Humans : Correct In Making Leap From Wealth As Currency To Wealth As Energy. But Logic Failure : Wealth

"My enemies are dehumanizing me by calling me a remorseless monster. Time to prove them wrong by dehumanizing them as a justification of cruelty towards them."

They REALLY don’t like the NPC meme. Keep pushing it! Maybe they’ll stop fucking calling us “Russian bots”.

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*medieval Ben Shapiro voice* well, technically, they aren't slaves, they're SERFS, so your argument is a fallacy,

not to put too fine a point on it but like, isutzumi was fully 100% a slave of shuro's family

Is it overconfidence, or performed enthusiasm? So much of liberal activism is based around not just the support of/opposition against the correct issues and worldviews, but also increasingly forceful displays of devotion. You win social capital for being the loudest but also risk losing it by challenging your betters.

It’s surprisingly hard to accurately parody wokeness. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an attempt that passed the ideological Turing test. Most of them focus on all the wrong things – it’s 2018, otherkin discourse has been dead for years – and miss subtleties in such a way that you can tell no one writing these things has actually interacted with Extremely Online types. Which implies that they’re not really parodying wokeness qua wokeness, but rather the version that trickles down to them via shitty right-wing outrage bait.

It's hard to look at senior politicians like McConnel or Pelosi and conclude that experienced politicians are somehow any more resistant to lobbyists than freshmen. Fundamentally Congress relies on lobbyists because the government has to interface with the private sector at some point, and certain private interests can make or break the fortunes of entire states. Even Bernie will jump when Lockheed Martin (a major employer in Vermont) tells him to. But this list is definitely a good starting place.

What sort of reforms would you suggest if you think term limits for Congress would be bad/more corrupt? I don't see how it would be any more corrupt than how things currently are. It's too late for me to think too in depth right now on it, but I feel like it would be harder for lobbyists to sink their teeth into a politician if they can only serve a maximum of X years. People that can just be voted in every single election would be more likely to be corrupt imo.

And how do you feel about term limits for the supreme court?

On the contrary, it is much easier for lobbyists to sink their teeth into new members of congress. New members of congress who want to survive have a strong need for legislative information and institutional experience; professional lobbyists have both, and are very eager to build relationships with the new lawmakers who need it. This is why there's an event attended by all new members of congress which is basically a convention led by lobbyists and business executives. Term limits do mean lobbyists have to create new relationships more often, but they're also the easiest type of relationship to make.

Grose, et. al. (2022): "Our survey reveals that lobbyists in states with term limits reported meetings [with legislators] in social settings more frequently than lobbyists in states without term limits (e.g., 79% of lobbyists in term-limits states met a legislator at a coffee shop and 65% in states with no term limits; p≤:01)."

I have a long list of ideas for reforming congress but if we're talking about addressing corruption specifically:

Ban members of congress, their spouses, and their senior staffers from owning individual stocks, instead requiring them to keep all of their money in pre-approved mutual or index funds while in office.

Restrict members of congress from accepting suspicious outside payments, like high-paid speeches at corporate events.

Lifelong ban on lobbying for former members of congress, along with public disclosures of their income in the years after leaving office. (Doing this effectively would also require expanding our definition of what counts as lobbying).

Completely overhaul our anti-revolving door policies and lobbying regulations to address ethics and corruption directly (this could be a long list in itself).

Turn the Office of Congressional Ethics into an independently-funded organization with authority over both chambers of congress. Further empower ethics committees as well.

Expand independent congressional organizations who can replace the role of lobbyists in providing policymakers with important legislative information (CBO, CRS, GAO, etc.)

Strengthen truth-in-testimony rules so that people providing testimony to congress have to disclose their institutional conflicts of interest.

Pay congressional staffers better, encourage their unionization efforts, and provide congressional offices with the resources necessary to conduct their own research.

(There is also a large and unambiguous body of evidence suggesting that paying legislators themselves better reduces corruption, but this is such an extremely unpopular idea that I don't really waste time advocating for it)

calling human rights and liberties “bourgeois liberties” doesn’t actually devalue them.

The humanities are too important to be left to the humanities majors.

without humanities you will fall for the first lie somebody tells you that punches in the gut because you never learned how those gut-punches work

"people who didn't go to university are easily fooled morons. I am not classist."

This tendency always fascinated me. There's a guy in my neighborhood with a big sign on his fence claiming that Obama passed a certain law making propaganda legal, as though Obama (or any ruler) would want to make sure his naked seizure of power was legalized prior to doing it? Such a strange mix of total paranoia combined with a childish belief in the law as inviolable.

i’ve been thinking about a bit in a recent Shaun video, where he has a short clip taken from a terf or anti-vax or wayfair truther rally, i don’t remember which (sort of the point, these groups all bleed into each other), where someone was claiming that the mRNA vaccine was a plot by transhumanists to alter people’s DNA so they wouldn’t be human anymore and thus, under the law, they would no longer have human rights.

and, like, the major takeaway here is just “oh, these people are crazy crazy,” but i can’t help but be kind of astounded at the logic regardless. like, the existence of legal rights predates the discovery of DNA. your rights as a person do not at all depend on your genome. nevermind that the casual conflation of DNA with the true essence of a living organism is a fundamental misreading of science; if you could magically remove all the DNA from someone’s body, they would still (in the brief interval before they died horribly) have human rights! no court anywhere on Earth would entertain the argument that someone’s legal status as a person is dependent on a DNA test.

and obviously there are much more salient objections to this whole line of reasoning, which is purely emotive “technology bad” nonsense rhetoric, but like… do they think that if they trick someone into standing next to a strong gamma-ray source, they have the legal right to murder them??

"Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse."

-Christopher Hitchens

Your arguments sum to "In my perfect world, there will be no Jews, no Shinto, no Hindu, no Sikhs, no nothing other than a vaguely Christian-ish 'default culture'. This to me is a positive," and you don't understand how everyone else is appalled and taking it as a negative?

Very strange that you assume "Vaguely Christian" to be a "default culture", sounds like you have some internalised Christian hegemony to deal with!

Maybe lots of people are answering "not sure" because the question seems to be written like a trick question? Most people know about the holocaust and believe in it, but couldn't tell you when it/WWII started and ended. So the question can't be answered unless you know that the holocaust started in 1939, which is probably beyond the grasp of many Americans.

A recent poll by YouGov showed that ~20% of adults under 30 in America believe that the Holocaust didn't happen. This is rather worrying (to put it mildly), so one has to wonder why. The direkt reason is probably that those people end up reading stuff by Holocaust deniers on the internat. But I suspect that is only convincing because history education generally only teaches that the Nazis murdered ~6 million Jews but doesn't teach how we know that Nazis murdered ~6 million Jews. If people have only accepted a claim based on authority, even weak arguments may convince them that it isn't true. Education about the Holocaust needs to get into the weeds of the methods historians use to establish what happens: census data shows that there are ~6 million fewer Jews in the world in 1945 than in 1933; we have reports about what was happening at the death camps by people who encountered them from many different perspectives (prisoners, guards, soldiers when they liberated the camps, Polish resistence fighters during the was - the earliest reports afaik); we have pictures and documents that conform to these reports. Refuting the arguments by Holocaust deniers is important, but that on its own will do little. People need to know the evidence for something to believe it, not just the evidence against the supposed evidence against it.

(By the way, I think it is a mistake to assume that everyone who goes down the Holocaust denial path already has an antisemitic worldview before that. Holocaust denial can be a gateway drug to antisemitism.)