took writing it very seriously, and spent a lot of time thinking about what sort of world could make people happy. It wasn't a world of fleeting joy and lackadaisical attitudes. It's a world rich with meaning, where people take their lives, their communities, their responsibilities seriously. It's a world where people make commitments to the people around them, and that's where they find joy and meaning. We are free, so we are free to do the right thing that makes the world a better place to live in.

2025-10-06 16:53:29 CEST

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If you want to piss literally everyone on the road off, drive the speed limit.
But I'm not gonna stop. that's the limit, I'll drive the limit. Even if I do have a convoy of 100 vehicles behind me waiting for the road to split again.

2025-10-05 00:57:10 CEST

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I thought a lot about this, let's say hypothetically that before the sun goes red giant, we get out to Europa and we also find a way to keep it from evaporating away during that phase. So now humanity is stuck under the ice of Europa. There's very little energy because the primary source of energy is the orbit around Jupiter, and there's really very little danger because there are no predators there's no weather there's no geological events.
Intelligence would be maladaptive at some point. It would make way more sense for any given life form to dramatically reduce the amount of energy it burns thinking of things because there's probably only about four things you need to do, and if you don't do those four things you're probably going to die, and there's nothing you can do that's actually going to be more positive than doing those four things.
Now the point here isn't to look into this deep dark future under the ice of Europa as a direct prediction. In this case, it is to look at the utility of intelligence and find out where the limits are. As the amount of energy available goes down and the number of options available goes down and the likelihood that an intelligent decision will be materially better than an unintelligent decision goes down then the utility of intelligence goes down.
Therefore there would have to be an upper limit to intelligence because there is a point where additional intelligence doesn't have the additional evolutionary utility to justify it.

2025-10-04 22:34:52 CEST

Its interesting to me that the "media literacy" people dont know about their own postmodern form of media literacy called "death of the author" in which the intended message of the work is subordinate to the interpretation from the audience.
Let's say that some dutch idiot made a movie set up like war propaganda because he assumed all war propaganda is fascist, then some people like it at face value because war propaganda isn't always fascist especially if you're fighting giant bugs.
Under postmodern critical analysis, the viewer is correct regardless of their intentions.

2025-10-04 15:06:58 CEST

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The rich aren't necessarily the problem, but they definitely are recipients of the benefits of the problem.
Of course wages did stagnate because the labor pool grew massively, but the government wants you to own assets in part so that they can count the assets that you own. To incentivize this, they print a bunch of money and that money almost immediately ends up in the markets. Even when it doesn't end up in the markets, it basically ends up in the hands of government because a good chunk of it goes into bonds.
So you have three different things going on at once: because the labor will grows the value of an individual worker goes down. Because of inflation caused by debt and monetary policies, just giving workers fairly low wage increases is actually a huge pay cut, and most of that money that gets printed ends up in financial assets so people who own assets instead of selling their labor and up wealthier.
So once you reach a critical mass of assets, at that point basically you just keep getting richer and richer even though you're not actually doing anything productive.
Elon Musk is my favorite example of this. Earlier this week he had hit $500 billion of net worth. The fuckin guy doesn't have any successful businesses. Tesla is a barely profitable car company, SpaceX is a barely profitable space company, Twitter is a barely profitable social media site, but he's learned how to play the game and so all of that excess money has to go somewhere and a lot of it seems to be going to his companies.
You can't get that mad at him, if people kept throwing money at you what are you going to do, not take it?

2025-09-30 15:05:01 CEST

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Sent you a DM, not sure if it federated.

2025-09-30 14:57:55 CEST

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Who said a nation can only be wealthy with oil?
A nation requires access to energy, but you can access energy using methods other than just having oil. Free markets are useful for that.
Unfortunately, the USA, China, and Japan are also all inconvenient examples of economic success, since they all became "rich" in part by overwhelming deficit spending and central economic planning.
The problem is that eventually the amount of growth you get for the money slows and you're in a situation like Japan -- they're 30 years into a "lost decade", rates stuck at 0%, and the national debt is massive.

2025-09-30 14:49:42 CEST

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Thanks!
It's nuts thinking about how quickly time goes. I published that right before my son was born (which was a good thing because I now realize finishing the publishing with a newborn baby in the house was never going to happen), he's almost 4 now.

2025-09-30 14:37:25 CEST

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My first book is called The Graysonian Ethic: Lessons for my unborn son. It's a book of different essays with life lessons for my son (who is now born, of course).
My second just got released this month, it's called Future Sepsis. It's a speculative fiction/science fiction book about four people from 2024 who wake up in 2124 and have to navigate a world that's different than ours. Two examples of the changes are that (at least in this location) religion is once again a much more central part of social and civic life, and education has been totally rewired to try to form virtuous people rather than people with diplomas, but there's a lot of differences that are revealed over time.
My third book was mostly completed during the second, it's the philosophical underpinnings of the second book. I don't have a title for it yet, but the working title is "Meditations on post-metamodern superpositional epistemology". It started off as some appendixes to the second book, but I realized I had almost generated as many words in that as in the book proper and I didn't think that made sense to include by itself since a lot of people wouldn't be that interested in a bunch of esoteric discussions about a potential system of thought that might surpass postmodernism or metamodernism. I'm adding some work that's going to tie into a Future Sepsis sequel.

2025-09-30 12:12:59 CEST

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We don't talk about this enough.
Daycare can have a place in society, but the idea you'd work full time so you can afford to pay for childcare so you can work full time is insanity.

2025-09-30 11:59:34 CEST

One of the most interesting things in contemporary discourse is there a discussion of capitalism.
When the concept of capitalism came about, it was in the throes of the industrial revolution. Employers really did have disproportionate power over the people working for them, and at the time the state was extremely weak. These ideas first began being discussed in an era where the French revolution had started and ended, and it looked as if the concept of an aristocracy was going away forever to be replaced by business owners.
The problem is, time moves on and it isn't like that today.
Among the things that have happened since the French revolution: the holy Roman empire collapsed and was replaced by a nation state called Germany. The concept of nationalism Rose. It was a century of relative peace in Europe. Those are Russia was murdered and the Communists took over that country. Nationalists from the Balkans murdered a German aristocrat causing a series of alliances to collapse upon themselves, resulting in a World war. That World war ended. Soldiers who were promised things during that World war ended up having major effects on the world including the bonus army who marched on Washington and German soldiers who ultimately took over the German government to form the third Reich.
There was a world war triggered over that. A coalition of Germany, Italy, and Japan lost that war. The world economy and world political system was fundamentally rewritten. There was a cold war between the two remaining superpowers, and the communists ultimately lost. China became communist then became more like authoritarians with some markets. The entire labor movement happened fundamentally changing the role of labor.
Meanwhile, people keep talking like the same capitalism that existed immediately following the industrial revolution was still in effect. It's absurd when you realize the entire world is different than back then.
In Marx's time, the state was almost non-existent, and capital controlled our lives (and by the way capital was not a very nice benefactor of the working class), but more importantly the state was tiny -- 3-5% of GDP, providing essentially no services besides basic police and military.
As well, the economy of that era largely no longer exists in the west. Factories are generally a relic relegated to developing nations. Company towns no longer exist. Cities like Sheffield which used to be titans of industry simply don't have those factories anymore. I have cutlery from the factories of the 1970s, which no longer exist. England is in fact a poorer country outside of London, the seat of government.
Some people point to corruption like the relationship between politicians and businessesmen as evidence capital still dominates. This is ahistorical and gets it backwards: in eras that were definitely not capitalism, the power you needed to convince was the government, not capital. You try to corrupt where the power lies. Today, that is the state.
It's always important to remember that virtually every one of the richest people on earth today isn't rich because they sold a great product everyone loved, but because they got in bed with government and did what government asked. Elon Musk may have 250 billion in net worth, but virtually nobody owns his cars. He got rich doing what the state told him to do. Bezos and Zuckerberg are both products of a massive public works project, the internet. Oil magnates sell to governments (the US government is the largest purchaser of fossil fuels on Earth, and the military industrial complex works to secure their military supplies). When half the economy is the state, it's a gravity well that pulls everything in.
The people still talking about capitalism as if such a beast still exists today are tilting at windmills. They will ultimately be just as successful as Don Quixote, since just like that character, it is no longer an era of dragons and knights, of damsels in distress and quests. The world has moved on, and those models no longer apply.
I can't get too deep into it because I'm still working it out for my next book, but today's system to me is either a modernist liberalism where previous iterations were more pre-modern, or postmodernist liberalism. No matter what, it went from a part of a more pluralistic world to a totalizing system that tears down anything else. This new form of liberalism doesn't try to protect existing rights but give new rights to people by taking from others, and in so doing the leviathan of the state grows more powerful.

2025-09-27 16:03:11 CEST

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All that time they're spending around radical Muslims is rubbing off on them
Press secretaries must wear burqas on the beach!

2025-09-23 19:18:09 CEST

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By flipping from utter ideal to utter cynicism, not only do you totally break your own idealistic argument, but you make any further discussions on rights moot because according to you, it doesn't matter anyway since you're not rich. And maybe you're right. But I think you're still wrong.
Perhaps you don't understand that the rich and powerful have always written the laws? Are you aware that the constitution was a compromise between The agrarian slave holding states so wealthy farmers in the South and the industrializing states so wealthy factory owners in the north, and between people who thought the government ought not to have any power because the states and the people ought to have it all and the people who thought that the federal government ought to be large and powerful more similar to the states of Europe? In spite of that, the Constitution which you invoked repeatedly here was created with a Bill of Rights that has done as good of a job as any protecting the rights of individuals.

2025-09-23 16:31:00 CEST

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Seems like you're not actually reading what you're responding to, or at least not understanding it, before you write.
I started off by a summary of natural rights granted to men by God, then explained how constitutions limit government but are themselves part of a state that inherently limits your right. After that, I explained that the constitution is a political compromise from the time, the best everyone in the room could agree on. Then I explained how common law and constitutional rights intersect, and how they haven't intersected (as in, many things have been illegal since 1776). I showed a specific example of existing law that has existed in the United States for centuries that illustrates my point. Next, I brought it back to the point we're discussing, the assassination of a person and individuals not just celebrating but planning the next assassination online. After that, I pointed out the Kimmel situation, and how as an OTA broadcast medium it's a special case under the constitution. I closed out with meditations on the nature of classical liberalism, postmodern liberalism, and a metamodern or post-metamodern liberalism, and the corrupting nature of political violence to the whole system that allows liberalism and codified rights in the first place.
None of which seems to have much of anything to do with anything you've written in response to it. You're responding with some news stories that made you mad, and a word that makes you mad -- and you're accusing me of being emotional.
The word "collectivist" in this case refers to a frame where you are part of a community of individuals and you need to as a group need to arrive at rules you're all willing to agree on. Organized religion and particularly Christianity are inherently collectivist. You are part of the body of the Church, and your behavior affects the functioning of that body, and how that body is reflected upon by the world. You want laws to protect speech from employers, but that's a collectivist solution, not an individualist one.
The sort of discussion you're having might flatter you into thinking you're having a real discussion about rights and freedoms, but in reality if you're just steering with your gut then you're one of the masses who ultimately lead to the end of liberty under democracy. I don't disagree with you that any one of the things you've mentioned is a problem, but that's unrelated to the discussion I've been having. There are a lot of governments that are pushing past the agreed upon limits in their constitutions or traditions, and that's bad, but that doesn't mean the government doesn't have the ability to limit freedoms. Unfortunately, the nature of government is that in order to do anything it always limits freedoms, so the question becomes about how to manage those limitations on freedoms.
I was once a hardliner like you, but the more I learned about the most ideal system our planet has, the more I realized that the system doesn't work that way and can't work that way. You're making a moral statement in saying that speech should never be restricted, but that's not actually possible while having a working government. The key then isn't to as you seem to think I'm doing throw away freedoms. The key is to figure out how to best protect freedoms in the real world we live in.

2025-09-23 06:44:53 CEST

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sj_zero
sj_zero
Seems to me that such a statement is nonsense. You accused me of making an absurd statement before, but the phrase "god given constitutional rights" is facially absurd.
God gives you all the rights. You can speak, you can go wherever you like, you can move your body in any way you'd like, you can hunt and fish and gather off of trees. God gives you free will to decide how to act, then scripture to try to convince you to use that free will to do good and not evil.
Pre-postmodern liberal governments (Also referred to as classical liberal governments) inherently take away your rights. Things God made you free to do are no longer allowed or are controlled.
The constitution then tries to bind those governments into not infringing any more than the most limited number of rights required under the circumstances.
The rights that the constitution protects aren't necessarily the best ones or the only ones, they're just the ones that everyone in the room could agree on 250 years ago.
After that, the constitutional rights didn't exist in a vacuum. Courts immediately created cut-outs for rational limits on freedom of speech including laws against libel, slander, and importantly in this case, criminal conspiracy.
The United States court system inherited criminal conspiracy charges from English common law at confederation, and because of the balance of rights between the right to speak a conspiracy and the right to not have crimes committed against you, they were kept on the books, and in many jurisdictions immediately codified under state laws. Today, such statutes exist in all 50 states, and in spite of the 14th amendment which extended the federal constitution to state law, they were not successfully struck down.
We're talking about a situation where a bunch of people are cheering for the violent murder of a peaceful political voice. As I said, that's really on a line. Then they're working on putting together a list of additional people to murder online.
Mass conspiracy to commit murder has never been constitutionally protected speech. Not even in 1777. God may have given us the right to do it, but the state has always taken that right away for the good of civilization.
We aren't talking about these things in a vacuum here. This is all related to the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk, in which a leftist appears to have committed the murder because he didn't like what Kirk had to say (an act which fundamentally violated Kirk's right to free speech and his right to not be murdered). Some people online have been cheering for the murder and calling for more people to die, some people are naming who they want dead. There haven't been any state interventions yet, but some of these people were in sensitive positions for their jobs and lost those jobs for what they said.
One latenight talk show host falsely suggested that MAGA was the one who committed the murder and they were lying about who did it for political gain and had his show suspended, for what we now know was a week. Importantly, this wasn't on cable or Internet, it was on network TV where the show is broadcast over the airwaves.
Let's talk about that last point in terms of constitutional rights: The government has regulated the radio spectrum, such that you and I are not allowed to run a TV station. Even if we pay for the infrastructure, if we were to broadcast in such a way, we will go to Federal prison. So whoever is allowed to use that spectrum has a variety of additional limitations on their speech because they are given access to a public resource and expected to use it for the public good to an extent. Disseminating misinformation about assassinations to justify them is not in line with the regulations on that public resource (which have been held as constitutional for those reasons), so there are potential consequences to those actions.
Unfortunately, all of this thought about classical liberalism is probably just ghosts of a dead era at this point. On one hand, you've got mounting political violence from people who don't know or care that it's going to end in totalitarianism or actively desire totalitarianism because they think their foolish faction will be the one on top. On the other hand, you've got people who naively think you can give all the rights and none of the responsibilities in a society where the current sitting president has nearly been assassinated, a sitting supreme court justice has nearly been assassinated, and a peaceful political activist is freshly dead, his wife widowed, his two kids no to never hear their father's voice again. It reminds me too much of North Africa and the middle east, which was pacifist and Christian until the Muslims took over and never gave it up. It was only Byzantium and Western Europe which grew some teeth that were able to keep going with their ideology rather than be taken over by someone else's.
Postmodern liberalism attempted to give people freedoms they wouldn't have otherwise had, but in reality that's just stealing from Peter to pay Paul, or in the case of a recent high profile murder, releasing a violent criminal 24 times before they just straight-up murder a refugee, which is why I made the distinction between pre-postmodern liberalism.
The next step in our society, if we actually get there and don't just collapse into murdering one another when they make a good point we can't counter without bullets, is a stage of liberalism that accepts the freedoms God grants us but also re-integrates the responsibility God demands of us to be judged worthy of the kingdom of Heaven. The focus on the state is a major problem, because by focusing on how the state does or does not protecting or "providing" your liberty, that becomes part of every answer. In reality, we do need collectivism as a cultural force -- just not a genocidal high progressive cultural collectivism. The idea of individualism as our postmodern society has defined it -- to make everyone look better by just eliminating any measure of a person's worth that they might not measure up to -- might make people free from judgement, but it will lead them to slavery, because they will lack the virtue the physical world demands to achieve personal liberty.
Meanwhile -- and this is important -- you've got one side that sees murder their side commits as positive and to be promoted, and the mere response to murder as evil and to be attacked and punished. If you can't even get both sides to agree that "murdering peaceful individuals is wrong", then you're starting from the wrong end worrying about the rest.

2025-09-22 16:06:10 CEST

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Freedom to do what?
One of the problems of the word "Freedom" is that it's a hanging signifier, it means everything and nothing.
Freedom to murder people in the street and eat their flesh without consequence?
Freedom to set off nuclear bombs in the heart of cities?
The freedom to own slaves?
Freedom to murder peaceful political enemies and to create lists of new people who ought to be murdered next?
Many dictators use the word "Freedom". Adolf Hitler used the word often in Mein Kampf -- he saw conquering Europe and eradicating racial impurities in Germany as part of establishing freedom for the German people. Stalin used the word to invoke the idea of the working class being freedom from class oppression. Mao used the word to invoke the idea of freedom from colonialist powers who had caused the century of humiliation.
Same with the word "rights". You can have a right to many things, including the right to oppress others.
Freedoms collide with one another, rights collide with one another, and we need to figure out how to rationalize them. That's just reality bumping up against itself.

2025-09-20 15:34:17 CEST

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If we're being honest, absolutely everyone is entitled to say bad things about Charlie Kirk.
Honestly, his videos weren't my pot of tea. He always struck me as kind of a dick, making a big show of going on college campuses and arguing with dumb college kids. I know a lot of people have told me he was the nicest guy you'd ever meet but that wasn't my impression based solely on the media presence.
And you know what? No one's going to have a single problem with anything I said above. I didn't celebrate his death, I didn't justify his death, I didn't willfully lie about the circumstances to make my narrative look better, and I certainly didn't say who needs to be murdered next.
That's the problem with modernists. They can only see in black and white. They don't have a choice but to flatten complexity. That's why Charlie Kirk is dead, because they could only see disagreement as the exact same thing as calls for genocide, I know that he is dead and they are getting pushed back for calling for the deaths of more people they can only see mild criticism of the man and hysterical celebration of his death as the exact same thing because murder must be justified in the former case, and absolutely zero consequences must be justified in the latter.
I think a lot of people have been confused as to why over last week or so they've seen a lot of posts from me working through the implications of things like Jimmy Kimmels show being canceled or the consequences have come about for the people who were celebrating the political assassination and calling for more. It's because the world isn't digital, and the answers aren't simple or permanent. Even Buddhist monks invented Kung Fu to protect their temples.
The justification for murdering Kirk was essentially that by saying mean words he was literally Mass murdering people. Now these mean words tended to be things like "men and women are different" or "you shouldn't hire people solely on the basis of race because otherwise you're going to get people who aren't very good at their jobs because you hide them based on race," which has to be flattened because otherwise you look stupid. Meanwhile, people who are cheering for the political assassination, and calling for more political assassinations, they are saying that they're free speech is being violated for what they are doing but the reality is we're not talking about it calling Charlie a dick, we're talking about cheering for his murder and calling for more murders.
All these people pleading free speech sure seem to have different standards for themselves than others because every one of the Free speech warriors was on top of the "disinformation and misinformation must be regulated" train, and now regulating disinformation is misinformation caused someone to lose their job and instead of celebrating they're acting as if it was a travesty.

2025-09-20 15:02:11 CEST

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It's kind of interesting, I was in a discussion relating to this a day or two ago. The person I was discussing with make the claim that the constitution is perfect and all the founding fathers agreed on how different parts of the Bill of Rights should be interpreted, and so I just put the facts on the table of exactly how the founding fathers were acting immediately after founding.
It seems a lot of people don't know how laws or sausages are made.

2025-09-20 02:13:22 CEST

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Yeah, everyone kinda figured the late night shows were going away anyway.

2025-09-19 21:15:39 CEST

If Jimmy Kimmel had been fighting for free speech against cancel culture for the past 10 years, I'd say "let's fight for the guy, doesn't matter if I disagree with him"
But he's past of the faction that hasn't shut up about "silencing misinformation and disinformation", why should anyone? They're hoisted by their own petard. They wanted the government to regulate disinformation and misinformation, and now the government is! They should celebrate their win!
Otoh, if Dave Chappelle wants to make a joke in poor taste about Charlie Kirk, I think I'd want to have his back because he did stand up when it looked like he'd lose everything for going against the crowd. Even if I disagreed with him. He's a man who earned his freedom in fire.

2025-09-18 03:50:29 CEST

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>I think being able to freely express yourself without being prosecuted regardless of what it advocating is covered under the first amendment.
Well, you think wrong.
There's all kinds of things that aren't covered by the first amendment. It tends to be covered by strict scrutiny, meaning that you have to pass a 3 part test: It needs to be narrowly tailored, to address a compelling state interest, and it needs to be the least restrictive method necessary to achieve the end.
Examples of limits to the first amendment include fraud, libel, slander, commercial advertising, tobacco advertising, uttering terroristic threats, impersonating a police officer, use of radio communications, and there's more where that came from.
The ideal would have been to amend the constitution back in 1798 when the first Sedition Act was passed and the question of federal laws affecting freedom of speech first came up, but instead jurisprudence went this way long after that point, and the court never ruled on the sedition act.
Looking into it, the first supreme court case regarding the line between freedom of speech and threats to people's safety didn't happen until 1919, because prior to the 14th amendment in 1868, the bill of rights didn't apply to individual states, and generally federal law wasn't used for that sort of think widely until the world wars. Even the 1919 case was under the Espionage act for an individual passing out flyers calling on people to avoid the draft.
But don't get me wrong here -- I'm running my own instance solely because I do believe in freedom of speech, and when rubber meets road I don't domain block any instances or even block individuals on my own account. My main arguments here have been that it's complicated and nuanced and it isn't a deviation from principle to say that there's a line and some people might have crossed it.

2025-09-18 02:13:02 CEST

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You can disagree with my argument, but you can't reasonably say it's absurd. At best it's wrong.
A bunch of political violence keeps happening. They tried to kill Kavanaugh. They tried to kill Trump and they did kill Comperatore. They did kill Kirk. And the threats keep coming.
The violence and the speech aren't equal and I don't think my argument ever claimed that directly, but the fact that violence keeps happening and people keep threatening more violence does mean that the two are much closer than disagreement would be.
Context does matter, and nuance matters. If you want to flatten what I said into "speech is violence", then you're just the same as the progs -- modernist flattening of complexity into something that never existed.
Given that my post had multiple paragraphs looking at things from different viewpoints and you collapsed it into four words, I suggest you might want to find someone who believes what you want to argue against instead of wasting your time on me.

2025-09-18 01:39:06 CEST

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In The Graysonian Ethic chapter called Basics, I talked about how different rights bump up against one another. There's no such thing as rights that are absolute, unless you only have one right.
It seems to me that a lot of people, both Leftist and Conservative, forget that the right to not be murdered is the basic human right, and so if someone is out there trying to violate that, that's not unpopular speech, but a potential violation of another person's basic human rights. People who follow up a murder by cheering for it and calling for more murders of specific people? They're walking a fine line and if they happen to trip I don't have much sympathy.
On the other hand, disagreeing with someone who was just murdered or died for any other reason? Well, that could be unpopular but it's probably not reaching the level of violating another person's rights, since you don't have any right to have people say nice things about you.
That being said, I think more people need to be pointing out that when someone says "but" after "no political violence" and then just uses the opportunity to talk about how they disagree with a person who was just assassinated, you're kind of erasing the whole "no political violence" thing by justifying political violence. At that point it isn't even about laws, it's about "Are you sure you disagreed with this guy so much that you think he should be assassinated?" because I don't think a lot of these individuals are thinking through the implications of what they're saying. I mean, if some dweeb arguing with dumb college kids deserves to be assassinated, then anyone on the left or the right probably deserves it. That doesn't sound like a fun world to live in.

2025-09-16 15:41:08 CEST

If someone tries to murder you with a gun in America, just say no.
In America, murdering someone with a firearm is a crime, and therefore they will be forced to stop or risk breaking the law.

2025-09-13 14:42:11 CEST

I thought about how my son would feel if he lost me, and realizing how he'd cry and never fully recover really got to me.
https://social.fbxl.net/media/7822aa13170354dd76f6de5a3dd6585482221b5e5ef8bbd40a5c400a8384220a.jpg

2025-09-09 23:27:40 CEST

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Can confirm: Canada is a psy-op. It's not real.