(b) law enforcement is terrible and they disproportionately victimize the poor and the incompetent. Like PETA throwing red paint on women in furs, not bikers in leather, LEOs go after people too poor to fight back.
Mar 26 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
this is an extremely leftist/wordcel/normie question
the normal state of cargo ships is sinking/no electrical power/no rudder control
only constant maintenance, discipline, and executive function keeps cargo ships out of that ground state and in a more energetic state
Entropy is always and everywhere trying to destroy, corrode, sink, and endarken.
Mar 26 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
1/
I had a [ slightly left of center ] teacher in HS who said that the distinction between right and left dictatorships is that in a right dictatorship you could keep your mouth shut, go along to get along, and all would be fine
...but in a left dictatorship, you had to actively parrot the party line, and the regime would switch up the party line all the time to trip people up. The constant greengrocerism and whiplash was PART OF THE PROCESS.
Mar 3 • 25 tweets • 6 min read
a new 747 costs $450 million, and one single trusted individual can destroy one in 5 seconds if he chooses to
the modern consumer-facing world trains people to think that everything has, metaphorically speaking, seat belts and airbags, but it's not true
and yet "... evidence falls short of supporting criminal charges"
ok, so there's rock solid evidence that he shared classified info he knew was classified...but...something something
is there some other branch of the law not fulfilled?
Feb 5 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
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Megan is getting at what @slatestarcodex calls "the non central fallacy".
My rebuttal is that being here illegally is a form of election fraud, often a form of benefits fraud (taking advantage of our roads, schools, and other things with real maintenance costs), and ...
while I detest the scare mongering of " MiLiTaRy aGeD mEn !!111", is it true that illegal immigration, en masse, and without assimilation, fundamentally changes the character of a nation, and often - contra @AlexNowrasteh - for the worse.
Jan 29 • 14 tweets • 2 min read
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As I mentioned recently, I saw Top Gun: Maverick and it was excellent.
A lot of little tricks of great writing.
Specifically re sequels.
One big trick w sequels...
2/
is how to hit the same notes, but not in the exact same way.
Cheap / bad: do the same thing, a second time. If episode 1 was a dam busters raid, ep 3 can't be another raid, and ep 4 certainly can't.
(looking at you, Star Wars, w 3 different death stars)
Jan 19 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
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This is entirely false, and I'm old enough to remember exactly when the progs forged this meme.
In the 60s & 70s progs had lots of exposes about mental hospitals, and leveraged these to pass laws closing institutions.
The crazies ended up on sidewalks and were now hobos.
First, the progs used the euphemism treadmill to get rid of the words "hobo" and "bum". Those had unfair connotations / stigma, and suggested that these people living on the sidewalks were either lazy or mentally ill.
Jan 2 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
I am, in general, in favor of mercy, against excessive punishment, etc.
...but I strongly disagree with Megan here, on, like, a dozen counts.
First (and least importantly), is Megan's assertion that Gay has gotten racist garbage. True or not, it's entirely irrelevant.
Some of the more important reasons to disagree with Megan:
* it's basic economics that the less likely someone is to get caught in a crime, the more painful the punishment has to be, so that the EXPECTED pain of punishment (chance of getting caught * pain) > benefit of crime
Jan 1 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
2023 was a mediocre year, but I got some things done:
* first year in the NH legislature, voted consistently for small gov, earning an A+ rating from @nhliberty
* finished building / re-building / re-re-building the solar project and got house onto it
* finished "Willow Park" (a ~500 ft^2 area behind the compost bins, where we planted a willow tree. Pulled all rocks, filled in dirt, re-re-seeded grass, etc.
2/
* finished my first YA novel "The Aristillus Engineering Club and the Journey to the Center of Mars", and shared beta copies with a few friends at BasedCon
* started my second YA novel "Aristillus Engineering Club Around Mars in 80 Sols"
Dec 13, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
one problem domain specialists often make is, because of their experience as practitioners, interpreting phrases much much more narrowly than normal people do
1A lawyers will argue that getting hounded on the internet or fired from a private sector job for political tweeting >
is not a "free speech issue", because they're so close to 1A litigation that they lose all concept that not all freedom of speech issues are American constitutional law.
Similarly, if someone reports that "inflation and the economy are crushing them", econ wonks >>>
Dec 8, 2023 • 38 tweets • 7 min read
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ok, quick thread on what negotiation is, and how to negotiate
any transaction (hiring, promotion, selling a new car, buying a used dog bed off of Craigslist, getting a fellow legislator to co-sponsor a bill, getting assigned to a new project at work, selling an original piece of art, etc etc) only happens if it is MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL.
a coronal mass ejection is a large bolus of plasma, electrons, and protons traveling faster than the escape velocity of the sun. They happen all the time, but the vast majority aren't aimed in the direction of Earth.
Earth has a magnetic field, and if you remember
Nov 27, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
There's something I envy about the media of the cultural victors: the NYT can spend 1/3 of its words trying to push the Revolution forward, and 2/3 of its words just IGNORING its class enemies and seeing/speaking the world from its own victorious position.
2/
1,000 words on a lesbian couple buying their first home, or 800 words on a guy who moved to a small goat farm in Vermont to make cheese in a nice college town, or an essay on a new restaurant that doesn't even ARGUE for why the biracial marriage of the two head chefs >>>
Nov 20, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
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I love threads like this.
From artists, from truck drivers, from welders, from airplane pilots.
All these crazy little details, the procedurals of "make sure your tire pressure meter is in your left thigh pocket", are so great.
I recently made a tweet about how Argentinian president elect Javier Milei looked like a BBC announcer from 1968 doing a documentary on British cheese, and one comment was along the lines of "so weirdly precise and yet so right".
There's a connection between that and this
Nov 14, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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the phrase "hard to believe things like this are happening in 2023"
reveals so much of what's wrong with the progressive mindset.
There's some teleological belief that the world gets better, that human nature gets better, just as a law of physics.
Human nature was forged in the furnace of evolution.
Perhaps it could be slightly altered through massive genetic engineering over centuries ...but it certainly doesn't change just because we've had electric lights for 150 years.
Savagery is ALWAYS an option.
Oct 27, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
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never forget that this wasn't some piece of "street activist" illegal art; this was a cynical piece of advertising commissioned by a huge wall street firm.
the piece was called "SHE" and it advertised an index fund with the ticker symbol $SHE
You're not "advocating a better world". You're advocating authoritarianism (either mandates or tax-and-spend programs) aimed at - in your own words - undoing the Industrial Revolution and putting 33M Americans who DON'T WANT TO FARM on farms
probably the absolute deepest conceptual insight is realizing that Darwinism is a fundamental law of the universe
political systems that are better at parasitizing minds outcompete those that are less good at it
firms that generate profits expand
religions that...
ideas that
2/
the current woke mind virus / religion is running roughshod over everyone and everything right now, but it's the Red Queen's Race ... the success of one meme disturbs the homeostasis of the system, meaning that old ecological niches (e.g. eGOP) collapse. New niches apply
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