World war 1 never happened bro, it was an optical illuuuuuuusioooon. So security guarantees are always doubleplus good!
[admin mode]. Test your backups folks!
Had an issue and restored Apache configs from backup. Backup was broken, all 0 size files, so now I'm rebuilding Apache configs.
On the upside, I'm planning to move to high availability redundant servers this weekend and I got a taste of how to migrate letsencrypt so that's a positive.
Had an issue and restored Apache configs from backup. Backup was broken, all 0 size files, so now I'm rebuilding Apache configs.
On the upside, I'm planning to move to high availability redundant servers this weekend and I got a taste of how to migrate letsencrypt so that's a positive.
There was a study whose heat map was making the rounds a while back, and it showed that progressives care about everything including space rocks, whereas conservatives tend to care about things that are much closer, including immediate friends and family, extended family, and community.
In the conversation about this, a lot is made about where empathy is distributed, but I think a key issue that isn't really touched on is also the fact that the further out from yourself you are empathy goes, the less impactful any actions you take in pursuit of that.
You can be as empathetic to space rocks as you want, for the most part you're never even going to see HD video on TV of one, let alone get a chance to touch one or have any actual impact on one. For something like an exoplanet, you won't even get a low def image, just a mathematical suggestion that it exists. Caring about space rocks is fine, but unless you work for NASA, it’s not something you can ever personally impact.
Meanwhile, how you treat your mother, father, brothers, sisters, spouse, and children has a direct impact on those things you have empathy on every moment of every day. Between those two extremes, having an impact takes exponentially more effort the further you get from right in front of you.
This is meaningful, for a number of reasons.
Most people want to have an impact on the things and people they care about. They want to help make things better. To care about space rocks but to be totally incapable in any universe of doing anything to impact them is to feel like you've failed. This directly impacts people's mental health, and I think it's one reason why studies have shown conservatives consistently have better mental health than progressives.
Along those same lines, it helps us understand the insane lengths we see progs go to. Whereas if you see a homeless person you can just give them some food or a place to live and you have an immediate impact, or if a friend needs someone to listen to you can just listen to them, if you want to give starvin' Marvin in Africa a sandwitch it takes a whole institutional network (including finding ways around the brutal dictatorship that's actualy keeping Marvin starvin').
It also becomes apparent that because of the additional effort required to do anything, that's also why small things end up becoming "literally genocide" for the progs, because that's the level of discipline required to move the needle in any way. You need to ensure that every single little thing you do is fully engaged on impact or you'll fail to impact those you empathize with, and if you imagine failure to impact as leaving them to their fate, and if you think their fate is death, then little things mean death.
This also explains a lot of the moral purity testing you see on the left, because not only do you need to be pulling in the right direction to cause the impact on space rocks, but you need everyone in your society to pull in the same, correct, direction.
In that sense, all of the behaviours of the progressives that everyone to the right of them disagree with are a manifestation of the consequences of impotence.
No wonder the progs in the 1970s felt better than today and were so much more successful -- they could speak to local people who were facing actual issues that were immediate and could be addressed. You didn't need to change everything on earth, you just needed to help one person.
Lilly Ledbetter was a supervisor working at a Goodyear tire plant, and she discovered she was making less money than her male peers. She ended up suing under the civil rights act, but because her first disparate paycheque was to far in the past, she lost at the supreme court. Her case ended up leading to Congress passing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009, which reset the 180-day filing period with each new paycheck affected by discriminatory pay practices. In that way, dealing with a local problem ultimately changed things for the better for everyone, and it was totally achievable -- it was in fact achieved.
In the same way, many other victories were achieved in this way. One reason Martin Luther King took on the cause of Rosa Parks -- by taking on the cause of one local Alabama woman being forced to sit in the back of the bus, they were able to change the world.
I suppose in some ways that's the problem -- they were highly successful acting locally, and so eventually you run out of local issues to deal with, so you have to grow your scope. Eventually you have to take over the world like a supervillain to continue if you're highly successful.
Now, it's important to note that this isn't necessarily universal. You can be a progressive and focused on local change, or a conservative and focused on global change. Conservative Christians were focused on trying to save the souls of every human on earth and had many of the same problems we see in contemporary progressives, for many of the same reasons. Meanwhile, a progressive who cares about their own local community could actually feel great by focusing on improvements to their own family, home, neighborhood, or city instead of changing the entire globe. It isn't impossible to eliminate your *own* carbon footprint though it's fairly difficult, you can build the home that's energy efficient, you can use solar and wind and batteries, you can switch to an electric car (notwithstanding the cost of building such a thing, but that's outside of your control), and you can successfully do all these things and feel great about it. We used to see that in fact, which is why people used to attack progs as sniffing their own farts -- very self-congratulatory in their own personal impacts.
We can see that the study's focus on conservatives really applies to *contemporary* conservatives, and it's likely a reaction to the failures of conservatism in a global context. Neoconservatism sought to bring western-style democracy to the world, and despite spending enough time, money, and effort to fundamentally change the country in positive ways, it did essentially nothing -- those countries that were previously living under dictatorships are generally still living under dictatorships. The religious right and the "moral majority" sought to control everyone, and often failed to even remain moral themselves.
The United States spent over a trillion dollars on Iraq and Afghanistan. According to some figures, there are about 750,000 homeless people in the US. That means that for the same price as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we could have spent over a million dollars on every homeless person in America. Even in California that'd be enough money to build them a home!
It probably doesn't mean that we should completely diregard all global issues, but it does tell us that we have to be careful balancing our actions. It might feel most important to some people saving starving kids in Africa, bringing liberal democracy to Afghanistan, or caring about space rocks, but the reality is that whether you're progressive or conservative, it's still most important to act locally and let impactful good work trickle up, rather than putting all your effort into changing things that you can't really control and going nuts in the process.
Some global campaigns have succeeded, but even in the case of something like eradicating smallpox or malaria, it's something that can be acted upon locally, has a limited scope, and a clear path to success. In that sense, it's almost just a local campaign completed elsewhere. Effective individuals were able to go to places where malaria or smallpox were common, work with the people in front of them, and in so doing solve the problem. It may be a large scope problem, but it can be made local and close, and that's how they succeeded.
Some issues look like global coordination such as nuclear proliferation, but it wasn't nearly as complicated -- Individual federal governments ended up passing rules that were within their scope to pass, and making agreements that were within their scope to make. Really, a small number of states needed to agree to reduce the number of nuclear weapons on earth, it was an achievable goal that would be local to the governments that control and equip the militaries involved.
This could actually describe a mechanism for the ideological pendulum swing -- as movements are more successful, they become more global and less effective, where their counterparts are forced to be more local and more effective, which leads to the decline of the dominant ideology and an uprising of its counterpoint, which eventually swings back as the counterpart becomes more successful and less effective.
I suppose it also means, be happy with good enough. If you've grown yourself a great family, if you've got a great neighborhood, if you're happy with your city, if you're proud of your country, then it's ok to declare victory and go party. You don't need to keep finding new frontiers to conquer. More importantly, those great things you're happy with need maintenance, and you can suffer from extreme farsightedness if you're not careful -- witness cities that were once beautiful turning into hellscapes as they worry more about world domination than maintaining their neighborhoods or strong families. You can still worry a little bit about the world, but it's ok to turn the volume down and just work on it a little. Ideologies that need to perpetually grow will perpetually fail and be replaced with counterparts because they will always become ineffective.
In the conversation about this, a lot is made about where empathy is distributed, but I think a key issue that isn't really touched on is also the fact that the further out from yourself you are empathy goes, the less impactful any actions you take in pursuit of that.
You can be as empathetic to space rocks as you want, for the most part you're never even going to see HD video on TV of one, let alone get a chance to touch one or have any actual impact on one. For something like an exoplanet, you won't even get a low def image, just a mathematical suggestion that it exists. Caring about space rocks is fine, but unless you work for NASA, it’s not something you can ever personally impact.
Meanwhile, how you treat your mother, father, brothers, sisters, spouse, and children has a direct impact on those things you have empathy on every moment of every day. Between those two extremes, having an impact takes exponentially more effort the further you get from right in front of you.
This is meaningful, for a number of reasons.
Most people want to have an impact on the things and people they care about. They want to help make things better. To care about space rocks but to be totally incapable in any universe of doing anything to impact them is to feel like you've failed. This directly impacts people's mental health, and I think it's one reason why studies have shown conservatives consistently have better mental health than progressives.
Along those same lines, it helps us understand the insane lengths we see progs go to. Whereas if you see a homeless person you can just give them some food or a place to live and you have an immediate impact, or if a friend needs someone to listen to you can just listen to them, if you want to give starvin' Marvin in Africa a sandwitch it takes a whole institutional network (including finding ways around the brutal dictatorship that's actualy keeping Marvin starvin').
It also becomes apparent that because of the additional effort required to do anything, that's also why small things end up becoming "literally genocide" for the progs, because that's the level of discipline required to move the needle in any way. You need to ensure that every single little thing you do is fully engaged on impact or you'll fail to impact those you empathize with, and if you imagine failure to impact as leaving them to their fate, and if you think their fate is death, then little things mean death.
This also explains a lot of the moral purity testing you see on the left, because not only do you need to be pulling in the right direction to cause the impact on space rocks, but you need everyone in your society to pull in the same, correct, direction.
In that sense, all of the behaviours of the progressives that everyone to the right of them disagree with are a manifestation of the consequences of impotence.
No wonder the progs in the 1970s felt better than today and were so much more successful -- they could speak to local people who were facing actual issues that were immediate and could be addressed. You didn't need to change everything on earth, you just needed to help one person.
Lilly Ledbetter was a supervisor working at a Goodyear tire plant, and she discovered she was making less money than her male peers. She ended up suing under the civil rights act, but because her first disparate paycheque was to far in the past, she lost at the supreme court. Her case ended up leading to Congress passing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009, which reset the 180-day filing period with each new paycheck affected by discriminatory pay practices. In that way, dealing with a local problem ultimately changed things for the better for everyone, and it was totally achievable -- it was in fact achieved.
In the same way, many other victories were achieved in this way. One reason Martin Luther King took on the cause of Rosa Parks -- by taking on the cause of one local Alabama woman being forced to sit in the back of the bus, they were able to change the world.
I suppose in some ways that's the problem -- they were highly successful acting locally, and so eventually you run out of local issues to deal with, so you have to grow your scope. Eventually you have to take over the world like a supervillain to continue if you're highly successful.
Now, it's important to note that this isn't necessarily universal. You can be a progressive and focused on local change, or a conservative and focused on global change. Conservative Christians were focused on trying to save the souls of every human on earth and had many of the same problems we see in contemporary progressives, for many of the same reasons. Meanwhile, a progressive who cares about their own local community could actually feel great by focusing on improvements to their own family, home, neighborhood, or city instead of changing the entire globe. It isn't impossible to eliminate your *own* carbon footprint though it's fairly difficult, you can build the home that's energy efficient, you can use solar and wind and batteries, you can switch to an electric car (notwithstanding the cost of building such a thing, but that's outside of your control), and you can successfully do all these things and feel great about it. We used to see that in fact, which is why people used to attack progs as sniffing their own farts -- very self-congratulatory in their own personal impacts.
We can see that the study's focus on conservatives really applies to *contemporary* conservatives, and it's likely a reaction to the failures of conservatism in a global context. Neoconservatism sought to bring western-style democracy to the world, and despite spending enough time, money, and effort to fundamentally change the country in positive ways, it did essentially nothing -- those countries that were previously living under dictatorships are generally still living under dictatorships. The religious right and the "moral majority" sought to control everyone, and often failed to even remain moral themselves.
The United States spent over a trillion dollars on Iraq and Afghanistan. According to some figures, there are about 750,000 homeless people in the US. That means that for the same price as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we could have spent over a million dollars on every homeless person in America. Even in California that'd be enough money to build them a home!
It probably doesn't mean that we should completely diregard all global issues, but it does tell us that we have to be careful balancing our actions. It might feel most important to some people saving starving kids in Africa, bringing liberal democracy to Afghanistan, or caring about space rocks, but the reality is that whether you're progressive or conservative, it's still most important to act locally and let impactful good work trickle up, rather than putting all your effort into changing things that you can't really control and going nuts in the process.
Some global campaigns have succeeded, but even in the case of something like eradicating smallpox or malaria, it's something that can be acted upon locally, has a limited scope, and a clear path to success. In that sense, it's almost just a local campaign completed elsewhere. Effective individuals were able to go to places where malaria or smallpox were common, work with the people in front of them, and in so doing solve the problem. It may be a large scope problem, but it can be made local and close, and that's how they succeeded.
Some issues look like global coordination such as nuclear proliferation, but it wasn't nearly as complicated -- Individual federal governments ended up passing rules that were within their scope to pass, and making agreements that were within their scope to make. Really, a small number of states needed to agree to reduce the number of nuclear weapons on earth, it was an achievable goal that would be local to the governments that control and equip the militaries involved.
This could actually describe a mechanism for the ideological pendulum swing -- as movements are more successful, they become more global and less effective, where their counterparts are forced to be more local and more effective, which leads to the decline of the dominant ideology and an uprising of its counterpoint, which eventually swings back as the counterpart becomes more successful and less effective.
I suppose it also means, be happy with good enough. If you've grown yourself a great family, if you've got a great neighborhood, if you're happy with your city, if you're proud of your country, then it's ok to declare victory and go party. You don't need to keep finding new frontiers to conquer. More importantly, those great things you're happy with need maintenance, and you can suffer from extreme farsightedness if you're not careful -- witness cities that were once beautiful turning into hellscapes as they worry more about world domination than maintaining their neighborhoods or strong families. You can still worry a little bit about the world, but it's ok to turn the volume down and just work on it a little. Ideologies that need to perpetually grow will perpetually fail and be replaced with counterparts because they will always become ineffective.
Oh wow so cool I'll have to
(squints)
See it next time, I guess it'll be another 3 years.
(don't get old folks)
(squints)
See it next time, I guess it'll be another 3 years.
(don't get old folks)
Looks to me like she's had more than enough alcohol while her mom was pregnant with her.
but you don't understand! i won't get....
i won't get....
wtf does the federal government even do that makes it worth funding that won't be funded automatically in a shutdown anyway?
i won't get....
wtf does the federal government even do that makes it worth funding that won't be funded automatically in a shutdown anyway?
Writers like Voltaire or Thomas Paine, who weren't writing to get another grant, but to examine ideas (and possibly to sell books or persuade others). The public square at the time would allow long form discussion and debate, and rewarded them for their works.
By contrast, today the academic public square is about impressing some layman into giving you a government grant, or getting published by writing simple things in a highly complicated way; and twitter is the public square for non-academics, and it's about getting the most engagement out of 240 characters.
Despite having the most powerful information system known to human history in the Internet and now LLM AIs, people aren't trained to think in terms of big and rigorous ideas presented in a way most people can understand. Therefore, people focus on short pithy posts online, and like in Plato's allegory of the cave they get quite upset at you if you try to see the real world rather than just the shadows cast on the cave wall. How many people get pissed off when they see my effortposting? How many people who pretend to care about smart conversation have muted me for the sin of not just giving them the red vs. blue view they wanted to see?
Now, that doesn't mean there's no value in academic writing, just as it doesn't mean there's no value in twitter pithiness. But when you have two extremes that are essentially unproductive, you have intellectual stagnation, and many people would agree we've seen intellectual stagnation for at least a decade. A lot of very smart people are saying mostly the same things they did 10 years ago, because there's only so many smart things you can say in 240 characters, and there's only so many times you can speak into the academic void and not even hear the echo of your own voice.
tl;dr: ur a homo :P
By contrast, today the academic public square is about impressing some layman into giving you a government grant, or getting published by writing simple things in a highly complicated way; and twitter is the public square for non-academics, and it's about getting the most engagement out of 240 characters.
Despite having the most powerful information system known to human history in the Internet and now LLM AIs, people aren't trained to think in terms of big and rigorous ideas presented in a way most people can understand. Therefore, people focus on short pithy posts online, and like in Plato's allegory of the cave they get quite upset at you if you try to see the real world rather than just the shadows cast on the cave wall. How many people get pissed off when they see my effortposting? How many people who pretend to care about smart conversation have muted me for the sin of not just giving them the red vs. blue view they wanted to see?
Now, that doesn't mean there's no value in academic writing, just as it doesn't mean there's no value in twitter pithiness. But when you have two extremes that are essentially unproductive, you have intellectual stagnation, and many people would agree we've seen intellectual stagnation for at least a decade. A lot of very smart people are saying mostly the same things they did 10 years ago, because there's only so many smart things you can say in 240 characters, and there's only so many times you can speak into the academic void and not even hear the echo of your own voice.
tl;dr: ur a homo :P
Why should you feel ashamed of someone else's actions -- especially if they're actions you disagree with and have no meaningful capacity to change?
What is anyone gonna do? Go full uncle ted? A few people tried that, it didn't improve anything.
People can go "but muh democracy", but in its current form, democracy is a sham intended to increase buy-in (which works -- democratic societies can have much higher taxation before revolution occurs, and we're some of the highest taxed people in history). Of course, that isn't to say that every politician is exactly the same and literally nothing ever changes, but in general, people were disgusted by red so they voted blue, then they were disgusted by blue so they voted red again, and we're all still less free (in terms of what government enforces) than 40 years ago.
In my view, the only long game has nothing to do with the state -- voting red or blue doesn't change the fundamentals in the long term, because the forces that choose who you even get to choose between are so disconnected from reality. The only solutions are local -- trying to become a strong individual, being a good family member, being a good parent, being a good neighbor, being a good parent, to create a culture that overwhelms the state and the market.
"Aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one."
In the end, empires fall, urban monoculture fails, and what's left? The people who are strong enough to live without it.
What is anyone gonna do? Go full uncle ted? A few people tried that, it didn't improve anything.
People can go "but muh democracy", but in its current form, democracy is a sham intended to increase buy-in (which works -- democratic societies can have much higher taxation before revolution occurs, and we're some of the highest taxed people in history). Of course, that isn't to say that every politician is exactly the same and literally nothing ever changes, but in general, people were disgusted by red so they voted blue, then they were disgusted by blue so they voted red again, and we're all still less free (in terms of what government enforces) than 40 years ago.
In my view, the only long game has nothing to do with the state -- voting red or blue doesn't change the fundamentals in the long term, because the forces that choose who you even get to choose between are so disconnected from reality. The only solutions are local -- trying to become a strong individual, being a good family member, being a good parent, being a good neighbor, being a good parent, to create a culture that overwhelms the state and the market.
"Aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one."
In the end, empires fall, urban monoculture fails, and what's left? The people who are strong enough to live without it.
That's what I said. Not necessarily because we died, but because our ancestors were the ones who were afraid and didn't die.
Some of our primal fears are based entirely on something like that. Not necessarily because we died, but because our ancestors were the ones who were afraid of something and didn't die.
I love how the talking heads are like "oh no, regular people are going to be so hurt by this!"
But let's be honest: How many people use federal services on a daily basis?
But let's be honest: How many people use federal services on a daily basis?
Imagine the poor fed who has to read my posts. "Aw fuck not another novella about post-metamodern superpositional epistemological framework, nobody cares neeeeeerd!"
Mark Carney, the new head of the liberal party, besides being former head of the bank of Canada and the bank of England, is also a former hedge fund manager. So the far left pick is literally just a hedge fund manager/banker. Lol.
It should be the easiest guy in the world for the NDP to run against, except they're headed by the masarati Marxist Jagmeet Singh, so they have to debate who has the bigger supercar collection.
I'm sure the left is excited to vote for someone who stands up for their anti-capitalist values -- a hedge fund manager.
It should be the easiest guy in the world for the NDP to run against, except they're headed by the masarati Marxist Jagmeet Singh, so they have to debate who has the bigger supercar collection.
I'm sure the left is excited to vote for someone who stands up for their anti-capitalist values -- a hedge fund manager.
It's like when Obama admitted to smoking pot and also inhaling. "That was the point."
"I sure am glad the engineer who was on track to flunk out of the program but got an A because 'death to the jews, death to Israel' designed this car!"
Saw a post claiming that Musk has no cards and ought to make concessions to Ukraine whom is allegedly ddosing Twitter.
I know it's a joke, but arguably Musk has a lot more cards than Ukraine does -- which kind of proves the point.
"Oh no! 'putin' 'hacked' starlink and got all the GPS coordinates for each one, permanently disabled each one, and got to see the unencrypted traffic for the past week! It sure is a shame our engineers were busy dealing with that ddos attack on Twitter, we were just caught off guard!"
I'm sure that if Elon was made governor of Zakarpattia for life he could definitely 'hack' 'putin' and make sure the terminals started working again and the GPS coordinates got lost!
Ukraine needs Musk, but Musk doesn't need Ukraine. Even if Twitter was wiped off the map, all Musk would lose is his (admittedly sizable) investment and be on the hook for some debt. If Ukraine was wiped off the map, however, they stand to lose a lot more.
If Ukraine were indeed trying to poke that bear, it would be a chevette playing a game of chicken with a 100 ton rock truck.
I know it's a joke, but arguably Musk has a lot more cards than Ukraine does -- which kind of proves the point.
"Oh no! 'putin' 'hacked' starlink and got all the GPS coordinates for each one, permanently disabled each one, and got to see the unencrypted traffic for the past week! It sure is a shame our engineers were busy dealing with that ddos attack on Twitter, we were just caught off guard!"
I'm sure that if Elon was made governor of Zakarpattia for life he could definitely 'hack' 'putin' and make sure the terminals started working again and the GPS coordinates got lost!
Ukraine needs Musk, but Musk doesn't need Ukraine. Even if Twitter was wiped off the map, all Musk would lose is his (admittedly sizable) investment and be on the hook for some debt. If Ukraine was wiped off the map, however, they stand to lose a lot more.
If Ukraine were indeed trying to poke that bear, it would be a chevette playing a game of chicken with a 100 ton rock truck.