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I'm pretty sure the media would just say "this is the hottest year ever and everyone died of heat stroke on january 15th"

As a Canadian, I can't help but point out that our retarded leaders brought this on themselves.

We spent the past 10 years falling over ourselves to be the people who hated orange man the most, and now we're shocked that he doesn't really care to be nice to us.

And every single person who ran on the conservative ticket was magically "Canada's Trump" up to and including Poilievre, and it was meant as an insult and an attack. But a lot of Canadians actually sort of want a Trump right about now. Even Erin O'Toole, who lost the election for being far too lefty was "Canada's Trump" to them, because "Trump" is just a synonym for "Evil enemy" and now we've got 25% tariffs incoming.

Even right now our politicians particularly on the left are acting like Chicken Hawk going after Foghorn Leghorn. "I'll mertalize him! Vote for me, I'll be so hard on Trump, he's so scared of me!" No he doesn't, stop you're embarrassing yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d277T73eHTQ

I've officially got it set up so I can cast audio over youtube or whatever to the stereo in the back yard. Chromecast to an HDMI to AV converter plugged into the line-in on the amp.

It was actually tougher than it sounds. The house is stucco and therefore surrounded by a wire mesh, so most radio signals don't get far. I started with an older powerline ethernet module, but it was pretty bad. I moved to something newer, then plugged in a really great 802.11ac router I had, and the setup is still limited to 32mbps according to speedtest, but that's more than enough for streaming from multiple devices.

(For people wondering "why not a chromecast audio?", two things: First, you can't just cast youtube to chromecast audio, you have to use youtube music. Second, they don't actually manufacture chromecast audio anymore)

Didn't expect to do this in the middle of winter, but it turns out little guy knows the speakers play music, so we're stomping around in the snow and he's asking for his favorite songs.

What will America do without Quebec's world-class supply of looking down their nose at anglos?

I tend to agree, I think we have a lot of people who are advanced thinkers relative to the institutions, and that's part of the problem with the civilizational model we're in, that it's far behind the reality of most people's way of thinking today. That's why people end up just posting memes about the obvious hypocrisies today, because the politics of the day and most of the discourse of the day haven't caught up to people's thinking. Even academics are arguably stuck 50 years in the past in some ways, and so people come out of academia trained in that way of thinking, and get thoroughly mocked by the common folk who are already past the point of rejecting the current dominant paradigm.

I feel like as I go on writing my book about a world whose whole ideology has become post-metamodern, I'm changing. I'm defining using the superposition model -- in the metamodern epistemology model, you oscillate between different things being true, but in my superposition model there is no oscillation, it's a superposition where different contradictory things can be true at once and like doing superposition while calculating the current through a wire in a circuit with multiple voltage sources. Unlike Hagelian Dialectics, you don't start with a thesis and antithesis to get a synthesis, you instead have just multiple things that apply to the same spot and their influence over that spot is going to depend on a lot of things, and can change later.

This way of thinking superficially resembles current ideological warfare. For example, the taliban in Afghanistan were freedom fighters, and they were terrorists, and ideological warfare demands you "pick a side". I think the difference is that individuals would hold these truths within themselves. The afghans were violent terrorists *and* freedom fighters, and understanding the contradiction exists and isn't logically wrong is where the post-metamodernism comes in.

I think another important thing is that truths will be somewhat weighted, so accepting a thing is true doesn't overwrite another thing being true, but you can think of one thing as more true than others. For example, it's probably true that there are people whose minds wired themselves wrong in the womb and so trans people may exist, but that doesn't override the reality for most people that we're men and women, male and female, and that model is useful for most people. Gender is a social construct, but it's also a biological construct, and they feed into one another over time in ways that are infinitely complex. This means that postmodernists if they prove gender is a social construct don't get to treat biology as fake in the post-metamodern ideology, all they've proven is that there are elements of gender which are socially constructed, but they don't thereby prove that gender isn't also a biological construct.

Climate change is a good example where superposition needs to exist, because multiple things *are* true. It's true that burning carbon produces CO2 which we can prove increases planetary warming. It's also true that people need to burn fossil fuels to live and we can't just stop immediately. It's also true that there are short-term effects to climate change. It's also true that the real effects of climate change don't happen within one lifetime. It's true that to disregard it entirely is dangerous to mankind. It's also true that many people are histrionic and acting like religous nutjubs claiming the world is going to end tomorrow. All of them are true, and then understanding the superposition we can come to conclusions. Otherwise we end up arguing for our one truth among many things that are all true.

I really think that looking at the world through the post-metamodernist lens of superposition actually changes everything because it doesn't fall to pure relativism, and it means that the weighting of different facts changes and we recognise that. For example, on crime -- most people agree that police can be dangerous and corrupt. The same people would also agree that police are more or less mandatory in an urban society. Reality isn't 100% "thin blue line", and it isn't 100% "defund all police", it's complicated and depending on what's going on in the world the truths can rebalance. I'm sure people who admit that the police can be corrupt and dangerous don't want to see injustice from the state would also admit they don't want to be living the sort of hellscape we see in places like Oakland where until recently swarms of people would just walk in and steal from stores until the stores shut down.

This way of looking at the world also helps to explain but limit what's called "flip flopping" in politics. It can define, explain, and justify "flip flopping" because people realize their weighting was wrong or that circumstances changed. It also shows that if someone just completely changes their worldview without a reasonable justification in terms of new or different fundamental positions in superpositions or in terms of changing the weighting of the different superpositions, then that person's mind seems to have changed for reasons that aren't really justified. A far right anarcho-capitalist can't really change anything to become a far left tankie without fundamentally breaking their worldview.

I've said before that in 2015 I supported Justin Trudeau for PM even though I didn't vote in that election. Now the thing is, Canada was in a good place in 2015, and so it felt like we ought to be doing our best to try to address long-standing grievances because things were doing well and we had that leeway to do so, and the previous liberal government was fiscally prudent and produced like 10 years of budget surpluses. Ten years later, the facts changed a little. It turns out Canada isn't in a good place now so we ought to be doing our best to address our immediate issues rather than worrying about long-standing grievances, and it turns out Trudeau isn't like Chretien and did not balance budgets and instead doubled the national debt. I didn't really change, but in my worldview I went from liberal to PPC in 2021, and presently support the conservatives under Poilievre, though my superpositional framework recognises that there's a chance he won't do what he claims or will have problems himself.

I think that support for Trump makes the most sense through a post-metamodern lens as well. People know he's got all these problems. People know he's got things he ran on that they disagree with. People know that he's a "convicted felon". But they also know a bunch of other stuff that they're presently weighting more strongly than those things. If he really screwed everything up, the people who support him may be likely to change their weighting, and people who ignore those factors may start to be the loudest critics bringing them up.

Some potential issues people might see with this model and how to address them are:

1. Superposition's interaction with action.

At the end of the day you can have infinite positions, but you need to take one when taking action. I think the fact that you recognise there being many truths doesn't change the fact that you can use this model to determine the best course of action at the moment.

2. Unlimited superpositions and paralysis by analysis

If there's all these different things that are true, how do you stop from having to analyze every single potential position for your superpostional framework? I think the way you do that is by using a sort of "blurriness heuristic". As things become more important, you pay more attention to them, and as they seem less important, you spend less attention on them. In this way, there can be unlimited truths, but you might only pay meaningful attention to the ones you think are the most important at the moment. When you're driving a car on the highway, you can see thousands of rocks in the pavement, but all that really matters is that the road is there, you're not about to hit anything, and you're between the lines.

3. How can we make moral judgements?

This is one of the coolest elements of superposition -- our moral framework already requires it. In the bible, Jesus explicitly and repeatedly states that he does not come to erase the rules of the old testament. Instead, he demands people look at situations through multiple truths, such as where he admits that the adulterous woman sinned, and also asks people to ask if they don't sin too, but then tells the woman "go, and sin no more". Three different truths that need to be accommodated for. This isn't the only place he does this, often he compares God's law as enforced by the Pharisees with the need for love and grace, a superposition that can't be synthesized into a single answer that applies at all times.

---

So yes, trying to wrap my head around a potential future way of thinking to develop my future society also is changing me. Modernism was certain of the existence and the power of a truth, postmodernism opposed grand narratives and objective truth, metamodernism oscillates between them, and my proposed post-metamodern superposition theory would be a realistic model of dealing with truth in a way that people actually have to.

The whole hormone levels argument reminds me of something I said in response to that idjit Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

He made the hormones argument, and I'm like "So if you have a hydrogen atom and a helium atom, the atomic weight is different, so you just need to add neutrons and then the atomic weight for tritum is the same as helium-3, so tritium is helium-3, and if you knock a neutron off your helium-3, then it's just deuterium!"

Which is obviously wrong, it's about the number of protons.

Ironically, whether you're a man is generally selected by a number too -- the number of X Chromosomes you have. If you have two, you're a woman, if you have one you're a man. There's a tiny minority of people who have different outcomes, but that's a tragic medical error, not some wonderful proof that postmodern conceptions of sex are true. You don't celebrate that in the same way you don't celebrate having cancer -- because cancer sucks.

(And hey -- it doesn't mean we treat people with cancer badly or anything, but nobody's trying to argue that cancer is a superior state of being because it aligns with someone's politics)

Once I was talking about this concept and someone tried to counter me by saying "I like how you admit that it goes for everyone except the people it doesn’t go for. Solid grounding." I responded by going "Yes, well good arguments require taking into account all the facts. Bad arguments refuse to consider facts that don't fit." People who live in the real world have to deal with reality, and reality is messy sometimes. Sometimes stuff that never happens happens. It doesn't mean that the rule isn't a general rule, just that sometimes the universe surprises us.

You kinda gotta give it to him, that by including Huffpo on the list it shows he isn't solely doing it to be partisan, because I can pretty much guarantee you huffpo isn't a huge fan of him or the president.

The way a communist wants communes.

Some people claim Canada doesn't have a bill of rights, or that it doesn't matter because there's ways around it so it isn't absolute. In reality the United States has varying levels of scrutiny explicitly allowing violation of the constitution, so it isn't absolute any more than Canada's constitution is.

The problem isn't that there isn't Constitution or Bill of Rights. The problem is that there's a culture at least under Trudeau that says that it is preferable to violate the constitution than to not get what you want.

The only reason the United States Constitution has teeth is that their culture treats it as almost a religious document. As we saw from 2020 to 2024, that can change quickly if the culture starts to change.

My writing goal is 1000 words per week to finish my next novel by the end of the year, but I'm hitting twice or three times that at the moment. Could just be a fun part of the novel and it'll get harder later, but I'm pretty happy nonetheless. 14k words so far, and I'm still fitting in an effortpost here now and again.

Front-hole having chest feeder bleeder breeders.

And I have it on good authority (seriously, each of those terms comes from official healthcare or government documents) that's the politically correct term and anyone who says anything different is definitely a far right extremist.

I have an apple phone for work, and I sure hope for their sake that this isn't what they're like -- because it sucks.

It seems to me a false dichotomy of business or state. There is a more important thing than either which gets ignored: culture, and I'll tell you why and why it gets ignored.

If we totalize everything into markets, then only that which can be monetized or profited from matters. This is a true criticism of free markets, that it only cares about profits (and that goes to the individual level -- are you going to go to work if you're not making enough money to profit somewhat from that labor?). The incentives often mean that people get more of what they want or need because you profit by providing services people want, but market efficiency is ruthless and sometimes what is efficient to the market isn't efficient for humanity.

If we totalize everything into the state then only that which can be powered by the state or will empower the state matters. This is a true criticism of the state, that only truly cares about power. To totalize everything under the national state is definitionally fascism. The incentives mean that people get more interference in their lives, and sometimes that's good -- I don't want roads built by Jethro's discount roads with no design being followed and for my car to get caught in a sinkhole every week -- but often what empowers the state does not empower humanity.

One thing the Ronald Reagans and Margaret Thatchers of the world were right about is that we have been on the road to fascism since the beginning of the world wars. The state used to be 5% of GDP, now it's 50% or more in some developed countries. So-called neoliberalism claims to want to shrink government power, but all it really seems to do is cut services for the poor and increase services for the rich, because the state is primarily focused on empowering itself and the utilization of that power, so unchecked will take over everything. In reality, neoliberalism is a false ideology that doesn't deliver on the things it claims and instead just refactors a state that was created when there was a stronger culture into a lower culture state with fewer guardrails. If your culture doesn't actually care about the poor, why pay into such a system when you can make an argument for handing trillions to big business instead? It reduces social security nets, but instead of returning the money to the people, it starts paying favors to the wealthy and powerful. In this way, the state and the market become symbiotes for themselves, but parasites for the society.

It's important here to understand that the state and markets aren't always entirely self-interested and destructive. However, these typically occur because of a third pillar which provides broader limitations to both, culture.

Culture is important because it needs to work as the mediator between the excesses of powers such as the state or the merchant class and the people. It doesn't get talked about because a properly operating culture doesn't usually profit individuals and doesn't usually empower rulers, and a distributed culture may instead be controlled by nobody in particular. Even centralized powers like the church need to guide while not disrupting or opposing consensus too much or people will tune out (as billions have, in fact). The thing is, culture is the overlay that keeps markets and the state honest more than they keep each other honest. Chivalry wasn't imposed by the state on itself, but by the culture to ensure the warrior class in the state was acting nobly and they weren't just violent thugs. In the East, Confucianism was a cultural counterbalance to the bureaucracy, ensuring that it didn't totally consume everything.

Politically, this leads to a "both sides are obviously wrong" conclusion that many people think is centrist, but is instead something else entirely. In Zen Buddhism, there is a parable that goes something like this:

The student asks the buddhist master whether a dog has a buddha nature. The master said "Mu" and the student was englightened".

In this case, "Mu" means "unask the question", or "the question is wrong". In the question, it pre-assumes that there is such a thing as a buddha nature that something has or does not have. In the same way, the question "should the state or the market have more power" pre-assumes that either of these has a correct answer, when reality is more complicated than that.

What we see instead is that culture is either coopted or attacked into irrelevance by both forces which don't want competition.

There is a stated "culture war" out there, but in reality it isn't about culture per se, it's about facets of the state or the market trying to impose norms on everyone that are beneficial to themselves. These forces drape themselves in a veneer of culture, but it isn't about culture at all. We can tell this because the final word isn't about who is right and who is wrong, but about who gets to rule.

I've been somewhat enlightened this summer in passing on culture to my son, and realizing all the things that it involves. You're reading stories, you're telling stories, you're singing songs, you're doing things -- and the whole process doesn't involve buying much of anything, and it doesn't involve the state stepping in and doing much of anything (though I'll admit, you can make a lot of use of common goods such as parks or walking trails).

I found it very interesting that despite going outside up to 3 times every day and making use of different parks, trails, or other facilities, most of them were empty virtually every time I went there. There weren't other fathers playing with their sons, there weren't other mothers playing with their daughters, there weren't even kids playing with other kids. It was a ghost world. Where are they? I tend to believe they're sitting somewhere being monetized.

The state also steps in and if they find your kids playing with other kids without direct adult supervision, you could have a visit from a police officer or CFS. Are kids really in so much danger? Not according to all the statistics we see, yet the state steps in anyway to mediate moments that don't belong to them. Simply because that's how they take a little more power for themselves, as is the nature of the state removed from the constraints of culture. In this way, the false dichotomy of state vs. market is fully visible, because as the state increases its grip, people require market solutions -- whether it's larger solutions like daycare, or smaller solutions like tablets with unlimited streaming, to pacify children who would otherwise react strongly to having their freedom to have a childhood taken from them.

You end up where perhaps a couple could have one working parent and one stay at home parent, but you instead need two working parents to pay for all the additional services you need because the state dictates you need them.

The suffocation of people by the state and the market has the effect of stifling culture. If one parent is working and one can stay home, the one who stays home is often dealing with cultural work including organizing events within the local community, volunteering with community organizations, or just spending time doing stuff in a decentralized manner to make the world a better place. Kids end up raised by the school and by commercial daycare instead of by their parents, and so their culture is dictated by the state, eliminating true culture.

So what does rebuilding culture look like? I think there's a few things everyone can do immediately.

1. Create culture. Its easier than ever to write a book, to sing a song, to produce a cartoon, to program a video game. It doesn't have to be great, it just needs to be authentically by you. I made a video game called "Quest for a King" as a teenager, and it was pretty impressive for the work of a teenager, but nothing revolutionary. However, my cousin saw that video game and was inspired, and today he's a world famous video game programmer. I'm not taking large credit for his success, but I do believe it showed him it was entirely possible to create something himself.

2. Raise your kids yourself, and with purpose. The data on this is unavoidable. First, a child with two parents is statistically speaking so much better than a child with one parent, who is statistically speaking so much better than a child with no parents. Then on top of that, it doesn't just matter that you show up, it matters that you care, it matters what you're teaching your kids. It isn't just about what you write on a chalkboard, it matters how you live your life, how you treat others around you. This doesn't mean necessarily that you have to homeschool and refuse to ever use daycare, but it means that the time you do spend with your kids needs to be meaningfully spent so you have a chance to pass culture on (and it does mean you have to pay attention to what the schools and the daycares are doing to ensure it meshes with your values).

3. Engage with problems with culture, not always markets or the state. If the local park is full of garbage, sometimes the right answer isn't to ask the council to send someone to clean it, or to pay a company to clean it up, it's to go there with a garbage bag and clean it up yourself. I made a habit of this at the parks I went to with my son, and he started picking up garbage on his own and throwing it away before he understood any idea of me telling him to do anything. He did it because I did it, and that's a slice of culture you can't buy or have imposed upon you by the state. People can get together, form groups, and work together to build local cultures, and the best of those can grow to become influential beyond a small group of people.

4. Think for yourself. Seems obvious on paper, but in reality a lot of people wait for someone else to think for them, and that's where the state and the market get their chance to inject themselves into situations they have no business in. You don't just do the previous points the way you think the state or the market wants you to, you do it the way you think is the best way to do it. The bar is insanely low from them because the bar must always be set low with the state or the market because it needs to cater to the lowest common denominator. By contrast, culture (and especially local culture we create ourselves) can set the bar infinitely high and tell people to strive for the highest bar, then reward the people for how much closer to the bar they get.

Premodernity had a variety of cultures, some of which were so powerful they shape our thinking today, such as the ancient Greeks or ancient Indians. Modernity had powerful elements of culture, but its focus on rationality, empiricism, and logic also eroded culture by assuming the influence of culture was the natural state of man and so didn't need to be accounted for. This gave an opening for ideologies where the state took over the culture such as Marxism, Fascism, and National Socialism, or ideologies which assumed such a void would be filled with the natural goodness of people such as classical liberalism, both of which proved fatally incorrect. Postmodernity (I always argue we entered the postmodern period after the world wars proved modernity catastrophically incorrect) continued the mistake by deconstructing and destroying institutions in culture because they could be shown on paper to be imperfect, destroying cultural institutions which then were replaced by the state and the market.

400 years of cultural destruction has resulted in the problems we see today: Atomization of the individual and destruction of culture including institutions such as families and organized religion. People are materially wealthier than ever in all of history, but we're miserable, stressed out, divided, and the state is more powerful than ever, and the market is deeply corrupt and despite wealth being greater than ever before, so is inequality.

If only there was a group of people working on software that didn't rely on Microsoft or Meta. Like, people who released the source code to their software in the open. A sort of "open source software".

But that's crazy. How could a modern nation-state support something like that? They only have software budgets in the billions of dollars. It's not like that level of funding would have an outsized influence on making software like libreoffice or nextcloud exactly what they want instead of just whining that it isn't good enough and buying Microsoft or Google.

I've heard though that Microsoft software never crashes which is why governments go with them, because Microsoft can guarantee their software is perfect and will never get hacked or crash. I mean, that makes perfect sense.

Nope, the only option is clearly to just keep paying Microsoft and Google. Can't be helped. But it sure would be neat if something like that existed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEQOv61Gveg

A neat math trick (now I know more about tetration and so on)

I think once they're confirmed, the Republicans really need to start very loudly reminding everyone that they were considered "good guys" just a couple years ago when they weren't working for the dreaded Rs.

When the Democrats go "Oh yes, Tulsi Gabbard is a russian asset" the next question should always be "did that happen before or after you put her in charge of the DNC?"

@7235c54512c28918a4dcb0d47aa48709feef5c4be45e85f5672cdc4a9a32a871 Curious if you've seen "The Master of Diabolism", it's an animated series by Tencent, looks like it's entirely in Chinese.

Maybe not something unique or interesting to you, but it's the first time I've seen anything quite like it in the circles I normally frequent.

Honestly, it wasn't until I was grown that I came to appreciate the difference in strength between men and women.

I'm probably on the weaker side when it comes to men -- I don't work out, I don't do sports, and I run a social media empire from parts scavenged from roadside signs -- but in terms of lifting power, there's a reason the women in my life were always asking me to lift things, because I just naturally have more muscle mass regardless, and it's just easier for me to do it.

I don't mind, it's like Red Green used to say: "If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy" lol

Yes. That's a key thing -- He's the executive, the principal executive. Every single employee under him is his agent, and is only acting under his authorization. This is where a lot of people mistake the tail as wagging the dog -- if they aren't doing what the president wants, then the employees are not completing their role and it only makes sense that they would be sacked. It isn't their job to second-guess him or work against him. (Now, that doesn't mean they can't or shouldn't provide counsel, but that's different than what we're seeing a lot)

Even that question of "lawful orders" doesn't mean individual employees get to just go "oh, we're not doing this because it's not legal" -- there's pathways where checks and balances see if you're right.