It’s quite clear that the reaction to Haidt’s1 claims about smartphones — even the “scientific” ones — are those of the addict’s defensive riposte to being told that their nasty habit is harmful to everything and everyone around them.
Day: August 18, 2024, 7:04 PM
Denial Style
Climate change denialism and NIMBYism are birds of a feather1 because both are about the renunciation of and attempted prevention of necessary change.
Left Behind
This is from a conservative perspective I do not share, but I still agree with the overall take. Secularism is dominant now. Religion has been largely vanquished. The left as much as the right has reacted poorly to this, attempting to replace old-fashioned Protestantism with its even-more-inferior substitute, wokism. Except it’s not been done with any sort of awareness or forethought, as the vast majority of the left doesn’t understand that there is a religion-shaped hole in their lives they are attempting to fill.
Religious urges seem to be nearly universal in the human soul1. Attempting to eliminate them only makes those compulsions emerge in a more dangerous, less controlled form elsewhere. This is also true on the right, where we see worship of a two-bit fraud like Donald Trump and other pathologies.
Clubgoing
It’s odd that conservatism is becoming the divorced dads/incel club and liberalism is becoming the angry cat ladies/blue-haired feminists club.
That cannot be healthy for the ol’ republic.
Non-friends With Low Standards
Trump is held to a much lower standard than Harris1. That has been true of every election Trump has participated in. We have a terrible press corps, really. It’s not wholly their fault, but a lot of this divergence is in fact on them.
People Like Owning Slaves
A lot of the RTO push is just that many people like owning slaves. RTO is as close as they can get to that in this era. A lot of people with a bit of power are sociopaths because power attracts their brand of mental illness, and those types would all own slaves if they could.
Being able to control lives, to force people into long commutes, to lord over them like they are in charge of medieval barony, to regulate their going and coming — that is the RTO-pushing wannabe-slaveowners’ stuff of dreams. It is the only thing that excites them, that vivifies their lives. You can tell by how lustfully they talk about RTO.
There’s nothing anyone can do to ever get me back in an office again. You want the best, I’m working wherever the fuck I wish to. You want some chowdearheaded doof who can’t distinguish an MTU from a CPU, go ahead and hire your slave type. I’m sure your network and prod environment will stay up very reliably then.
Wishing Poorly
The left’s ignorance of and disdain of basic, factual biology is almost as bothersome as the right’s belief that Trump is some brilliant genius with their best interests at heart.
I wish human biology worked differently, too. It would be more politically palatable. But wishing don’t make it so.
Southron
Why do non-Southerners always screw up Southern food so incredibly badly and make it taste like apocalyptically-atrocious garbage?
Southern food isn’t even hard to make! I cannot understand.
Crumble
Anyone who talks about how wonderful and glorious Putin is and who does not live in Russia should be:
1) Required to emigrate to Russia.
2) Required to sign up for the Russian armed forces.
Those two requirements would probably solve that problem.
Ok, ok, I’m not really serious. But damn, such clownishness should be punished somehow.
There was neither nonexistence nor existence
then; there was neither the realm of space nor the
sky which is beyond.
What stirred?
Where?
In whose protection?
Was there water, bottomlessly deep?
There was neither death nor immortality then.
There was no distinguishing sign of night or day.
That one breathed, windless, by its own impulse.
Other than that there was nothing beyond.
Darkness was hidden by darkness in the
beginning…
“The Hymn of the Dark Beginning,” from the Hindu Rigveda (c. 1500 BCE)
TM-62
Those repurposed anti-tank mines are shockingly effective; not a sandwich I’d want to eat. It’s good that the Ukrainians are able to use those old mines. There are vast stockpiles of those things from the Cold War.
‘Had It
Can we go Butlerian Jihad yet or not? I think we should.
We Now Have a Chance to Stop the Most Deadly Infectious Disease — if We Act.
Doubting America’s ‘Nuclear Umbrella,’ Some South Koreans Want Their Own.
‘Strange and mysterious’: rarely seen, 12ft-long oarfish found in waters off San Diego.
Republicans Pump Brakes on KOSA After Realizing It Could Censor Them Too.
Why elite women’s sports need to be based on sex, not gender.
Carmel-by-the-Sea has never had street addresses. A plan to adopt them is causing a rift.