People aren't even going to believe that the housing market is crashing until long after it's already done crashing.
Should have been self-evident to anyone with half a brain that you can't have prices like that forever because nobody actually has that kind of money... I mean there might be a few thousand people on the planet Earth with enough money to buy a million dollar condo in toronto, but if you have that kind of money why are you buying a million dollar condo in Toronto? For that matter, a two million dollar condo in Vancouver!
Should have been self-evident to anyone with half a brain that you can't have prices like that forever because nobody actually has that kind of money... I mean there might be a few thousand people on the planet Earth with enough money to buy a million dollar condo in toronto, but if you have that kind of money why are you buying a million dollar condo in Toronto? For that matter, a two million dollar condo in Vancouver!
False DMCA claims should be treated the same as boxing up the latest season of a popular TV show and trying to sell it in Walmart. Essentially a corporate death sentence.
Sad thing about Winnipeg is the light pollution in the city is so bad you can't really see the sky.
There's somw truly incredible spots to watch the Northern lights in manitoba though.
There's somw truly incredible spots to watch the Northern lights in manitoba though.
My garden: everything dies.
A random block sidewalk in vietnam:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPYnUQ5CITs
A random block sidewalk in vietnam:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPYnUQ5CITs
Goddamnit Hitler you need to wash your dishes.
"Vould you like me to Conquer Europe?"
No, I want you to wash your dishes
"Do you vant me to kill ze jews?"
NO I WANT YOU TO CLEAN YOUR GODDAMNED DISHES
"Vould you like me to Conquer Europe?"
No, I want you to wash your dishes
"Do you vant me to kill ze jews?"
NO I WANT YOU TO CLEAN YOUR GODDAMNED DISHES
Leftists always talk about "I'm moving to Canada!", but Canada:
1. requires voter ID
2. knows who won the election the night of the eletion
1. requires voter ID
2. knows who won the election the night of the eletion
Follow enough people and it becomes common at certain times of the week.
That fact totally changed the way I look at social media -- do I really need millions seeing my posts when I see more than I can even do anything with and I get plenty of meaningful engagement with my posts?
That fact totally changed the way I look at social media -- do I really need millions seeing my posts when I see more than I can even do anything with and I get plenty of meaningful engagement with my posts?
This is the first episode that I've listened to, and I found it very interesting and entertaining. But man, if part of your religion is a list of your favorite anime, then you have achieved unlimited cringeworks.
Fact check: no, the Seine river is not dangerous
Article body: while it is true e coli levels are elevated and many swimmers in the Olympics were so sick they had to drop out [...]
Article body: while it is true e coli levels are elevated and many swimmers in the Olympics were so sick they had to drop out [...]
I'd say that the feedback from some of the first democrats in recorded history is awfully important, especially when it is so predictive.
Plato's Republic describes the forms of government. The initial aristocracy (defined as rule by the best people) is dominated by the most wise and just in a society. Eventually, the children of those wise men inherit power, but they are not necessarily wise and instead work to cultivate wealth rather than virtue, leading to a focus on values such as warfare and courage as those are perceived to be the virtues that lead to wealth. Eventually, the government is replaced with oligarchy, as the wealthy are the rulers. Eventually, the socioeconomic divide grows and those tensions result in demands that the majority get a stake in government, creating a democracy.
The time of democracy is a time of populism, and so the lower class looks at the upper class and a democrat will say "You have so much, we have less, surely you can share what you have?" and so the democrats will vote to take from some and give to others. Through this, the upper class will shrink, and the lower class will grow. Eventually, many of the wealthy will have hidden their wealth such that nobody can vote to take it from them, and there won't be any wealth left to take.
At that time, a demagogue will step in and promise the world, and the government will slip into tyranny.
Aristotle's "Politics" speaks of democracy, as well as oligarchy, monarchy, aristocracy, tyranny, and polity. He argues that in a democracy, the poor, who are the majority, will pursue their own interests rather than the common good, leading to instability and injustice. This is in contrast to oligarchy, where he suggests the rich, who make up the powerful under such a system, will pursue *their* own interests rather than the common good, again leading to instability and injustice. He suggests that a form of democracy that helps curb the excesses of the rich and the poor by having a strong middle class. The fundamental problem to Aristotle is people voting in their own self-interest rather than in the common good.
Both Plato and Aristotle prefer the concept of aristocracy as defined as wisest and most just by the best of people for the common good, not the concept of hereditary nobility as we've seen through the ages.
Both writers saw the democracy to be dangerous and lead to tyranny.
As for what happened to Athenian Democracy, first they lost in the Peloponnesian war to Sparta leading to the installation of "the thirty tyrants" who ended the democracy. Later there was a short-lived democratic revival before Athens was taken over by the Macedonian monarchy, before eventually being conquered by Rome.
Interestingly, plays recovered from the time suggest that at least some wise Greeks knew full well that they were democratically marching off a cliff, but under democracy, a mob always has a greater weight than a few wise people.
Rome itself is also a cautionary tale -- while it was much different than liberal democracy, it was a republic with democratic elements that fell because after a bunch of different classes acting in self-interested ways to accumulate wealth and power, eventually the Rubicon was passed and Rome became an Empire under a tyrant for the rest of its existence.
Another example of tyranny arising out of democracy is Nazi Germany arising directly out of the Weimar republic, which was by far the most progressive democracy on the planet at the time, which is arguably one of the things that led to its downfall.
Having evolved from governments making up 10% of the economy to the current form of 50% of the economy, and a rising alienation between different groups of people, a declining standard of living, a shrinking middle class that's having its blood sucked out of it by both the poor and the rich, I think the warnings of both writers are prescient. Western democracy may in fact be in its late stages -- we may even already be past the breaking point, in a cryptotyranny that pretends it's still a democracy while happily eliminating the concept of liberty using near total control of the media to sell it as something else.
According to the Greeks including Plato, Aristotle, and Herodotus, one of the signs of a tyrant is a reliance on foreigners rather than the local population. It represents the increasing disconnect between the tyrant and the population they are supposed to rule. This isn't definitive, but it certainly is a sign that perhaps western society has transitioned into tyranny considering the most important issues are not really about the common person's problems but the problems of foreign countries and people who are specifically not representative of the typical people.
When discussing "Democracy", it's important to question whether the line we're walking is actually towards a better future, or if we're just digging deeper into our developing tyranny. I personally think that given the massive increase in the size of government and massive declines in the middle class and the grinding decline in quality of life that's led to a demographic cliff in front of us, and governments around the world slowly closing its hands around the throats of people including increasing attacks on fundamental human rights such as freedom of speech including Canada's intervention into the Internet with constantly increasing censorship such as bills C-11, C-18, and new bills incoming this year, there's a very real risk that we're living in tyranny already.
My country's leadership tripled the federal debt in 8 years. Increased taxes. Higher inflation than the US. Many scandals costing taxpayers billions of dollars in a country where a billion dollars actually matters, but all memory holed by a press that's been paid off (and our tyrant laughs about it). All that money spent, but rising homelessness has led to homeless encampments in every city, despite being a place where the weather here will kill you dead half the year. Have you ever felt -40C? I have, you can feel your body freezing to death, you can feel the fact you're going to die, but there's encampments of people living outside because they had nowhere else to go, despite a trillion dollars in new debt. Meanwhile the leadership focuses on things totally disconnected from the realities faced by those ruled, spending time and money on wars on the other side of the world. Feels like tyranny to me.
Arguably, one of the key things that matter a lot to having a democracy or a democratic republic that thrives is having a populace that is interested in the good of society as a whole and is willing to disregard their own interests, but has a good understanding of what constitutes the common good. How many people will ever have a conversation like ours, compared to the people regurgitating word for word what establishment media tells them? How many people vote but don't really think about it because they've got some simplistic heuristic to follow?
I recently went back to some of the establishment media I used to watch, and the way they uncritically presented government data in the way the government wants it presented. The big news story that day was that the jobs numbers were a huge hit, but the fact is that 11 of the past 12 numbers were revised way down afterwards wasn't mentioned. I used to rely on that media, until I realized my predictions were all wrong. After I dropped those sources and found more accurate ones, suddenly I found my predictions improving significantly.
Besides establishment media, we now have overwhelming proof that big tech social media was directly receiving marching orders from the government. Directly. One allegation is that there was a specific gateway so government agents could come in and silence dissenting posts. It isn't often in history the state has been able to interject in conversations between people like it can today. Unprecedented tyranny. Justified by democracy, even though it's totally undemocratic.
Plato's Republic describes the forms of government. The initial aristocracy (defined as rule by the best people) is dominated by the most wise and just in a society. Eventually, the children of those wise men inherit power, but they are not necessarily wise and instead work to cultivate wealth rather than virtue, leading to a focus on values such as warfare and courage as those are perceived to be the virtues that lead to wealth. Eventually, the government is replaced with oligarchy, as the wealthy are the rulers. Eventually, the socioeconomic divide grows and those tensions result in demands that the majority get a stake in government, creating a democracy.
The time of democracy is a time of populism, and so the lower class looks at the upper class and a democrat will say "You have so much, we have less, surely you can share what you have?" and so the democrats will vote to take from some and give to others. Through this, the upper class will shrink, and the lower class will grow. Eventually, many of the wealthy will have hidden their wealth such that nobody can vote to take it from them, and there won't be any wealth left to take.
At that time, a demagogue will step in and promise the world, and the government will slip into tyranny.
Aristotle's "Politics" speaks of democracy, as well as oligarchy, monarchy, aristocracy, tyranny, and polity. He argues that in a democracy, the poor, who are the majority, will pursue their own interests rather than the common good, leading to instability and injustice. This is in contrast to oligarchy, where he suggests the rich, who make up the powerful under such a system, will pursue *their* own interests rather than the common good, again leading to instability and injustice. He suggests that a form of democracy that helps curb the excesses of the rich and the poor by having a strong middle class. The fundamental problem to Aristotle is people voting in their own self-interest rather than in the common good.
Both Plato and Aristotle prefer the concept of aristocracy as defined as wisest and most just by the best of people for the common good, not the concept of hereditary nobility as we've seen through the ages.
Both writers saw the democracy to be dangerous and lead to tyranny.
As for what happened to Athenian Democracy, first they lost in the Peloponnesian war to Sparta leading to the installation of "the thirty tyrants" who ended the democracy. Later there was a short-lived democratic revival before Athens was taken over by the Macedonian monarchy, before eventually being conquered by Rome.
Interestingly, plays recovered from the time suggest that at least some wise Greeks knew full well that they were democratically marching off a cliff, but under democracy, a mob always has a greater weight than a few wise people.
Rome itself is also a cautionary tale -- while it was much different than liberal democracy, it was a republic with democratic elements that fell because after a bunch of different classes acting in self-interested ways to accumulate wealth and power, eventually the Rubicon was passed and Rome became an Empire under a tyrant for the rest of its existence.
Another example of tyranny arising out of democracy is Nazi Germany arising directly out of the Weimar republic, which was by far the most progressive democracy on the planet at the time, which is arguably one of the things that led to its downfall.
Having evolved from governments making up 10% of the economy to the current form of 50% of the economy, and a rising alienation between different groups of people, a declining standard of living, a shrinking middle class that's having its blood sucked out of it by both the poor and the rich, I think the warnings of both writers are prescient. Western democracy may in fact be in its late stages -- we may even already be past the breaking point, in a cryptotyranny that pretends it's still a democracy while happily eliminating the concept of liberty using near total control of the media to sell it as something else.
According to the Greeks including Plato, Aristotle, and Herodotus, one of the signs of a tyrant is a reliance on foreigners rather than the local population. It represents the increasing disconnect between the tyrant and the population they are supposed to rule. This isn't definitive, but it certainly is a sign that perhaps western society has transitioned into tyranny considering the most important issues are not really about the common person's problems but the problems of foreign countries and people who are specifically not representative of the typical people.
When discussing "Democracy", it's important to question whether the line we're walking is actually towards a better future, or if we're just digging deeper into our developing tyranny. I personally think that given the massive increase in the size of government and massive declines in the middle class and the grinding decline in quality of life that's led to a demographic cliff in front of us, and governments around the world slowly closing its hands around the throats of people including increasing attacks on fundamental human rights such as freedom of speech including Canada's intervention into the Internet with constantly increasing censorship such as bills C-11, C-18, and new bills incoming this year, there's a very real risk that we're living in tyranny already.
My country's leadership tripled the federal debt in 8 years. Increased taxes. Higher inflation than the US. Many scandals costing taxpayers billions of dollars in a country where a billion dollars actually matters, but all memory holed by a press that's been paid off (and our tyrant laughs about it). All that money spent, but rising homelessness has led to homeless encampments in every city, despite being a place where the weather here will kill you dead half the year. Have you ever felt -40C? I have, you can feel your body freezing to death, you can feel the fact you're going to die, but there's encampments of people living outside because they had nowhere else to go, despite a trillion dollars in new debt. Meanwhile the leadership focuses on things totally disconnected from the realities faced by those ruled, spending time and money on wars on the other side of the world. Feels like tyranny to me.
Arguably, one of the key things that matter a lot to having a democracy or a democratic republic that thrives is having a populace that is interested in the good of society as a whole and is willing to disregard their own interests, but has a good understanding of what constitutes the common good. How many people will ever have a conversation like ours, compared to the people regurgitating word for word what establishment media tells them? How many people vote but don't really think about it because they've got some simplistic heuristic to follow?
I recently went back to some of the establishment media I used to watch, and the way they uncritically presented government data in the way the government wants it presented. The big news story that day was that the jobs numbers were a huge hit, but the fact is that 11 of the past 12 numbers were revised way down afterwards wasn't mentioned. I used to rely on that media, until I realized my predictions were all wrong. After I dropped those sources and found more accurate ones, suddenly I found my predictions improving significantly.
Besides establishment media, we now have overwhelming proof that big tech social media was directly receiving marching orders from the government. Directly. One allegation is that there was a specific gateway so government agents could come in and silence dissenting posts. It isn't often in history the state has been able to interject in conversations between people like it can today. Unprecedented tyranny. Justified by democracy, even though it's totally undemocratic.
If you don't like effortposts you should block me because that's half my posts. This one's short compared to a lot of them. Some people like them, some people don't, but I set up FBXL Social so I have a place to play with ideas as I please.
That being said, this isn't abstract thought, it's embodied and immediate. Right now today and every day you have a choice how to live your life, and it has an immediate impact on you and your life. Will you pursue making yourself better and doing everything you can to become the best you can, make your family the best you can, make your community the best you can, or will you hope someone else does it for you? If you're in that moment someone is trying to bash you over the head, which life philosophy do you think is more likely to get you through?
That being said, this isn't abstract thought, it's embodied and immediate. Right now today and every day you have a choice how to live your life, and it has an immediate impact on you and your life. Will you pursue making yourself better and doing everything you can to become the best you can, make your family the best you can, make your community the best you can, or will you hope someone else does it for you? If you're in that moment someone is trying to bash you over the head, which life philosophy do you think is more likely to get you through?
With respect to collectivists who can only see the world through their lens and who create an internalized ideal man in that image, they only think you can make your life better through the collective, and so they can only judge themselves by every sin in the universe that still exists because the collective has failed to act in a godly manner, and because they judge themselves as an avatar of the collective the failure of the collective is the failure of themselves and so they can never truly do good because the collective has failed to bring utopia, and so the only righteous act is further revolution because surely if the all-good collective has not achieved utopia surely it is only because not enough of everything under the sun has been brought into their collective yet.
Class Socialism as an ideology once covered most of the planet. It was dominant in Asia, controlled much of Europe, existed in Africa and South America, and was represented in small parts of North America. It had all kinds of people, white and black, asian and indigenous American. Most of the population of humanity. Yet, if you talk to the people who still subscribe to it as to why it failed, it's because they didn't have enough -- They just needed that slice of europe, they just needed the rest of North America, they just needed those people included in their collective and then utopia would have finally taken place.
This collectivist viewpoint bent on always expanding the collective and not considering individual merit a virtue and considering individual striving for achievement to be a vice against the collective since that could mean there are different classes of people.
Such an ideology can be likened to the dot com bubble's failing businesses: "We lose money on every sale, but we make up for it on volume". Already with most of the world's population, already with most of the world's landmass, but if they just have a little more then they'll be ok.
By contrast, seeking individual virtue is something that you can't rely on anyone else for, you have to do it yourself. If you aren't succeeding, then you have to work harder, to be better. You'll never live in a utopia, but you have a very real chance of finding personal happiness and fulfillment. People succeed in this regard every day.
Of course, extreme individualism has its own problems -- human beings are social creatures and so you can't just sit in your basement pumping iron every day and hope to be successful -- but the key here in my view isn't being anti-social, but rather putting responsibility for your personal happiness and success on yourself rather than on everybody else.
On the other hand, if you have a business that makes money on each sale and you scale it up, then you can become rich. In the same way, you can build a community of individuals who each take personal responsibility for their own success, and in so doing have a community that works on its own without having to take over the entire world and all her people.
Individuals who have their own power usually can't change the entire earth, but they can change their part of it for sure. A good man can become a good husband to his wife, and a good father to his son or daughter. A good woman can become a good wife to her husband, and a good mother to her son or daughter. That unit alone, producing good children thereby, is a unit in and of itself, a self-contained center where happiness is found by a lot of people. Then perhaps you have a neighborhood with some good families, and some good neighborhoods in a good community, and before you know it you've got a good place to live. That place is not created by conquering and subjugating everything around them, but by strong individuals using their personal agency to make the world in front of them worth living in.
There are a lot of people who will not pick a piece of litter off the ground in front of them, but hubristically expect to conquer global climate change. If you can't even pick up a piece of litter to make your own community a tiny bit better at nearly no cost to yourself, how do you expect to change the climate of the entire earth? It's absurd. There are people who argue that a starving person in Africa is of the same moral substance as someone starving right in front of you right now, and so the person in front of you has no particular reason to be helped while the person on the other side of the world also remains unhelped. This too is absurd -- if you can't even help your own community, what do you think you'll do on another continent? It's orders of magnitude more effort to help someone who isn't even in front of you.
In my view, that's how you actually change the world: Make yourself strong, make your family strong, you might then get a chance to make your neighborhood strong, and perhaps even your city, your state, your nation, and if you become someone who has done so much good, then and only then can you actually change the world. Skipping steps only shows your personal hubris.
It should be self-evident -- how does one make the world better if they've failed to even make themselves any better? Obviously they can't. If you take failure and multiply it by a thousand, you have a thousand times the failure. However, as I mentioned at the beginning, it's part of the ideology -- imagine that someone else, someone somewhere in the collective, will save you if only you submit to it. And in so doing your submissive impotence becomes virtuous and utopian, and anyone who refuses to submit, anyone who wants to find their own strength, is a threat to the collective, and a threat to utopia.
Besides the honest outcomes, I think there's also a dishonest hidden truth: By outsourcing competence to the collective, you aren't responsible for seeking to be virtuous, and so you don't have to. By aiming at changing the entire earth and refusing to compromise, you're never responsible when you inevitably fail. Why try to raise a child, or feed the hungry, or clean litter, and face potential failure for something mundane, when you can aim to change the climate of the entire earth and if you inevitably fail you're just failing to do the impossible? The former makes you a pathetic loser, the latter a noble visionary who just happened to come up short. Moreover, pretending you are fighting to change the entire globe gives you a noble excuse not to even try to do the inglorious, boring, tedious things that make up doing the right thing in your personal life.
A couple things to be careful of reading the above: Obviously I'm not attacking all forms of collectivist thought. I'm attacking a specific type of thought, while implicitly supporting another. Second, I'm not calling for perfect individualism, but rather that people ought to follow a certain trajectory where they take personal responsibility for their competence and virtue before trying to contribute to a collective whole rather than jumping into a collective and thinking that doing so will inherently solve problems.
I think many philosophies and religions follow a similar idea. Individuals must find Christ, must follow God's commandments, must work to improve themselves. Individuals must try to reach nirvana. Individuals must work to be worthy of their station in life. However, that does not mean individuals are not doing so alone. There is often still a church, a temple, a society, some collective it's implied that individual is working within.
Class Socialism as an ideology once covered most of the planet. It was dominant in Asia, controlled much of Europe, existed in Africa and South America, and was represented in small parts of North America. It had all kinds of people, white and black, asian and indigenous American. Most of the population of humanity. Yet, if you talk to the people who still subscribe to it as to why it failed, it's because they didn't have enough -- They just needed that slice of europe, they just needed the rest of North America, they just needed those people included in their collective and then utopia would have finally taken place.
This collectivist viewpoint bent on always expanding the collective and not considering individual merit a virtue and considering individual striving for achievement to be a vice against the collective since that could mean there are different classes of people.
Such an ideology can be likened to the dot com bubble's failing businesses: "We lose money on every sale, but we make up for it on volume". Already with most of the world's population, already with most of the world's landmass, but if they just have a little more then they'll be ok.
By contrast, seeking individual virtue is something that you can't rely on anyone else for, you have to do it yourself. If you aren't succeeding, then you have to work harder, to be better. You'll never live in a utopia, but you have a very real chance of finding personal happiness and fulfillment. People succeed in this regard every day.
Of course, extreme individualism has its own problems -- human beings are social creatures and so you can't just sit in your basement pumping iron every day and hope to be successful -- but the key here in my view isn't being anti-social, but rather putting responsibility for your personal happiness and success on yourself rather than on everybody else.
On the other hand, if you have a business that makes money on each sale and you scale it up, then you can become rich. In the same way, you can build a community of individuals who each take personal responsibility for their own success, and in so doing have a community that works on its own without having to take over the entire world and all her people.
Individuals who have their own power usually can't change the entire earth, but they can change their part of it for sure. A good man can become a good husband to his wife, and a good father to his son or daughter. A good woman can become a good wife to her husband, and a good mother to her son or daughter. That unit alone, producing good children thereby, is a unit in and of itself, a self-contained center where happiness is found by a lot of people. Then perhaps you have a neighborhood with some good families, and some good neighborhoods in a good community, and before you know it you've got a good place to live. That place is not created by conquering and subjugating everything around them, but by strong individuals using their personal agency to make the world in front of them worth living in.
There are a lot of people who will not pick a piece of litter off the ground in front of them, but hubristically expect to conquer global climate change. If you can't even pick up a piece of litter to make your own community a tiny bit better at nearly no cost to yourself, how do you expect to change the climate of the entire earth? It's absurd. There are people who argue that a starving person in Africa is of the same moral substance as someone starving right in front of you right now, and so the person in front of you has no particular reason to be helped while the person on the other side of the world also remains unhelped. This too is absurd -- if you can't even help your own community, what do you think you'll do on another continent? It's orders of magnitude more effort to help someone who isn't even in front of you.
In my view, that's how you actually change the world: Make yourself strong, make your family strong, you might then get a chance to make your neighborhood strong, and perhaps even your city, your state, your nation, and if you become someone who has done so much good, then and only then can you actually change the world. Skipping steps only shows your personal hubris.
It should be self-evident -- how does one make the world better if they've failed to even make themselves any better? Obviously they can't. If you take failure and multiply it by a thousand, you have a thousand times the failure. However, as I mentioned at the beginning, it's part of the ideology -- imagine that someone else, someone somewhere in the collective, will save you if only you submit to it. And in so doing your submissive impotence becomes virtuous and utopian, and anyone who refuses to submit, anyone who wants to find their own strength, is a threat to the collective, and a threat to utopia.
Besides the honest outcomes, I think there's also a dishonest hidden truth: By outsourcing competence to the collective, you aren't responsible for seeking to be virtuous, and so you don't have to. By aiming at changing the entire earth and refusing to compromise, you're never responsible when you inevitably fail. Why try to raise a child, or feed the hungry, or clean litter, and face potential failure for something mundane, when you can aim to change the climate of the entire earth and if you inevitably fail you're just failing to do the impossible? The former makes you a pathetic loser, the latter a noble visionary who just happened to come up short. Moreover, pretending you are fighting to change the entire globe gives you a noble excuse not to even try to do the inglorious, boring, tedious things that make up doing the right thing in your personal life.
A couple things to be careful of reading the above: Obviously I'm not attacking all forms of collectivist thought. I'm attacking a specific type of thought, while implicitly supporting another. Second, I'm not calling for perfect individualism, but rather that people ought to follow a certain trajectory where they take personal responsibility for their competence and virtue before trying to contribute to a collective whole rather than jumping into a collective and thinking that doing so will inherently solve problems.
I think many philosophies and religions follow a similar idea. Individuals must find Christ, must follow God's commandments, must work to improve themselves. Individuals must try to reach nirvana. Individuals must work to be worthy of their station in life. However, that does not mean individuals are not doing so alone. There is often still a church, a temple, a society, some collective it's implied that individual is working within.
This isn't true.
Some of those are clearly scripted. That's the A material that's gone through speechwriters
Some of those are clearly scripted. That's the A material that's gone through speechwriters