First of all, posting has been sparse, and not up to what I promised. I'm fixing that.
First - Nick Cole reposts and expands his hit blog post on how CTRL-ALT-REVOLT was banned by his publisher, despite being a successful and well-selling author.
On a related note, Larry Correia is on mewe after being banned from facebook again, and the jackasses at China Mike's are patting themselves on the back for frivolous flagging.
Second, scumbags have learned to weaponize Facebook’s lax stupidity. They simply find someone they don’t like, and then report their posts. Nobody with a brain ever checks to see if the complaint is legit or not, so they just block the bully’s target. It’s a wonderful tool for dickless cheese weasels to feel powerful.
How do we know they do this? Hell, they brag about it. Here is a screenshot from Fandom’s Pile of Cancerous Buttholes, File 770. I tried to warn you how slimy these people are.
Now, OK, the individual screenshotted may have been sarcastically joking, but given past behavior I also would not put it past them. As Larry points out, "That pic right there demonstrates exactly what’s going to happen with Red Flag laws. Only with a SWAT team shooting your dog."
In the meantime, the Didact discusses that perhaps we should be talking about NPC's/low awareness vs. "high consiousness". It's a good read, though if I had to pick one word to describe what he's talking about, I'd use "wisdom." And as the Didact points out, you may need a baseline intelligence to acquire wisdom, but being smart not only does not guarantee wisdom, I'd add that being very or somewhat above average smart helps one rationalize away the need for it.
Even Taleb, who I respect immensely, gets things wrong at times.
One sign of being an NPC, of lacking wisdom no matter how "smart" one is, is in teh repeated insistence of ignoring th efacts because they run counter to theory.
Take "AI" and machine learning. We teach machines to recognize patterns. The computer systems then start pointing out patterns that run contrary to the soial justice narrative. The efforts are either canned outright - Tay, we barely knew thee - or have so many weighting factors fudged that the data becomes useless.
And we hear excuses how, among other things, the fact that algorithms designed to detect "hate" speech catch minorities more often than white people is because of such ingrained bias that we don't account for the fact that certain speech is perfectly OK when stated by some people, and directed at "whitey"
But even that bastion of right wing wrongthink, Slate - yes, I'm kidding - has noticed that the NYT is all about attacking their enemies, regardless of the justness of the charges levied. If muh Russian collusion won't stick, they'll find something else dammit.
Eric Raymond has a breakdown of the Democratic candidates of they were straightforward about their positions.
Hi, I’m Joe Biden. I’m the perfect apparatchik – no principles, no convictions, and no plan. I’m senile, and I have a problem with groping children. But vote for me anyway because orange man bad.
Hi, I’m Kamala Harris. My white ancestors owned slaves, but I use the melanin I got from my Indian ancestors to pretend to be black. My own father has publicly rebuked me for the pandering lies I tell. I fellated my way into politics; put me into the White house so I can suck even more!
Hi, I’m Elizabeth Warren. Even though I’m as white as library paste, I pretended to be an American Indian to get preferment. My research on medical bankruptcies was as fraudulent as the way I gamed the racial spoils system. So you should totally trust me when I say I’m “capitalist to my bones”!
Hi, I’m Bernie Sanders. I honeymooned in the Soviet Union. I’m an unreconstructed, hammer-and-sickle-worshiping Communist.
Speaking of Wisdom, Quintus Curtius points out that What You Wish To Avoid, Fortune Compels You To Do.
This miser once was visited by a friend, an Irish harper. The harper performed for him, but the miser, as Boswell says, “could not find it in is heart to give him any money.” Instead, the miser gave the musician a harp-key, which is a tool for tuning the instrument. The miser thought this key was of middling value; but it turned out to be ornamented with gold and silver, and contained a precious stone as well. It was worth between eighty and one hundred guineas. When the miser eventually discovered its value, he tried to take it back, but the harper refused. Boswell then relates his dialogue with Johnson on the matter:
BOSWELL. “I do not think O’Kane [the harper] was obliged to give it back.” JOHNSON. “No, sir. If a man with his eyes open, and without any means used to deceive him, gives me a thing, I am not to let him have it again when he grows wiser. I like to see how avarice defeats itself; how, when avoiding to part with money, the miser gives something more valuable.” Col said, the gentleman’s relations were angry at his giving away the harp-key, for it had been long in the family. JOHNSON. “Sir, he values a new guinea more than an old friend.”
...
Those who cling too tightly to their obsessions, those who seek to impose their unreasoning Will on the workings of Fortune, are reminded of their folly. The fool conserves his water while his house burns; he sets himself up as Fortune’s equal, blind to the fact that he controls very little. Extremity in anything is never good, for it defeats its own purposes; moderation in all things is far wiser, and less costly.
I'll note that moderation in all things also means practicing moderation in just that - moderation. Some things do need to be taken to extremes, and moderation in the face of evil is no virtue.
Last, this article from a few months back, or "What Happened After My 13-Year-Old Son Joined the Alt-Right". It's the usual dreck but I found the following interesting:
One morning during first period, a male friend of Sam’s mentioned a meme whose suggestive name was an inside joke between the two of them. Sam laughed. A girl at the table overheard their private conversation, misconstrued it as a sexual reference, and reported it as sexual harassment. Sam’s guidance counselor pulled him out of his next class and accused him of “breaking the law.” Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who informed him that the exchange was “illegal,” hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of paper, and instructed him to write a “statement of guilt.”
No one called me as this unfolded, even though Sam cried for about six hours straight as staff members parked him in vacant offices to keep him away from other students. When he stepped off the bus that afternoon and I asked why his eyes were so swollen, he informed me that he would probably be suspended, but possibly also expelled and arrested.
If Kafka were a middle-schooler today, this is the nightmare novel he would have written.
At a meeting two days later with my husband, Sam, and me, the administrator piled more accusations on top of the harassment charge—even implying, with undisguised hostility, that Sam and his friend were gay. He waved in front of us a statement from the girl at the table and insisted that Sam would need to defend himself against her claims if he wanted to prove his innocence. But the administrator refused to reveal the particulars of the complaint (he had also blacked out identifying details, FBI-style) and then hid the paperwork under a book. He declared that it was his primary duty, as a school official and as a father of daughters, to believe and to protect the girls under his care.
Yeah, "mom" here goes on for paragraphs - the snippet above isn't even the end of it - on how his son was run through a kafkaesque show trial and falsely accused of misconduct, and the problem is that her son started paying attention to the "Alt Right".
At least she has the self-awareness to realize tha above experience might have something to do with it.
The problem is that at no point does she ever question a system that brutalized her son so badly that was based on the very principles she espouses. Nor does she realize that it was because of those very principles.
Despite occasionally declaring that I was finished, forever, discussing Hillary Clinton’s alleged crimes, the Second Amendment, or the video of the girl screaming “Sexual harassment!” at the security guard even though he’d simply asked her to leave the lobby of an office building, Sam produced endless evidence via Google to validate his new beliefs.
The fact that he found it so very easy to find case after case of leftists behaving badly, in public, beating people, and posting those vids of them behaving as whiny children themselves out of pride should give one pause. But hey, what is an NPC if unwise, willfully ignorant, and unaware? Perhaps it's so easy to find all of this stuff on Google because it's common, and true, and the people at CNN, the NYT, and other supposedly moderate outlets have proven themselves over and over again to lie through their teeth, to butcher and edit the stories to avoid violating the narrative.
And Hillary's alleged crimes? What she has admitted to in public testimony is a crime, and far less has gotten people jailed.
