http://www.oregonlive.com/marijuana/index.ssf/2017/02/trump_administration_takes_aim.html

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/23/516916688/private-prisons-back-in-mix-for-federal-inmates-as-sessions-rescinds-order

Well that's just great. Both of these news are absolutely dreadful, and there's an apparent overlap with them as well.

Revenge is not the only reaction people have to being hurt. Probably one of the lesser likely reactions.

he says, about Machiavelli

Meh. Not gonna overreact.

Sorry, don't know how to play this video :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYZe7ihTLAg

Can anyone here explain why Trump fans on the internet are obsessed with cuckolding?

I am tempted to try, but since I am not a psychiatrist it's probably better not to.

There is def a huge racial (and salacious) element to it, tho (something about protecting their Aryan women)

apparently the word is pretty popular in fraternities these days

"don't be a cuck, grab `em by the pussy"

NOT SAFE FOR ANYTHING (yeah, you're going to have to guess how the swear filter censored the URL)

First place I heard about it (2009). Don't read anything except the editors comment at the top, since the rest is just a bunch of racist schizophrenia.

Basically, I believe that in the extreme racist corners of the web, word got out that the operator of that site, which competed with a slightly different racist site, was an _actual_ cuckold IRL. From there it may have spread, with the phrase "don't be a cuck" probably soon following.

Edit: probably a fluke, since it really didn't gain currency until much later

Here's a version of the theory Google turned up:



It was probably much later than ~2009 that it became a 4chan meme, but the person who started it must have been a Stormfront transplant, who had remembered the term.

Really the term is just another expression of tribal jealousy (like the older term, "******-lover"), used by rage-filled deadbeats.

That's actually much worse than I expected. Thanks.

Turns out, gibberish is hard to translate.

because as we all know, people always practice what they preach.

Well, I thought it was funny.


Better evidence that The Prince is intended to be an insult (or a warning) is the fact that he wrote Discourses only a couple of years later; if Machiavelli was sincere, that is a remarkable shift in opinion for such a short time.

The Prince was also banned by the Catholic church for (ostensibly) its extreme cynicism of authority, particularly the kind wielded by the church against its enemies, and presenting it a wholly amoral and unchristian thing.

Also, some scholars have been calling it a satire for literally hundreds of years, so my claim isn't actually all that novel (if it's even controversial).

Upon listening to the podcast interview with Tim Wu (recommended by Eversor ITT), I've checked out Wu's 2016 book, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads.

You know those ad men, ever maligned by Jon`C? Turns out, not only was the first wildly successful (ad-supported) penny paper (the New York Herald) an outright tabloid, which printed falsified stories about new telescope discoveries of winged bat-men flying on the surface of the moon with giant dongs, as well theatrical filth about gore and sex, but the New Yorker who founded it was also a "severely cross-eyed, shameless braggart, who promoted himself as a paragon of gentility while also feeding the public's appetite for the lurid and debauched [...] a flagrant charlatan--but always a charlatan who accomplished his ends".

Oh, and he had this characterization of the editors of The Sun (the newspaper founded by Benjamin Day, the inventor of the advertiser-supported newspaper revenue model), in response The Sun's support for the abolition of slavery:



It feels strangely comforting (but saddening) to think that the for-profit news media that created President Trump, was in the very beginning spewing garbage that absolutely looks like something taken straight out of /pol.

Before I had read this passage in Wu's book, I had mostly thought that Americans had been more or less turned against one another from external forces, by a changing media and technology landscape. Uneducated (but mostly functioning, if sub-genius) people connected to a web (bringing their ideology and hearsay along for the ride, of course) which would so easily stoke existing frustrated expectations of social outcomes (which had already been made into a caricature of perfection by television), in a medium heavily biased for profit by the ad-tech men, and therefore favoring instant gratification and confrontation.

Instead, I am forced now to accept that there has evidently always been some deeply embedded current in American society (slave traders? plantation owners? cut-throat business generally?), that somehow pumps out people who are intrinsically predisposed to come out flamingly as racist ****heads spouting off conspiracy theories.

TL;DR; man, I knew from history class that racists were out there, but not that there were so many of them

I feel that on some level, Abraham Lincoln really didn't abolish slavery, because the blue coastal cities are now the slaves of the racist ****heads and leftovers of society who wield the vote, who think they are entitled to their stupid broken ideologies and hate, and deserve federal funding for it.

In other words, Idiocracy is real.

1.) People in the "blue coastal cities" are freer than the "racist ****heads". They enjoy a class and labor mobility which is not available to "racist ****heads". They are more likely well educated and possess valuable skills, which makes it easy to leave the United States permanently, if they chose to do so. They are not slaves.

2.) People in the "blue coastal cities" have an extractive relationship with "racist ****heads". The "racist ****heads" buy goods and services from "blue coastal cities". The "blue coastal cities" are not interested in a concomitant purchase of goods and services from "racist ****heads". That situation creates a powerful economic and cultural imbalance that gives the "blue coastal cities" genuine power over the "racist ****heads", regardless of how they might vote.

2a.) For example, if the "blue coastal cities" wanted to stop "racist ****heads" from getting fake, racist news, all they'd have to do is ban "racist ****heads" from social media. That hasn't happened. That probably means "blue coastal cities" don't actually consider "racist ****heads" much of a problem yet.

3.) The "racist ****heads" occupy the economic niche of slaves. A cheaper, less efficient alternative to capital investment. And like slaves, their employers are getting economically curb stomped by firms that are not addicted to cheap domestic labor.

4.) Yes, actually, they are entitled to their stupid broken ideologies and hate.

5.) If your country is so balkanized that both "blue coastal cities" and "racist ****heads" consider the waning and waxing of their political influence to be an existential threat, on par with mass slavery, that probably means you shouldn't be a country anymore. It probably means won't be for much longer, either.

6.) Calling the "racist ****heads" Nazis is one thing (because they literally are). Comparing rich white city folk to slaves, just because they didn't get their way in the last election, well, that's kinda bull****.

7.) Idiocracy is not real. People are getting smarter. Humans are still selecting their partners for intelligence, and there is a real survival advantage to being a "blue coastal cities" versus a "racist ****heads". You don't have to worry about people getting dumber, because they aren't. That still doesn't fix the problem though, because intelligence doesn't stop someone from rationalizing evil. If anything, it makes it more dangerous. The Nazis had very smart reasons for doing stupid, evil things.

Lead poisoning, maybe?

Whew boy, can we back up for a second here? When I started my last post off with the phrase "I feel that on some level", you might say that I was trying to avoid the kind of literal reading of my analogy that you just made. I'll be the first to admit that I only made it with some convoluted logic, and slavery is probably a bad choice of word, especially given the contradictory economic picture that you've painted from what might reasonably be inferred from what I wrote. I have a more nuanced justification for what I wrote, and my emphasis is rather different from the aspects of the analogy which you've responded to, but I'm not really in the mood to write it up at the moment.

As for this,



it so happens that, IMO, we're in for a real ride politically, in large part because of the Faustian bargain that the Union made by beating the slave-holding states, and letting them back into the Union (electoral college and all), despite the economic and intellectual drain out of the red rural states that would eventually come to pass, leaving behind angry people beholden to a party of conmen, with nothing to lose by holding the country hostage.

The "Faustian bargain": force the immoral actors to free the slaves, but by doing so, sow the seeds of your own "enslavement" much later, by the geo-political heirs to said immoral actors, when they kick and scream in the midst of their own economic and intellectual decay, all the while with disproportionate political influence compared to their now declining economic significance.

Of course I feel sorry for them. I don't want them to suffer. And if they are like bad children lashing out, then the blue coastal cities are full of bad parents who abandoned them until it was too late, and are much more morally culpable, because they were the ones with the intelligence to do something and did not.

Edit: major change in meaning in the final clause of my third sentence

My reading of the film 'Idiocracy' isn't based on anything about population genetics and IQ.

What is true is that intelligent, educated people don't stay in the red districts too long, or continue to buy into the trash spewed on Rush Limbaugh's radio show, so the result is the same.

I believe that almost nobody is beyond redemption. I see lots of good in now broken people, and try to see what exactly changed in the system so that they are no longer acting in the interests of a workable solution.

I think that there are precise (probably mathematical) political and institutional reasons behind the level of division we are seeing now (beyond just the historical, psychological, or maybe even vulgarly economic aspects).

None of this looks good for the immediate future. The only thing I can hope for is that President Trump isn't able to do too many bad things, and that the next president returns to the politically left roots of the Democratic Party.

Finally, in case anybody really doesn't buy into my contention that we are in some kind of generalized version of the events portrayed in the movie 'Idiocracy', look no further than the commander in chief. I mean, for Christ's sake, Mike Judge wanted to run satirical ads comparing Donald Trump to President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Drew Herbert Camacho (but they would never have seen the light of day, since Rupert Murdoch's 20th Century Fox holds the copyright, and would never have signed off on it).

And by the way (and I don't know why I feel like I need to say this), it was absolutely worth it to go to war in order to abolish slavery, even if it ultimately proves to be one of the catalysts that tears the country apart some 150 years later.

I mean it's a possible idea and worth entertaining, it's just not definite. Also didn't realize you were being funny.

BTW, when I said "the blue coastal cities are now the slaves of the racist ****heads and leftovers of society who wield the vote", I wasn't meaning to imply that all people in that voting bloc are "racist ****heads". But because of the herd mentality engendered by red state politics, and the trench-warfare, race-to-the-bottom brand of political strategy conducted by their representatives (which has territorial aims as highest priority), they are somewhat morally culpable for not purging them from their ranks. Of course doing that would have been political suicide, so they are deadlocked into acquiescence, with naught but a peep from Paul Ryan in protest of any and anything that comes down the pipeline from President Bannon.

It sounds to me like it's already been entertained for hundreds of years. And yeah what he said was a clever joke, but that doesn't feel like a concession to me. But maybe "it's not definite" is a good way to leave it, either way (if only since this is tautologically true for pretty much any written history).

Instead of a slavery metaphor, maybe a "hey, a bunch of dumbass friends persuaded me to get into a car with a drunk driver" metaphor would be better? Or perhaps a "an out of control spouse who you'd love to divorce before he runs off with your estate or commits acts of domestic violence against you, but can't find the legal recourse to do so" metaphor.

If I haven't said anything too controversial, can we get back to hating the ad-tech men (which was really meant to be the main point of my post)?

I'll just leave this amusing anecdote here.

[quote=Andrei Kolmogorov's history teacher in university (before he became a professional mathematician), on Andrei's thesis on the topic of owning of property in Novgorod in the 15th and 16th centuries]You have supplied one proof of your thesis, and in the mathematics that you study this would perhaps suffice, but we historians prefer to have at least ten proofs.[/quote]

Was it worth going to war to end slavery? (No, oh my god, calm down, he's not going to defend slavery.)

The confederate economy was turbo-****ed. Literally. It was based entirely on raw agriculture exports - mostly cash crops - zero value-add, and produced in a very inefficient, land-consuming and labor-starved way. They'd export raw cotton, and then buy back cotton shirts at ten times mark-up from a more developed trading partner. That's how all of their trade worked. It was totally unsustainable. The whole thing would have collapsed on its own within a few years.

"[Temporarily] restoring the union" is probably the only thing the civil war accomplished.

That is certainly very interesting.

For the record, I was of course simply re-affirming the obvious moral conclusion in the hypothetical that the war was in fact necessary.

You know, this post makes the Democratic Party's abandon of the left really pretty stupid / ominous, given that economic realities are once again rearing their heads.

I have Richard Rorty's book, Achieving Our Country on hold from the library, but I guess hindsight is 20/20 (even if said "hindsight" was actually something that was seen 20 years ago, if only by a minority, in 1997).

Well, yeah, the obvious moral conclusion is that it was necessary. But in practice, probably all it did was give them an excuse: "the confederacy didn't fail because we were dumb *******s, it failed because of northern agitation."

Which is, of course, where all of that southern pride, don't tread on me, klan, saluting the traitor flag bull**** comes from. Because they didn't learn nuthin.

I'm not sure how the democrats rightward swing ties into this situation specifically, but yes, like the slavery states before the Civil War, the unskilled labor states are turbo-****ed.

It's kind of a backwards situation though.

Like, the Civil War was a dad telling his crackhead son to get clean, and then the son steals a bunch of money and runs away, and the dad beats the **** out of him until he comes home.

This is like a dad putting his whole family on crack to make his crackhead son feel better about himself.

Because the Democratic Party abandoned the unions in favor of identity politics, which seems to have simultaneously let the white working class fall prey to conmen on AM radio, while multiplying by about 100 the number of excuses for being complicit with a party that builds coalitions with outright racists, by extending the logic of the civil rights movement to anybody who could attach a label to themselves and get the attention of feminist polemicists.

I am not actually sure what exactly happened with the unions between the end of the Vietnam war and the Clinton "the era of big government is over" administration, other than to mumble something about Ronald Reagan sticking it to air traffic controllers.

But then again that's probably because I've never read a book on the subject.

Oh. That. Well, Trotsky said that would happen too.

I guess the Democrats just didn't expect the unions would get driven off by passive tolerance, and toward a party that utterly despises them.