polymerize-finale

@Ross Scottyou have said previously that you're not going to ask people for money for this campaign, unless you have some specific purpose you want to achieve (like a lawsuit which you think might succeed). While I support that in general, I have to ask: could you use money? Obviously all of us could use some more money, but I mean: are there any specific things you would like to do, which you believe would be impactful for this campaign, and which you could do if you had some specific amount of money? For example, maybe you know someone who would be a good part-time assistant, and you could hire them for $10,000. Or maybe there's some specific software tool that would be really useful for running the campaign, but the account/license would cost $1000/yr, or something along those lines. I ask because I know people who are rich, generous, and like video games. In my experience, they tend to be much more attracted to donating to concrete objectives that they can see the value of ("Buy Ross a Salesforce Marketing Cloud subscription*") than to vague future possibilities ("Help support Ross's campaign"). Thus, if you have a wishlist, I'd be interested to hear it. Feel free to message me privately about this if you like. IF YOU ARE NOT ROSS feel free to brainstorm ideas. Perhaps Ross has not thought of something. I would advise brainstormers to consider primarily things where the solution is money, not time and effort (mostly). For example, I suggested that if Ross *ALREADY KNEW* someone who would be available and effective as a part-time assistant, then this would be a good use of money. But stopping other work in order to search for, vet, and hire such an assistant could easily be a inefficient distraction. *I am not in any way suggesting that Salesforce Marketing Cloud is something that Ross ought to consider using. I have no experience with it. I just tried to think "What's an expensive software product that someone might use in connection with a publicity campaign?"

EFF did actually reply to Ross (source: haruspicy), so that's not necessary. Unfortunately, the liver wasn't clear enough for me to tell if anything useful came of it. Maybe @Ross Scottcould clarify?

Oh for christ's sake.... We say f(x) = O(g(x)) if there exists constants C and x0 such that |f(x)| <= C*g(x) for all x > x0. Let f(x) = O(M) where M is a constant and M > 1. Then |f(x)| <= C*M for x > x0. Then f(x) = O(1) because there exists a constant D such that |f(x)| <= D for all x > x0, namely C*M. Let f(x) = O(1). Then |f(x)| <= C for all x > x0. If M > 1, C < C*M, so |f(x)| <= C*M for all x > x0, so f(x) = O(M). Therefore, f(x) = O(M) if and only if f(x) = O(1). Now that I've supplied a LITERAL FUCKING MATHEMATICAL PROOF of this, can we please get back to discussing linux gaming?

Except that Trump was very much not part of the Republican Party machine. He was a Democrat until relatively recently. He came in as an outsider and took the nomination in part due to having a pitch which distinguished him from the rest of the field. And part of that was the theory that his policies, being substantially different from standard-issue GOP fare, would actually move the needle for the working/middle class. And of course there was substantial opposition to Trump from more conventional GOP circles, which provided additional confirmation for Trump supporters. It's entirely fair to believe this isn't true, that it really was the same old GOP with a hip new Trump style. However, it feels to me like you just didn't notice this. Like if one didn't know much about the details of politics, the default assumption would be that this was a change of direction. There are plenty of reasons to doubt this (I doubt it myself to some degree). But it's asinine to suggest that there was a shift from euphemistic hostility to the middle class to explicit hostility to the middle class in the same way there was a shift from euphemistic to explicit hostility to Mexicans. If MAGA is hostile to the middle class, it's clearly euphemistically hostile. My complaint wasn't that you didn't take them at their word. You shouldn't take any politician at their word. My complaint was that you appeared to have no idea what their word was, and you confidently assumed it was something wildly different (or even diametrically opposed) from what it actually is. When you're this badly wrong about a subject, I think it's good to recognize that you maybe don't know it as well as you think. This is partly because it's difficult to reconstruct your reasoning around all the things you currently believe, and to what extent those beliefs are supported by other beliefs which were wildly wrong. So it's better to step back and take a more humble view of how much you actually know. Which is totally fine, you don't need to know everything. I don't myself. This is kind of a confused point. If you lower taxes, you have to lower spending (or make more debt, but let's pretend you won't so this doesn't become more complicated than it has to). So what do we cut? Well we probably want to cut funding from things which are controlled by enemy constituencies, and not from things controlled by us. So if one of our big constituencies is white working-class people, we probably prefer to cut funding for HUD than USMC, otherwise we expect a backlash. This is just basic political calculus. It doesn't require that we have any principles at all, just a desire to win future elections. From the perspective of the political donor class, lower taxes affect me directly in a way that cutting funding for almost any government program does not (like unless I'm Raytheon exec or something). So unless I have specific beliefs about the value of certain government programs, I don't really care about what you cut funding for, I just want you to cut my taxes and then cut spending in some way you can get away with politically so you can keep cutting my taxes. In other words, from the point of view of my actual direct interests, cutting social programs wasn't the point, cutting taxes was the point. Cutting social programs was just the means. On the other hand, it's also true that lots of people on the right have beliefs about the inherent desirability of cutting taxes for the rich (if they don't have capital, they can't invest it to create good jobs and improve society), and the inherent undesirability of social programs (the more you subsidize not working the less people will work, and people working makes stuff for society). But these are more the sorts of things you'd hear from a right-wing intellectual (like Tom Sowell), not a working politician. For politicians, the Machiavellian considerations dominate the principled considerations of the intellectuals. That's definitely part of it. However, there's another consideration which is also relevant to abortion: Both were effectively decided by the Supreme Court, not the Federal Legislature. Which is not how SCOTUS is supposed to work. SCOTUS cannot legislate; that's what the Legislature is for. This is obviously much more valid in the case of abortion & Roe; in Obergefell SCOTUS simply ruled that DOMA was unconstitutional, rather than implementing a federal standard for gay marriage. So opponents are left to argue that it was a bad decision (arguable) or that it was somehow analogically the equivalent of legislation from the bench (much less arguable). The thing you have to keep in mind is that states' rights is the default. Where the federal legislature is silent and appellate courts have not screwed the pooch, states just get to make laws. So if you oppose some SCOTUS decision you necessarily think the point should be resolved by the states, because that's who would resolve it if SCOTUS had not foreclosed this possibility. If you think some federal law should be overturned, the result would be the decision on that point devolving to the states. My broader point is that just because there are political tactics and political objectives and unprincipled politicians trying to implement them doesn't mean that there are zero principles involved, or that those principles have zero impact on what happens. You may recall that this thread began on the subject of "Understanding the GOP." I don't think you're going to get there by just looking at political actions. Hence my original point that if you want any kind of understanding of the right, you should read their intellectuals, not the tea leaves of their political activity.

Follow-up: The 9th Circuit ruling basically upholds the reasoning of the trial court in its entirety. There's nothing in it which would suggest anything potentially unpleasant for gamers or modders. For some reason I've seen a lot of suggestion that the case was something of a double-edged sword for modders, which doesn't really make any sense to me. The only thing I can think is that since neither the trial court nor the 9th Circuit explicitly said categorically that mods were 100% not derivative works, it means that maybe they are, and so maybe modders are at risk. Which again, doesn't make sense. Both decisions were as 100% pro-modder as you could ever expect to see from a court. I may look into some of these articles in future though.

On the one hand, kerdios should have said `O(50M) = O(1)`, but also both of you are being needlessly pedantic. The expression `O(N)` is typically read as "On the order of N." When used in the context of ordinary language, this means "about N" or "approximately N". Of course it means something much more specific in mathematics, but who thought I was doing math? I'm not seeing a lot of hands.

@kerdios and @Shaddy both suggest that "discussion is impossible" with MAGA supporters, which I think implies more of lack of perspective than anything else. Like it's pretty standard for discussion on highly partisan topics across the partisan divide to be extremely unproductive. This is just a normal feature of political divisions. Also, it takes two to have the impossibility of discussion; it's not that _one_ cannot have a discussion with MAGA people, but rather that _you_ cannot have a discussion with them, at least when it comes to highly partisan topics. You'll find they have discussions with one another about those topics just fine. In other words, they're not special people immune to discussion, but that the relationship between them and you (namely that of political opposition) makes discussion ineffective. If you were to lurk forums on which MAGA people congregated you would find plenty of them lamenting that people like you were immune to reason when it comes to beliefs which were politically important to them. Also, @Shaddy mentions: It's that last point which makes me go all "wait, what?" I agree that the MAGA-tide has been accompanied with more explicit calls for keeping the Mexicans out or greater scrutiny of Muslims (I don't recall a registry specifically, but it sounds plausible), but are you really suggesting that "obliterate the middle class" has been an explicit policy position of any MAGA-aligned politician or other leader ever? Let alone a sufficiently common policy position that it bears mentioning alongside the other two? I don't pretend to have an encyclopedic knowledge of MAGA policy and propaganda, but my experience suggests that at least explicitly they are in favor of strengthening and increasing the middle class. In other words, this is the same old disagreement about the best means of achieving a shared goal that we've always had. When Trump would talk about improving our trade position with China, or enthusiastically announce the creation of more jobs, he was clearly playing to an audience for whom the health of the middle class was important. What this actually suggests to me is someone who is not really primarily seeing the world as it is, but filtering it too much through their own biases. It's common to believe that the 3 aforementioned positions are "really" about the 3 latter goals. I'm not suggesting that there's no basis for believing this subterfuge. But rather, to have brought up "obliterate the middle class" makes it seem like the writer is not paying attention to actual MAGA positions as his starting point. Instead, being aware that MAGA are now explicitly supporting what he previously took to be the secret agenda of the right, he just completes the pattern. Look, I understand that accurately following the policy positions of your political opponents is an unpleasant task at best (hell, following the policy of your preferred politicians is still way less fun than playing video games). I'm not suggesting that you should make an effort to have accurate and well-informed beliefs about what is and is not the MAGA line. But if you don't care enough to get it right, maybe just recognize this rather than assuming you can intuit what their positions would be, since you're demonstrably making major errors trying to do this.

Just an addendum: I briefly reviewed Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions" and "The Vision of the Anointed." For the purposes of forming an understanding of the GOP as they see themselves, I would definitely recommend "Conflict" rather than "Anointed". "Conflict" is much more concerned with identifying and contrasting the worldviews of "us versus them", so it's much more valuable in understanding the GOP's self-image. "Anointed" by contrast, is a lot more concerned with "Here are ways that the other side's vision/worldview causes them to make mistakes" and actual discussion of how that worldview works is more limited.

I made this series of posts to quickly get around the you-must-post-10-times-before-serious-discussion rule. I'm confident my subsequent post was sufficiently not-a-low-effort-troll that mods won't ban me for getting cute, but it's your forum after all.

So I think it should be obvious to everyone that OP doesn't really understand the GOP or the right. Often when people say "here's what's really going on with the GOP" or some other entity, they're not really trying to understand the subject. They're trying to refine their criticism of the subject. They're engaging in politics, not actual inquiry. I'm going to assume that the OP is ultimately seeking understanding (even if in his confusion he's going about it in a politics-laden way), if only because if he's seeking politics, that's boring. To begin with, if you think you've come up with One Weird Trick to understand some person or group, you've already failed. The first rule of psychology is nobody ever does anything for just one simple and easy-to-explain reason. People do things for lots of different reasons at the same time. These can be complicated, and they can even contradict one another. Any explanatory theory will always be a piece of the puzzle, not the whole thing. If you want to understand the GOP, you should begin by asking yourself: how do they understand themselves? What sorts of outcomes do they believe they are seeking? What sorts of values do they explicitly hold? In trying to answer this question, in my opinion you should seek out the opinions of a relatively small number of relatively high-quality thinkers, ideally those who are in the business of serious thinking rather than mass-market propaganda (or at least not JUST mass-market propaganda). Unfortunately, the only really good example I can think to recommend offhand is Thomas Sowell (although if you try you can probably find others in the same clade). I can recommend his book "Knowledge and Decisions" just in general. He also has two books on the whole how-left-vs-right-thinks (although they both cover a lot of the same ground), "A Conflict of Visions" and "The Vision of the Anointed." I don't think they're as high-quality as "Knowledge and Decisions", but insofar as the whole point of the exercise is to examine the GOP from the GOP's perspective, at least one of "Conflict" and "Anointed" would be worth reading. Probably "Anointed" since it's the later one. Helpfully all 3 are available via LibGen, although you could also probably buy them too. Now you probably think that there are some differences between how the GOP understand themselves and how they actually act (although this obviously isn't limited to them), and some patterns of consistent self-blindness on these points. I agree, but you won't really understand them unless you start out by asking yourself how these appear from the perspective of the GOP themselves. I'm not suggesting you actually adopt their perspective, just that unless you make a real effort to look at things from their perspective you aren't really doing understanding. If you look at what's involved in actually doing understanding and decide it's not worth the trouble, I understand completely. Just be aware of what you're actually doing. Another possible source of real understanding would be Johnathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind", which is often recommended on the how-left-vs-right-thinks question. I can't really recommend it myself since I haven't yet finished it, but odds that it's worth reading are pretty good. OP brings up the case of Jason Miller. Now, I don't know the facts of the Jason Miller Incident, but OP suggests that he expected the GOP to turn on Miller due to his actions conflicting with their values, but he didn't. I think it's important to keep in mind in cases like this that Jason Miller was (is? I don't care enough to check) a politician who (I assume) was otherwise, in the opinion of the GOP constituency, successfully fighting for their goals and interests in the public arena. This is obviously going to bias people. And I imagine that the attempt to publicize whatever discrediting information about him came from media sources loyal to his opponents (because of course it would), which would trigger his supporters to distrust it, deny it, and defend him. Which, if you think about it for a second, makes sense, and is in fact the correct thing for them to do. Like personally, I'm not friends with any politicians, and frankly I don't want to be. I figure that they're probably unpleasant people personally, and likely don't have the highest standards of personal morality, but this doesn't really affect me. The people who suffer from these things are their own friends and family. To me, a politician has value insofar as he promotes my views and interests in politics, and as for what he does in private, I just try not to think about it. Like, imagine having sex with Joe Biden. Do you regret imagining this already? See what I mean? Just focus on his policy agenda and effectiveness as a leader and you'll have a better time. To conclude, one of my favorite right-vs-left psychology points was something a friend of mine told me from some kind of study about political reasoning. As you probably know, support for housing vouchers is a left-wing policy, and support for school vouchers is a right-wing policy. The study found that rather than having notably different thought processes, members of both sides used essentially the same reasoning to argue for their preferred policy and to oppose the enemy policy as the other side did, just directed towards different targets. So if they reason about these things the same way, why are their positions so different? Well, one obvious possibility is that construction companies and (to a lesser extent) construction workers are a right-wing constituency and donation source, whereas teachers, school administrators, and teachers unions are a left-wing constituency. Sometimes it's just about which side you're on.

So is this.

So is this.

So is this.

So is this.

So is this.