• 52 Posts
  • 58 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 18th, 2023

help-circle









  • I’m pretty impressed with the WSWS take:

    It is politically appropriate to condemn the killing, which accomplishes nothing progressive and actually aids the efforts of the Trump White House to attack democratic rights and erect a police state. But that is no reason to glorify the victim or cover up the bloodthirsty, bigoted character of his political perspective.

    The Times editors claim, “Such violence is antithetical to America.” On the contrary, such violence is the stock in trade of the American ruling class, whether directed at striking workers, racial minorities, immigrants, or political figures deemed to be dangerous or merely inconvenient. It is barely a week since the president of the United States ordered the incineration of 11 people in a Venezuelan fishing boat, claiming, without offering any evidence, that they were drug smugglers and terrorists.

    Matt Dowd was fired from MSNBC for much less.


  • Alright. What did you mean by “ignorance should not have a safe space there”?

    Last week, a student at Texas A&M objected to the professor teaching about “transgenderism” in the classroom. The teacher was doing their job, teaching the scientific consensus. Instead of challenging the teacher’s ideas, the student challenged the legality of teaching science. The student was ignorant. Instead of admitting ignorance, or even assuming their own competence and trying to argue their ideas, the student took the third route: threats of political violence. The student warned the teacher that police could come and force the teacher from teaching the truth.

    Campuses should be very intolerant to ignorance like this student displayed. But instead the teacher, department head, and dean were all penalized for standing up against an enemy of free thought. That is the goal of this administration - to force indoctrination on American children, and shut down all the spaces where having discussions like this one we’re having right now might open their eyes up to the lies they’ve been taught.


  • In a school, it should be safe to admit your ignorance.

    I didn’t write very much, and I clearly didn’t write that you shouldn’t be able to admit ignorance at school. If you actually care about reading and understanding what I’m saying, then this is your opportunity to demonstrate you can roll it back, tone it down, and read what I wrote again. If some of it is ambiguous to you, you can ask me questions.

    It seems like you’re looking for a leftist punching bag, and that will just make you look like another hateful violent right-wing brute. Are you afraid to talk about your beliefs? Are you afraid to talk about them anonymously and online?



  • I mean, Kirk was on Gavin Newsom’s podcast in March and Newsom talked about how his kids loved Kirk. How his 13-year-old son refused to go to school because he wanted to stay home and meet Charlie. And if that doesn’t tell you how wide Kirk’s appeal is among young people I don’t know what would.

    And look. A lot of people on the left also discount or ignore how young conservatives feel discriminated against in higher education. Rightly or wrongly, I’m talking about their beliefs, not the validity of those beliefs. Kids who come from red states with conservative Christian beliefs about sex, about gender, about what it means to be a man, they’re proud to go to college so they can earn a better living and do better for their future children than their parents did for them. And then they hit the culture shock of college and both students and teachers are telling them “everything you believe is wrong, you’re a bad person for believing it, and if you even try to argue for it we will ostracize you”.

    There is no ‘rightly or wrongly’ – what you’re describing is indoctrination and brainwashing. They are and should be discriminated against, but not because of where they’re from or the color of their skin, but because they have been taught wrong, and most importantly have been taught to see challenges to their beliefs as a threat. The purpose of a school is not to validate your pre-existing beliefs, but to give you a space to challenge your ideas and learn new ones. Ignorance should not have a safe space there, and people who do not come to learn should not feel welcome.


  • And ironically, part of the issue is a lack of empathy on the left. Instead of asking why conservatives believe these things and trying to understand how to convince them otherwise, the American left just wants to call them fascists and deplatform them. “It’s not my job to educate you” is smug and contemptuous and one of the nicer ways the left respond to conservatives.

    No wonder you delete all of your comments. That’s a pretty terrible take.















  • Why organize a labor union to keep the tyrants from paying you poverty wages when you could just submit the name of the tyrant to the assassination market and let somebody take care of it?

    The more unpopular you are as a human being, the shorter your expected lifespan, because the reward for you not existing would increase proportionally to how much of an asshole you were.

    What are some ways that you can think of where a scheme like this could have undesirable results?



  • Bitcoin = Monero in your mind. They aren’t the same, not even close.

    LOL. I understand they are very different entities.

    Bitcoin Monero
    Proof of work Proof of work
    Uses a blockchain ledger Uses a blockchain ledger
    Extremely volatile exchange rate Extremely volatile exchange rate
    Unregulated Unregulated
    Price easily manipulated by wealthy investors Price easily manipulated by wealthy investors
    “HODL” - unrealistic expectation that the endgame is general use as currency “HODL” - unrealistic expectation that the endgame is general use as currency
    Heavily driven by FOMO Heavily driven by FOMO
    Uses obscene amount of energy per coin Aspires to use an obscene amount of energy per coin to prevent another 51% attack
    Ledger has become so large it is unwieldy to store and transfer Ledger 200+ GiB, constantly expanding
    Represents an ecological catastrope A currently smaller part of the ecological catastrope
    Most popular currency used to facilitate human trafficking Has features that should make it more attractive for use in human trafficking
    Difficult and annoying to use Even more difficult and annoying to use
    Available on most cryptocurrency exchanges Available on fewer exchanges
    Claimed by early proponents that transactions were ‘anonymous’ but now frequently the subject of blockchain analysis Proponents claim transactions to be anonymous
    Pre-mining began January 2009 Pre-mining began April 2014
    Advocates behave like people in an MLM cult Advocates behave like people in an MLM cult
    Represents the vain hope to individually escape catastrophe while the world burns by using theoretically clever but practically unworkable technological solutions that create further social problems, while the real, difficult though not intractable social problems of government abuse, economic instability, and authoritarianism continue to increase because resources for real social solutions are starved of resources Represents the vain hope to individually escape catastrophe while the world burns by using theoretically clever but practically unworkable technological solutions that create further social problems, while the real, difficult though not intractable social problems of government abuse, economic instability, and authoritarianism continue to increase because resources for real social solutions are starved of resources
    $116,760 / coin $270 / coin
    20M coins 18.5M coins
    Logo is a circle with the letter “B” Logo is a circle with the letter “M”

    One of the hilarious details I discovered while researching this is that according to the US Government Accountability Office report “Use of Online Marketplaces and Virtual Currencies in Drug and Human Trafficking” in 2022,

    Representatives of two analytics firms and one exchange also noted that illicit actors use privacy coins less frequently, as they are more difficult to obtain and are supported by fewer exchanges compared to Bitcoin, making it difficult to convert funds to government-issued currency.

    So whatever benefits Monero claims to have in protecting the privacy of illicit activities, the people who could face real time in jail don’t consider the benefits worth how extremely annoying it is to use.