I think that train (i.e., “Decline-of-the-UK-Express”) started after WW1, if I’m recalling the statistics portion of my contemporary history class in university.

So, a network enabled call light?

I, for one, welcome our new femboy sysadmin overlords!

I blame the tyranny of our amygdala.

Self-hosted LLMs are the way.

Are posts like these just rage bait at this point? I mean, this has to be a troll… right?

Are there any ETFs that I can put money into that short Tesla for mentally handicapped retail investors like me? For example, inverse REITs are an easy way to short the housing market.

Wildcat strikes are de wei.

banding together to sting

mallable malleable

How do you know that their being a woman is why they she lost?

that are their there

I’m turning 42 this summer. I’m considered an “elder millennial”.

I’m tired, boss.

Potentially, to both of us. But given Trump’s and his ardent supporters’ speech patterns and behavior, the odds are that they’re in the category of “too stupid to know they’re stupid”.

Smart people seem stupid to many stupid people because many stupid people are too stupid know they’re stupid.

Is anyone else a firm believer that Event Horizon is canonically “in-universe” with Warhammer 40K?

Anti-Conservative

There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.

There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.

There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.

As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whatever-the-fuck-kind-of-stupid-noise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism.

No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get:

The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

• Frank Wilhoit, American Composer, 2018

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“Hail corporate!”

How do people become such pieces of shit?

Chrystia Freeland, author of Plutocrats, says that the present trend towards plutocracy occurs because the rich feel that their interests are shared by society:

You don’t do this in a kind of chortling, smoking your cigar, conspiratorial thinking way. You do it by persuading yourself that what is in your own personal self-interest is in the interests of everybody else. So you persuade yourself that, actually, government services, things like spending on education, which is what created that social mobility in the first place, need to be cut so that the deficit will shrink, so that your tax bill doesn’t go up. And what I really worry about is, there is so much money and so much power at the very top, and the gap between those people at the very top and everybody else is so great, that we are going to see social mobility choked off and society transformed.