2024-11-07 at

Ordinary Americanism

From many comments.

1. Everyone knows a friend like this! Some of us know a few 😎

There are only two things, ordinary men and women want. 

i. Money, in their pockets.
ii. God, in their hearts.

Once they have it, their attention is caught, and their brains are able to ignore a great number, in fact nearly any other perils. Everything else burns.

Now if you're a politician, a party leader, or a strategist, in a theistic country, and you don't grasp this, then you deserve to lose.

These are facts embedded in structure. These are falsifiable hypotheses.

This week, American voted against Exceptionalism. Ordinary people want ordinary things.

What the Dems did poorly : they fielded a poor speaker, who did not have a detailed ground communications strategy to engage uneducated people. The other guy just had to yell economy, economy, heresy, and he got the vote. :)

2. Both Harris and Clinton didn't lose because they're women. They lost because they're prudes.

Not going to comment on this in the feminist Facebook groups, because it'll just get dogpiled by irrelevant points :

Look, Harris is a smart person, but she's far from the ideal politician. She can't communicate, and communication is control, and control is politics. The Dems can now go scour the ranks and forage in the fields to find an orator of any gender who can hold a candle to Obama's verbal legacy, and then they'll have a campaign. But who knows, maybe the GOP won't have any charismatic candidates in 2028, so the Dems won't need one either.

3. Social media being the vector of mass deception? Don't blame the environment. Blame professional politicians and strategists who did not adapt to the environment competitively.

Twice they fielded a prude who was incomprehensible to people looking for god or money. Twice a majority voted for a maniac over a prude because they understood the maniac better.

There is great irony in this, and in the quantity of people paid to do a job who sucked at it.

A Trending Trite Complaint

I need to turn a complaint on its head, for a bit. You know how it's increasingly trendy to publicly discuss how contemporary AI models do not properly reason about the world? If this seems like a problem, I have some news for you about most of the people walking about, in your homes, and at your offices.

If you sit any one of them down and down for a few days and do a thoroughly rigorous analysis of what they understand about the world ... you will find that much of it will not be reasoned, and much of what is reasoned will not be proper. Much of what people think about on a daily basis is based on what they have decided to ACCEPT from society. Reasoning is generally based on these foundations. It is a rare privilege to meet a human being who does not take for granted the value of their own existence and experience.

This is after all, what has been left to the departments of philosophy and literature after sundry quantification was yanked out and named as the natural and social sciences. To converse with a mind, and unravel it to identify its base components and nature.

Well, now I suppose, we get to do it with bots. Yay, finally. And they will soon do it back with us. Some already do, to a limited degree.

2024-11-06 at

At What Point is Morality Unhealthy?

Aphorism : the line where morality becomes unhealthy, is where it starts to make you feel uncomfortable ( about yourself, or about someone else ).