Nice deal if you can get it. "oh no you caught me but let's make a deal -- I agree I did it and you agree I've never committed any other crime in my entire life ever anywhere"
Can I plea guilty to a parking ticket and get immunity for all the dead hookers in my trunk? Or is this one of those "the president's crackhead son only" deals?
Can I plea guilty to a parking ticket and get immunity for all the dead hookers in my trunk? Or is this one of those "the president's crackhead son only" deals?
> It feels like the “omg nerds are the kool kidz now uwu” phase of America is on its way out.
Thank God for that. The sooner it becomes unpopular, the sooner it can become authentic again because the clout chasers can move on to the new hot young thing and destroy it.
Thank God for that. The sooner it becomes unpopular, the sooner it can become authentic again because the clout chasers can move on to the new hot young thing and destroy it.
Bros bros you don't understand everything is going so well bros just go live in your tent cities bros they have such high gdp bros
I don't have 58TB of *anything*, and I run like 6 websites. The guys building the war and peace of Canadian Pacific.
It's because of the light novel formulas I think, where the series just keep going forever.
"Canada is not broken! It is the greatest country in the world! Now excuse me while I go back to my tent city, the greatest tent city in the world!"
I feel like this is about 95% of some games that are very popular with streamers. Just make a game mechanic of having a duck with rambo arms going around messing everyone's shit up and you'd have a winner on your hands.
It's sorta funny the idea that the actual hacking site that tried to steal everyone's credentials is less blocked than the site that hasn't even federated for like 3 years.
In a definitional sense, let's look at what the word stochastic means. It essentially means probabalistic. So for example there is no known safe level of radiation, even low levels of radiation have a small chance of causing cancer, so cancer is a stochastic effect. This is compared to something like a radiation burn that requires a certain amount of radiation to happen and if you keep the amount of radiation below a certain level you will never get a radiation burn.
So in this sense, the term "stochastic terrorism" is the idea that there's no known safe amount of a thing. Essentially that if you do anything whatsoever against a group, no matter how trivial, it is still terrorism because there's no known safe level of criticism a group can take without it potentially triggering violence.
In this sense, the term "Stochastic terrorism" is a fancy way of saying that at no point can you ever do or say anything against the target group in any way or at any level because even a benign - 0.00001 comment is "stochastic terrorism" since anything that isn't neutral or positive can automatically present a tiny risk of negative outcomes.
I think that a term like "stochastic terrorism" sounds like a great way to justify authoritarianism. We had examples such as zero tolerance school policies that put basically innocent people into really bad punishments because there's a non-zero risk that anything remotely suspect turns into something really horrible. It's practically precrime, suggesting that we are predicting an actual crime that could be caused by something that isn't a crime, so we need to make the thing that isn't a crime into a crime (or at least into a taboo)
So in this sense, the term "stochastic terrorism" is the idea that there's no known safe amount of a thing. Essentially that if you do anything whatsoever against a group, no matter how trivial, it is still terrorism because there's no known safe level of criticism a group can take without it potentially triggering violence.
In this sense, the term "Stochastic terrorism" is a fancy way of saying that at no point can you ever do or say anything against the target group in any way or at any level because even a benign - 0.00001 comment is "stochastic terrorism" since anything that isn't neutral or positive can automatically present a tiny risk of negative outcomes.
I think that a term like "stochastic terrorism" sounds like a great way to justify authoritarianism. We had examples such as zero tolerance school policies that put basically innocent people into really bad punishments because there's a non-zero risk that anything remotely suspect turns into something really horrible. It's practically precrime, suggesting that we are predicting an actual crime that could be caused by something that isn't a crime, so we need to make the thing that isn't a crime into a crime (or at least into a taboo)
It's literally just used car salesman high pressure pressure sales tactics and now they're wondering why people are going nuts from being exposed to that sleazy shit all day every day but instead of a terrible used car they're selling genocide (if you take away my heat in winter I and everyone I know will die)
"YouTube has accustomed us to fast paced short content that doesn't really go very deep into anything."
https://youtu.be/-UOhCjB0AEI?si=BSZz_fj_9Qkt7DFU
https://youtu.be/-UOhCjB0AEI?si=BSZz_fj_9Qkt7DFU
It always has struck me as strange that people would claim that the existence of the physical disproves the existence of the metaphysical. If you are crossing a street, you have to look both ways. Looking to the left doesn't prove there are no cars coming from the right, and looking to the right doesn't prove there are no cars coming from the left. In the same way you cant use metaphysics to prove or disprove physics, and you cant use physics to prove or disprove metaphysics even though the road ahead of you is connected in front of you.
You make an interesting point. There is a tank, but there's a lot of forces trying to shatter it, claiming it's a prison and if only we could smash the tank the world would be ours for the taking.
Assuming bad faith or ignorance of our ancestors and also assuming that oneself is not either of those things is a bit naive.
In my view, nothing we've done in the past 30 years justifies thinking we're the best people in the history of the world. Even before the collapse into wokism (itself a green eyed demon in a pretty mask), the movies of fight club and the matrix both spoke to generations that sensed something was going wrong even then, and far from improving since then it seems we've gotten worse.
Even the boomers I think if we apply the same standards to the millennials it becomes clear we are their children, and we carry the same critical flaws and are doing a lot of the same things. The debt rose to 32 trillion dollars on the signature of presidents elected by millennials.
It's easy to judge our ancestors for not living as we do, but we live with the benefits of many things they do not. You need food, and you need shelter, and you need protection from people who would otherwise take your food and shelter because they don't have any. Living in global civilization that all seems simple and straightforward, but youtube channels like how to make everything or primitive technology challenge these ideas by showing how hard it is to make these things even if you know that they can exist, and if you don't need to figure out where your next meal is coming from, and if you don't need to worry about raiders coming and taking your stuff, or bears and wolves coming and eating you. And you can't rely on the wealth of a global civilization to bootstrap you because you are that bootstrap of future civilizations. So you end up using less than ideal solutions -- like the Romans used slavery or the kings after Rome used feudalism.
I'm not intending to be a moral relativist here. Good and evil exist because we are humans and such things are fundamental to our being, and enslaving others is evil. But the world isn't so easy that everyone can afford to be good and have their civilization survive.
In my view, nothing we've done in the past 30 years justifies thinking we're the best people in the history of the world. Even before the collapse into wokism (itself a green eyed demon in a pretty mask), the movies of fight club and the matrix both spoke to generations that sensed something was going wrong even then, and far from improving since then it seems we've gotten worse.
Even the boomers I think if we apply the same standards to the millennials it becomes clear we are their children, and we carry the same critical flaws and are doing a lot of the same things. The debt rose to 32 trillion dollars on the signature of presidents elected by millennials.
It's easy to judge our ancestors for not living as we do, but we live with the benefits of many things they do not. You need food, and you need shelter, and you need protection from people who would otherwise take your food and shelter because they don't have any. Living in global civilization that all seems simple and straightforward, but youtube channels like how to make everything or primitive technology challenge these ideas by showing how hard it is to make these things even if you know that they can exist, and if you don't need to figure out where your next meal is coming from, and if you don't need to worry about raiders coming and taking your stuff, or bears and wolves coming and eating you. And you can't rely on the wealth of a global civilization to bootstrap you because you are that bootstrap of future civilizations. So you end up using less than ideal solutions -- like the Romans used slavery or the kings after Rome used feudalism.
I'm not intending to be a moral relativist here. Good and evil exist because we are humans and such things are fundamental to our being, and enslaving others is evil. But the world isn't so easy that everyone can afford to be good and have their civilization survive.
Some people have started to claim that America has no culture. People who say stuff like that look like a fish in a tank criticizing their tank, dreaming of going to the lake beside them without realizing you are a saltwater fish and that's a freshwater lake, and you're a tropical fish and that lake is 4C. You look at that lake longingly, but if you were ever released into it you'd immediately die of at least 3 different things.
America has its problems, but a lack of culture is not one of them. Entire genres of music were created in America. Even in its weakened state, Hollywood still dominates filmmaking. America has produced some of the greatest novelists of all time including names like Mark Twain. The writings of the founding fathers on Government and the subsequent culture of freedom and later of diversity had global influences. Japan's anime industry is a direct descendant of Disney films. Phrases devised in the US end up trickling over to other parts of the world so countries that had the people living there living there for thousands of years claim "We're a nation of immigrants". The entire world watched TV shows like The Daily Show or MASH. Much of the world celebrates a form of the American holiday "Thanksgiving".
That's not to say America's culture is perfect or that there aren't things that need to change, but absolutely there is American culture, and it's had an outsized global influence. Hell, there's italian and japanese westerns even though neither of those places ever had a west to win.
Just as the fish in a tank doesn't realize what the tank has granted them, anyone claiming America has no culture doesn't realize how much that culture surrounds them and permeates them and how bad things could get without it.
I'll go one step further here and point out that Canada is in the same boat. People claim Canada has no culture, but that's only because it's hard to see since we live in this tank. Occasionally something comes out that is about Canadian culture that blows up and you get to see how unique the country actually is. I'm not sure of any country on earth where The Pukatawagan Song would become a sleeper hit, but The Tragically hip wrote songs specifically about being Canadian as well, such as Thompson girl or Bobcaygeon. The reference to a place is one thing, but then the lyrics also talk about specific things that are unique to the local culture as well.
America has its problems, but a lack of culture is not one of them. Entire genres of music were created in America. Even in its weakened state, Hollywood still dominates filmmaking. America has produced some of the greatest novelists of all time including names like Mark Twain. The writings of the founding fathers on Government and the subsequent culture of freedom and later of diversity had global influences. Japan's anime industry is a direct descendant of Disney films. Phrases devised in the US end up trickling over to other parts of the world so countries that had the people living there living there for thousands of years claim "We're a nation of immigrants". The entire world watched TV shows like The Daily Show or MASH. Much of the world celebrates a form of the American holiday "Thanksgiving".
That's not to say America's culture is perfect or that there aren't things that need to change, but absolutely there is American culture, and it's had an outsized global influence. Hell, there's italian and japanese westerns even though neither of those places ever had a west to win.
Just as the fish in a tank doesn't realize what the tank has granted them, anyone claiming America has no culture doesn't realize how much that culture surrounds them and permeates them and how bad things could get without it.
I'll go one step further here and point out that Canada is in the same boat. People claim Canada has no culture, but that's only because it's hard to see since we live in this tank. Occasionally something comes out that is about Canadian culture that blows up and you get to see how unique the country actually is. I'm not sure of any country on earth where The Pukatawagan Song would become a sleeper hit, but The Tragically hip wrote songs specifically about being Canadian as well, such as Thompson girl or Bobcaygeon. The reference to a place is one thing, but then the lyrics also talk about specific things that are unique to the local culture as well.