Or maybe we're the dumpster fire of the trash taken out in the aftermath of the destruction of European society (called world wars I & II).

Hey what'd ya know:



http://time.com/4627056/dumpster-fire-2016-word-of-the-year/

Our obsession with individualism is certainly a contributor to why most of the human environment is dominated by cars with one person in them. We are single handedly responsible for the phenomena of parking lots, and for that, we must suffer.

That's very interesting. (And I would add that much like cars, dumpster files also contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.)

Physicists have a concept of boundary conditions, in which an equation may be solved if enough parameters are supplied. Perhaps it is the geographic boundary conditions of the American continent (i.e., sparse and vast) that amplified the English individualism provided to the system as an input. So that in a sense we were doomed from the start by some master equation. And then all the truckers, in those long stretches of highway, had Rush Limbaugh to shout at them as they drove along, once the fairness doctrine was annihilated.

Yeah but only in the context of fossil fuels and the ICE did it get so ugly. Beforehand we had railways with villains with private trains.

I recall listening to Rush Limbaugh in 2008, in which he ranted about how it was actually water vapor, not the exhaust coming out of the tailpipes of his listener's vehicles, that were actually responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas composition in the atmosphere.

It was very clever for a father figure like Rush to tell his conservative children that they needn't be embarrassed after all that it could possibly have been them emitting offensive gas.

I remember hearing Limbaugh on the radio all of the time when I was a small child, before I started going to school, when I would accompany my mother on errands. No wonder I'm so nuts

If individualism is a factor, it's nevertheless insignificant compared to the well understood efforts of car, oil, tire companies, and housing developers, to make modern American society as car centric (and therefore profitable) as possible.

By preying on our desire for individuality and distilling it using advertising, yes.

By destroying choice.

So is this where we go back to Spook saying that consciousness was a mistake of evolution?

I DIDNT SAY IT IT WAS THAT LONG **** FROM TEXAS WHO TALKS IN THE BACK OF HIS THROAT

but yes successful marketing destroys choice

No, I mean things like:

redlining, steering, and blockbusting;
the interstate system and predecessor highway funding bills, which were intentional subsidies for car companies against which mass transit companies couldn't compete;
governments intentionally defunding urban infrastructure and causing "urban decay";
municipalities preferentially zoning for low-density and high-density residential, at the expense of medium-density residential, commercial, and industrial, in order to maximize property taxes and developer profits;
landowners blocking new development in order to drive up existing property values;


This isn't marketing. It's the literal destruction of choice; not the perception of choice, but the elimination of the very possibility of choosing a different lifestyle for the vast majority of people.

Here's the anecdotal part: I used to live in a walkable, medium-density neighborhood, and commute by mass transit to my job in a major American city. That lifestyle cost me $3500 a month in rent. That's not a credible option for basically anybody. It might as well not even exist at all, for how rare and expensive it is.

That's great. I was talking about the narratives that drove people to think they wanted all of that.

That's great. My point is that whether narratives drove people to want it is irrelevant, because there were never any alternatives.

That's very nice Jon.

Anyway Jones, this video gives a great overview of how people are able to overlook the sinful nature of parking lots by focusing on their illusory individuality and personal relationship to god. If they could focus on broader scales of ecology they would see that parking lots are cancerous lesions on the face of creation, but they cannot because of propaganda. For example, in the film, Larry is focused on his own suffering, rather than all of the many parking lots he encounters. This is, I believe, the core thesis of this film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzKzPd4lhQM

I flippin` love that film. I find the interactions between Sy and Larry hilarious.

Not so sure about this parking lot thesis of yours, but I do find the movie itself rather mysterious.

Edit: fixed the link

Well, admittedly it's not as aesthetic a choice as Film Studies 101-does-nihilism, but at least in my ending the soft palate and low calibre pistol don't belong to me.

Thank you for the kind words!

Getting back to the subject at hand (i.e. how Trump is destroying America, rather than how God is dead and sapience is a mistake)

It's official, Trump is killing the entrepreneur visa. It never actually took effect, thankfully, and I'd have a hard time imagining anybody taking the chance on it (legally the "visa" would have meant being out of status, i.e. an illegal immigrant, but one the DHS knew about and promised not to deport.... ?) but it's still an interesting and important bit of follow-through on his early promises to crack down on high skilled immigrants.

Steve Bannon was once quoted as saying there were too many immigrant CEOs (specifically Chinese ones) so this isn't much of a surprise.

IS THIS MAN BOTHERING YOU?

They've created a car-centric society by ensuring it is the most practical, and sometimes practically the only way to get around. You cited individualism and marketing as the reasons for said car-centric society, when in fact it's resulted from a concerted effort to leave people with little choice. The marketing has evolved around that.

Also the marketing around capitalism itself, which maintains the fiction that companies profit most by increasing consumer choice, rather than by reducing it.

Collective responsibility is a very convenient explanation for those who profited the most from urban sprawl.

Generally people underestimate the degree to which society was engineered.

Another example of this is how car companies pushed through jaywalking and traffic control laws. Originally pedestrians had right of way everywhere, but modern road law (written by car companies) prioritizes automobile throughput above all other factors, especially pedestrian safety and throughput.

These efforts made most American communities unwalkable practically overnight -- and it was all done on purpose, in order to make car ownership more attractive than walking. And American people had exactly zero say over it.

Case in point: god-damned evolutionists such as yourself.

So basically car companies are to road traffic as advertising companies are to ad traffic: push people through it at their own risk physically or psychologically, and without their consent.

...and in both cases Americans were subject to forces that would make them both fat and angry through a sedentary and frustrated existence.

Anybody know the qualifications for white house press office intern?



Does I need a geography background?

Will you come and live in my experimental resilience city that will have no cars? Theres' a town plot south of here on a rail spur I'm hoping to buy and develop into some sort of communal ****post factory.

EDIT:There will also be mandatory rock moving each day to keep people active

That sounds like a pretty low population density center. I like the idea of living near places where there are lots and lots of choices when it comes to things like doctors and also women to meet. If I were married I would consider buying property in such a place though. But probably not in your town (mathematically speaking).

Eversor, the interpretation you gave of Oedipus Rex was definitely the right one, I was doing some research and came to that conclusion. I had heard some interpretations from knowledgeable people, and I read their reading of the Oedipus story into Oedipus Rex, but it turns out much of the important story is in Oedipus in Colonus, which is where he learns to both accept his fate, but he finds out he also has agency within his fate (he chooses the fate of his sons) which is why I was confused.

I am aware that geologists push boulders over edges of cliffs for fun, but this sounds like back breaking work. Unless you were talking about smaller rocks.

Well yes all of the women will probably be my wives and i will be the only doctor there so that makes it not a good move for you. However, the idea is to not die a terrible death in the city during The Collapse™ but to die a terrible death instead in an entire town cosplaying as Nightvale.

And no I'm talking big sisyphean boulders. Not really, it will be picking rock just like you pick rock on any farm.

Thanks. I appreciate the correction.

Oedipus at Colonus is even hazier in my mind than Oedipus Tyrannos, but I'll take your word for it. I think that's right, though, that perhaps Oedipus at Colonus more explicitly expresses some of the theological ideas that underpin Sophocles' worldview -- especially the ideas that there is a necessity that governs the fates of individuals, that that necessity is insurmountable and human beings have no power to change it because the very definition of necessity in this case is that it is what cannot be otherwise, and that that necessity is the will of the gods (especially Zeus).

I think that Sophocles' view on necessity isn't too distant from the Stoic view which is expressed in a metaphor that compares how humans relate to fate to a dog being dragged by a cart. The cart is going to move forward, and the dog can resist it, or he can accept it and move with it, but either way, it's going to pull him forward.

Sophocles was of the view that fate operates in a similar way. No matter what a person does or wants, fate will govern their lives. Therefore, the best that humans can do is be aware of it, recognize the power that fate has over human life and the limited ability of human beings to change it, and accept it. But the worst thing to do is try to resist it, because it's impossible, and ultimately leads to the ruin of those who are impudent enough to resist (or disquietude and perturbation, in the case of the Stoics).

In that schema, impiety is defined as the failure of an individual to recognize how fate operates in his/her own life. It is an insult to the gods to fail to recognize the specific fate that one has been allotted, and to know that is just what self-knowledge is: to know one's fate is to know oneself. Thus, self-knowledge (which takes the form of a virtue, sophrosune) and fate are closely related, and the absence of self-knowledge is a vice.

(Sorry if I'm being obnoxious by writing all this out. It's been a while since I've had to think about it and it's a pleasure to be able to do so again.)

Leaning in hard on that One China policy. lol

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/341163-trump-says-no-sanctions-talk-with-putin-after-tillerson-said-they-did

Now what I really like about these two is they remind me of my and friends trying to get away with something in junior high after we have been caught and we hadn't yet learned how to keep stories straight.

That's not a contradiction, it's an alternative narrative.

When doesn't Tillerson contradict Trump?

I can't think of a single big thing that's come up since the Trump presidency began where Tillerson and Trump have been on the same page.

So now that I've stopped consuming Google News in the wake of the disastrous, mobile-oriented site redesign, I've had a chance to check out techmeme.com and memeorandum.com as alternatives. What's cool is that on techmeme.com the top story right now is something from a nice little blog which I hadn't seen before, and looks like the kind of thing that should show up on a news site that isn't just propagating CNN and Fox clickbait.

Anyway, the story is that apparently Trump is talking about some kind of "joint" cybersecurity task force between the United States and Russia / Kaspersky Labs. This sounds pretty terrible, and the blog post notes that Congress has already been trying to keep Kaspersky out of federal networks. There is also the interesting bit in that Kaspersky apparently is one of the few (only?) security firm that discloses malware being released by the United States.

Lucky for them that's what I like