201–210 of 298 posts
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>deny that their purpose is of oppression... A lot of the uber-nerds are just regular nerds who got lucky, not part of some evil genius cabal. By all means keep an eye on them but I think for the most part they are regular people.
Is there anything 'regular' about walking onto stage wearing a cap and sunglasses and then brandishing a chainsaw as a 'symbolic' gesture (at anything other than a chainsaw conference)?
I know it's fashionable to say that democracy itself leads to these outcomes that destroy democracy. I think Arendt was right about self-colonization and overproduction of elites being the main thing that leads to totalitarianism. There wouldn't even be such a thing as a silicon valley billionaire if the United States wasn't the most wildly successful political entity for the past 2000 years. Power corrupts, but that…
I don’t know that I would position the USA in this way.
Different metrics lead to different “winners”:
Longevity: Imperial China
Institutional legacy: Rome
Global reach: British Empire
Scientific/cultural transmission: Islamic Caliphates
Modern dominance: United States
Another lens:
* Rome & China = stability, governance, internal cohesion.
* Britain & the US = networks, capital markets, technology leverage.
* Caliphates = knowledge platforms, cosmopolitan integration.
My cousin suddenly has been very captured and obsessed by an area of opinion I didn’t have a name for, fixed money supply, all inflation inherently bad, Elon Musk is badly treated, longer government terms (which sounds reasonable initially until you actually think about just having LESS democracy), no minimum wage. After some research it’s definitely coming from influencers linked to the SV techno feudalists - it’s j…
It took me a long time to break myself out of it. I think key was getting into the deep details of passing actual policies that would have enough popular support to be sustainable, to realize its ultimately just naive/simplistic thinking, thats another impractical ideology under the hood, dressed up as something more meaningful.
It seems nicer than the Woke Reich
Say what you want about "woke" (assuming you can define it), but its worst excesses were curbed by democratic elections. What's the endgame of a movement that seeks to discredit, overturn, and functionally control elections?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Romanian_presidential_ele...
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> a lot of us nerds value physical strength, it's 2025, we're not mouthbreathers anymore. Sure, I don't disagree. I just put that in to prevent people from claiming he was a jock now because of that (which would clearly be absurd).
The nerd/jock dichotomy is at best loosely pointing at some genuine clusters of interests and predilections that exist among people in the world, and is more often taking a set of tropes from 80s Hollywood movies about high school and using them to try to explain how real people in the world are today, which is stupid. (Who wrote all those 80s movies? Bookworms ! Who acted in them? Theater kids !)
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Except that he didn't invent any of it. Just a savvy investor, and as far as I understand, hasn't really worked on any of it. His contributions were rants until he just took ketamine. His work was making a yelp clone.
He invented the very successful hyperloop.
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I don't know if you will find a time in US history where the press was accurate, honest, and truthful. I agree with GP that a primary missing feature is a principled public - without principles people swing wildly in opinion depending on the topic and popular rhetoric. I see this with much of my own family. They mostly consider themselves conservatives and Republicans of the small government and balanced budget era.…
> I don't know if you will find a time in US history where the press was accurate, honest, and truthful. 1) Spare us the US defaultism! 2) If we are going to make this conversation about the USA, didn't US broadcast media have a 'fairness doctrine' that was abolished some years back? Hence the growth in outlets providing heavily biased dishonest news on broadcast media? I suggest this has driven much of the popular r…
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Anything that is a millimeter to the left in US politics, which happens to still be considered right in the rest of the world, gets immediately coined as left wing activists.
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> maybe you can count Zuckerberg I think that you definitely need to count him. He's always been a massive nerd, his attempts to bulk up and become a MMA competitor notwithstanding.
>his attempts to bulk up and become a MMA competitor notwithstanding a lot of us nerds value physical strength, it's 2025, we're not mouthbreathers anymore.
My dad died from a heart attack in his fourties and my mom only has 30% lung capacity left thanks to smoking.
Your health always catches up with you and it's better to prevent trouble.