sophia-epistemia

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A Simple Model

Both of the major US political parties are really very bad, right now.

(Blogger Has Amazing Novel Insights!)

The electorally-significant Dems, having finally lived up to their destiny as the new Party of the Elite, are a pack of careerist apparatchiks incapable of any vision beyond "keep the engine of the world chugging along for another day." (Turns out, that's the kind of person you have to be in order to rise to the top of the Party of the Elite.) They are aligned with enough of the major institutional power-players of American society that they're pretty much at the mercy of those power-players. They can be counted on to provide the kind of ass-covering deceit that big bureaucratic institutions generally provide (cf. Covid guidance). The last wave of "big change ideas" that were cutting-edge in the early-to-mid 2000s - marijuana legalization, public healthcare, stimulus spending, No Really We Could Just Have Open Borders, etc. - has been thoroughly assimilated, dealt-with or not-dealt-with to varying degrees, and they're not really having any new ones.

Mostly separately from that, by a weird quirk of intellectual history, the otherwise-extremely-stodgy modern Dems managed to attach themselves to a very unpopular version of identitarian group-liberation ideology. There are arguments to be had about how much this matters in the long run, how long-lasting the effects are going to be, how likely the problem is to solve itself (and under what circumstances), etc.; but one way or another, (a) it's a political albatross, and (b) it's created a bunch of actual-factual problems on the small-to-medium scale.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have become so totally unmoored and directionless that their political program consists entirely of lashing out at things they don't like. The coalition has no center, and no integrity, save for its opposition to the elite sociocultural establishment. It is capable of embracing insane/inane "ideas" like tariff-based tax systems, border-wall-building, The Plague That's Killing A Ton of People Just Isn't Happening, etc.; it can be easily baited into gleefully embracing things as evil as police brutality and war crimes, just by presenting it with a smarmy opposition on those issues. It can toss random bones to constituent ideologies like right-libertarianism or religious social conservatism, but not advance their agendas in any overarching way. It is actively opposed to institutional competence, because competent institutional actors are assumed to be Of the Enemy, which is more important than anything else. It doesn't even try to keep most of its (insane) promises. It is increasingly dominated by naked grift, mostly directed at its own base. It is, in short, the kind of party that could nominate and then elect Donald J. Trump twice.

...either of these parties could easily, by this point, have become Totally Nonviable. This hasn't happened, mostly because both of them are coasting on their legacies, and through spinal reflex doing just enough to keep those legacies on life support. The Republicans are the traditional party of the rich and respectable, and even though they're increasingly unappealing to the country's newer middle-class cadres, they're still the party of Big Tax Cuts etc., which...stanches some of the blood flow. Meanwhile, the Democrats are the traditional party of minorities, and - although they're less and less able to depend on those minorities, as we just saw in the 2024 election - there are enough credible signals that they're Less Racist Than the Other Guys to keep the minorities more-or-less voting for the apparatchiks.

At this point, both parties are mostly selling "at least we're not the other guys." This is a very easy and low-energy thing for them. It requires no vision and relatively little competence; it plays on partisan hate and fear, which are more reliable and easier-to-stoke than hope or inspiration, in an environment suitable to them.

They will both continue selling that thing, rather than anything else, until forced to change. Which is to say, until one of them actually becomes Totally Nonviable and has to spend some time in the wilderness becoming a genuinely different kind of party. (Or, hypothetically, until one of them actually gets replaced by an outside institution. Good luck.)

Which is to say, we are going to be in this nightmarish stalemate until one of the parties breaks the other one over its knee, in the world's most depressing geriatric cage fight. This is actually even more important than it sounds, because the political situation is yoked to the sociocultural situation. We're going to be stuck in some version of this dumbass culture war until there is an ideological power capable of uniting the warring tribes, a power that is stronger than their toxoplasmic hostility to one another; that power could imaginably be a sui generis religious movement or something, but it's much more likely to be some kind of all-encompassing We're Actually Good political thing, a new Reaganism or War Rooseveltism or whatever.

I would strongly prefer for the Democrats to win that fight. I would strongly prefer to be ruled by the bleak sclerotic establishment, during the period when the opposition is getting its shit together and coming back to force a New Better Binary, rather than by a gang of nihilistic hucksters likely to dismantle random parts of the system and to make essentially-random diplomatic gestures to volatile dangerous foreign powers.

Until recently, I would have said that the Democrats were going to win that fight, in the sense that the contemporary Republicans literally couldn't. I thought that nihilistic hucksterism would always provoke enough horror, when given the power to do anything, that the bleak sclerotic establishment would have room to push its way back. Maybe that's still the case. But, like so many people, I've become more pessimistic.

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Everyone in my family knows I love plants and my house is packed with planters so they keep gifting me plants and it's a disaster because I cannot keep a plant alive more than 10 minutes every plant I paid to have is plastic but I keep receiving living plants the fuck do I DO with these poor babies I am NOT A RESPONSIBLE PLANT FATHER

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many things which are dangerous for the average person are in fact perfectly safe for the person who's read even one (1) instruction sheet

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ehh you could make a group with other people who like to shriek at the same things you like to shriek at

if you do it enough, that might make a group shrieking back at you

and then those groups, combined, might make enough noise as to attract more and more people who like to shriek

I think part of living in an open society is that the more out of line you are in telling someone what they are or aren't allowed to do, the nastier you're going to get when they realize they don't have to listen to you. You can't call the police or file a lawsuit for something the law won't back you up on, and threatening to stop being friends with someone and ostracizing them doesn't work when you're so personally repellent and controlling that no one would want to be friends with you.

So instead the only response left available is shrieking. Which also isn't illegal, so no one is going to stop you. they're just not going to be friends with you

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puberty blockers for gender dysphoria are a shitty compromise and always have been. puberty blockers have one (1) Correct usage and it's as a gender-affirming treatment for people whose gender is "child" and want to keep it until the normative time to undergo puberty so as to transition to an "m/f/other" gender.

the Correct treatment for gender dysphoric teens is full hrt, with target hormones levels of within the distribution of cis teens levels.

The fact that leagues of smart and rational trans adults who are informed about the evidence base for puberty blockers wish they could’ve taken them in their youth seems to me pretty darn conclusive evidence that the balance of risk and benefit is favourable.

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oh, yeah. I've been on both sides of this, in multiple permutations of gender and orientation, and every time it was Fun! admittedly it's a bit mortifying for the top, but eh, cumming in 12s often means the subsequent refractory period is short and they can go again quickly.

one time with a then-fwb I came after three pumps because it had been so long and I was a little embarrassed and started apologising but she was like “why are you apologising, I like when you cum inside me”

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like so?

it's better to be hot but vapid than useful but normal-looking, but the ideal is to be hot, talented, and entirely without use

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gods, i don't remember ever reading a guyblog mentioning "i want to die in a war", bc i don't remember replying "right, do go sign up to die in the latest organized mass murder-suicide. if you do, you're an evil moron, and if you don't, you're a lying coward.".

not sure if you know internet-sentences off of here, but it looks like her blog was deleted. hope things are ok

and we all know that well wishes from maladjusted internet men are the most helpful to receive

yea u_u may she be blessed by the spirits of the poasting world & may providence look with favor upon her

in the general case, well wishes from maladjusted internet men can be helpful. 'maladjusted men' is redundant - men are like spawning salmon. have you ever noticed how many men are red like alex jones? alex jones has the salmon-nature, or puts on the salmon-nature, but it isn't well-adjusted. it's constant rage to swim upstream to fuck and die. have you ever noticed how guybloggers talk about wanting to die in a war? so 'maladjusted internet men' reduces to 'men who are adept at communications technologies'

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Hilarious marketing choice tbh.

If a fictional hyper capitalist parody of Amazon had this on their packages I'd say the messaging was a little too on the nose to be real.

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argumate. we have a standard procedure for this. i know it's been so long that even joking about joking about it is a joke so tired it died twice, but

read the sequences, lol

vampirebicth said: gods are real. all of them. they have an impact on the world around them - they change laws, inspire cruelty and charity, comfort people and cast them out. real communities are built around them, some of the last still sticking around. people devote their whole lives to them, make art for them, pray to them before they do anything else to fix things. just because we made them doesn’t mean that they’re not real.

yes and Marvel characters are also this real, although hopefully have inspired fewer murders (so far).

obviously fictional characters, literary devices, and even mathematical abstractions are “real” in the sense that they are instantiated in the minds of human beings and encoded in speech acts and books and movies without being real in the sense of being agents that actually exist and act in the world outside of people thinking about them.

the mosquito that sucks my blood exists and does things even when I’m not observing it, but Dracula only exists in our thoughts and words.

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funny, mine did that too

... unrelatedly i have an idea for our next date 😁

funny thing is the less you like churches the more churches you’d prefer to have, as it’s a lot harder for ten competing churches to burn people than one.

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“My client,” Findley replied, “is quite shocked you offered him nothing for working 80.4 hours of free overtime.” It took several more letters, and inching concessions from Ashurst over two months, for Woolworths to pay the full overtime entitlement of about $8000. They denied this was an admission of wrongdoing.

Findley is relentless and Woolworths is not the first big company he has taken on. In a recent case involving security company MSS, the Federal Court stayed his claim on the basis it was “an abuse of process” and noted he had used inflammatory language and had apologised after “improperly” accusing members of the Fair Work Commission of corruption.

With Woolworths, ultimately, his work won big for his client, and helped bring to the surface what could be one of Australia’s biggest underpayments.

“They delayed everything and threatened me,” Findley said. “It’s been an awful experience, but I’ve been lucky because my client, my friend, has no fear.”

come on man somebody needs to face jail time for this, you don’t accidentally underpay people when you’re a fifty billion dollar company and you can afford to hire lawyers to threaten the people complaining about underpayment, this is theft pure and simple, the executives need to be marched out by store security exactly how they would treat a fucking shoplifter.

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it shits me up the wall because we apply the thumbscrews and squeeze wages down to subsistence levels and then we’re like huh that’s weird now that nobody has any discretionary spending capacity the economy is grinding to a halt due to lack of demand, I wonder how we could fix this utterly inexplicable conundrum

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Having dug out the Unfinished Tales to reference a conversation Tolkien wrote between Gandalf and Pippin (but didn’t publish) I thought I’d share it. Gandalf is talking to Pippin about the history of Thorin’s company, hobbits and why he chose Bilbo.

This is evidence for the grand statement I just made about how Bilbo was intended to be a catalyst that changed his society, and that hobbit society was indeed significantly different after his journey, with large social changes occurring between The Hobbit and Fellowship. But it’s also a very funny passage to me so here it is:

‘And then there was the Shire-folk. I began to have a warm place in my heart for them in the Long Winter, which none of you can remember.

They were very hard put to it then: one of the worst pinches they have been in, dying of cold, and starving in the dreadful dearth that followed. But that was the time to see their courage, and their pity one for another. It was by their pity as much as by their tough uncomplaining courage that they survived. I wanted them still to survive.

(😭😭😭😭. Also the theme of having pity for each other is what redeems both Bilbo and Frodo re: Gollum.)

But I saw that the Westlands were in for another very bad time again, sooner or later, though of quite a different sort: pitiless war.

(This is possibly one reason why this passage didn’t make it to publication - Gandalf shouldn’t have had this much foreknowledge of the upcoming war of the ring.)

To come through that I thought they would need something more than they now had. It is not easy to say what. Well, they would want to know a bit more, understand a bit clearer what it was all about, and where they stood.

(It’s also explaining that Bilbo’s role in Thorin’s company was predetermined both by a more omnipotent Gandalf and by Fate; that Gandalf selected Bilbo to be a social catalyst, to return and provoke hobbit society into a more adaptable, resilient state; therefore increasing their chances of surviving.)

They had begun to forget: forget their own beginnings and legends, forget what little they had known about the greatness of the world. It was not yet gone, but it was getting buried: the memory of the high and the perilous. But you cannot teach that sort of thing to a whole people quickly. There was not time.

(Thus Bilbo was supposed to be changed, and return changed by his journey, to teach his people.)

And anyway you must begin at some point, with some one person. I dare say he was “chosen” and I was only chosen to choose him; but I picked out Bilbo.’

‘Now that is just what I want to know,’ said Peregrin. ‘Why did you do that?’

‘How would you select any one Hobbit for such a purpose?’ said Gandalf. ‘I had not time to sort them all out;

(He is SO funny)

but I knew the Shire very well by that time, although when I met Thorin I had been away for more than twenty years on less pleasant business. So naturally thinking over the Hobbits that I knew, I said to myself: “I want a dash of the Took” (but not too much, Master Peregrin)

(This is brilliant we are always BODYING pippin constantly. NOT TOO MUCH TOOK 👀. We were ROBBED not having this in canon )

“and I want a good foundation of the stolider sort, a Baggins perhaps.” That pointed at once to Bilbo.

(Eugenics! Observing them like laboratory mouse lines! Call him a Charles River BILB/o the way you’re genotyping these poor little bastards for your purposes)

And I had known him once very well, almost up to his coming of age, better than he knew me.

(??? Hiding in the bushes spying or…?)

I liked him then. And now I found that he was “unattached” – to jump on again, for of course I did not know all this until I went back to the Shire. I learned that he had never married. I thought that odd, though I guessed why it was; and the reason that I guessed was not the one that most of the Hobbits gave me: that he had early been left very well off and his own master.

(Was it cos he’s gay as fuck, Gandalf)

No, I guessed that he wanted to remain “unattached” for some reason deep down which he did not understand himself – or would not acknowledge, for it alarmed him.

(I 100% now and for always love a narrator in a constant state of Just Fucking Lies To Everyone All The Time, Giving Us Nothing, Acknowledging Nothing Including Himself. NOPE NOT PROCESSING ANYTHING TODAY THANKS. WE’RE CLOSED. COME BACK TOMORROW. just A Massive Liar about everything and for what!!! Bilbo Baggins my beloved you were born wrong.)

He wanted, all the same, to be free to go when the chance came, or he had made up his courage. I remembered how he used to pester me with questions when he was a youngster about the Hobbits that had occasionally “gone off ”, as they said in the Shire. There were at least two of his uncles on the Took side that had done so.’

You can see why I love this! And I can see why Tolkien didn’t include it, too. Still very fun passage and near enough to canon to be used if you ever want to.

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#you can't go wrong with Oscar

if you're transgender and need name ideas, may I direct you toward the nato alphabet because like. delta? november?? echo?? romeo is like the butchest name. please consider foxtrot. being named whiskey would be cool as hell. I know multiple transmascs who were a bit too into english lit and are named victor now. I've met people named sierra who were trans in every direction. maybe don't name yourself golf