bsanr

>She began to notice something that looked a lot like what the 20th-century scholars Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm had referred to as “group narcissism”: Golec de Zavala defined it to me as “a belief that the exaggerated greatness of one’s group is not sufficiently recognized by others,” in which that thirst for recognition is never satiated.

As an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfaUDh42bRs

I believe this was shortly after NYPD officers had brawled with protestors and an NYPD SUV had driven into a crowd of protestors.

EDIT: This one's more succinct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVQmdKwn_dQ

>Packing the Supreme Court because you can't trust the justices appointed by the right to vote the right way?

As much as I wish we would have breached this point of trust by now, liberals have never actually packed the Supreme Court.

>That crazy plan to make a separate state out of each DC neighborhood, so that DC would have dozens of senators?

I have never heard of this.

Please focus on things that have actually happened, and not wild conspiracy theories.

>That is so ridiculously wrong

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_suffrage#Dates_by_co...

Each point of contention, hard fought by conservatives, who were dragged kicking and screaming into the future of a country that ever-so-slightly further embodied its highest ideals, despite their protests.

>Democratic rhetoric about “Jim Crow on steroids” is precisely about these restrictions such as number of days of early voting—which are still generally more liberal in these states than in advanced western countries.

We are supposed to be the flag-carrier for free and fair elections. That means fairness with respect to the capability of all voters to "get to the polls", however that may be. We meet them where they are, not the other way around. The alternative opens the door for nominally-unrelated-but-practically-critical barriers to voting - like underfunding public transportation, for example.

>But that’s exactly what’s happening. Foreigners aren’t looking at the actual laws in Florida or Georgia and comparing them to their own laws, they’re hearing Biden call those laws “Jim Crow on steroids.”

>Except, apparently, the “facts” regarding the actual content of these laws.

Let's be clear: I am glad that foreigners recognize the righteousness of American elections when they're at their most free, regardless of how that might impugn their own processes. But that's not where my argument draws its legitimacy. It comes instead from the appropriateness of less restrictive election laws in the face of America's particular values and America's particular history. The actual content of restrictive voter laws allow conduct that is substantially similar to the Jim Crow-era conduct - of the segregationist governments that today's Texas and Georgia and Florida and others are heir to - that the VRA was meant to curb.

If you don't want to be accused of conjuring Strom Thurmond's ghost, don't pass laws he would have applauded for reasons he also would have applauded. You accuse others of not looking at the content of laws when you refuse to critically examine the content of our history.

Cherry-picking restrictive (and, might I say, somewhat off-topic?) policies doesn't change that some form of postal voting is associated with national freedom and wealth, which is both an image I imagine that we'd like to project and a reality level-headed lovers of democracy support. Japan has it. Australia has it. The UK. Canada. Germany. It's a good thing.

Many foreigners recognize this, just as they recognize the truth that "liberal election workers and would-be reformers" ARE the good guys, because they are not bombarded with cynical, horse race-style coverage of the minutiae of our collective political life. When they learn of our goings-on, they usually receive facts, like:

There has been no widespread election fraud in American federal elections at any point in living memory.

and

Certain US states have a documented history of voting discrimination.

and

A 2013 SCOTUS decision struck down key provisions of a law meant to protect people from this discrimination.

and

The conservative governments of those very same states immediately enacted new restrictive voter laws.

and

Officials have admitted that, in some cases, these laws were expressly designed not to enhance election security, but to lower turnout of "undesirable" voters.

So, if non-Americans come away with the impression that conservatives are married to a century-and-a-half-long campaign of doing whatever it takes to try to restrict voting along lines of identity (sex, race, class, location), and that liberals are the ones trying to get the citizens, of a country that prides itself on its free and fair democracy, to... vote? It would be an accurate impression. It would be the truth.

You completely ignored the bulk of my reply, probably because there's no getting around the fact that American conservatism, historically, radically diverges from liberalism on voting rights. They don't hold the same values at all, and the delineation is clear, as I'll state again:

Liberals want people to be able to vote.

Conservatives want to withhold the right to vote.

Now, you can argue the merits of each stance. I would probably counter your likely argument that undue and onerous restrictions, which substantially resemble capricious tactics of the past, run counter to the most basic American ethos, and that our national experiment has been one of slowly uncovering the diamond of liberty that is recognizing and assuring the right of all sound-minded adults to agency and self-determination and a voice in the public square. It's a really pretty diamond. People around the world think so, too. I'm going to ask you to put down the shovel you seem intent on using to cover it back up again.

Huh. Something must have changed in the last year or so. I could not for the life of me find a gel grid this large for purchase, going as far back as 2018. Neat, thanks.

This is where truth and "truthiness" diverge, I suppose. "Two decades of claims about election fraud" shares character with "two decades of high rates of Stop-and-Frisk detainments of black New Yorkers." The rest of the world looks at the reasonable behavior of liberal election workers and would be reformers - no the "Moderate" Democrats, who as recently as last week were working to gerrymander one of their own party members out of office because they're a progressive - and the way they're received by certain subsets of the electorate, and justifiably consider us insane. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29071163]

This statement

>That, in turn, has destroyed trust.

Is useful, though not in the way you probably think. The notion of "trust" in American politics is an important and powerful one, and the root of much of our history. Our basic structure as a federation is built on interstate trust. Our major flirtation with dissolution was not predicated on actual legislative action, but a lack of trust that certain actions wouldn't eventually be taken. So, trust is both a bedrock of our society and a curiously fragile thing.

As far as that notion goes, an examination of our history can yield the following statements:

That the Left has not always trusted the Right to make the "correct" decisions, but has always trusted them with the right to vote.

and

The Right has never trusted the Left with the right to vote.

Any answer that doesn't include the phrase "Southern Strategy" is suspect. Not that that is the ultimate source of the issue; but that, from that era forward, there is an unbroken through-line of tone and tactic.

That sounds like a description of every American civil rights activist ever.

A reminder, once again, that "identity theft" does not exist. It is fraud, plain and simple, and the responsibility of the businesses which aren't performing due diligence in confirming your identity. 6-figure sums shouldn't be exchanging hands without multiple layers of confirmation. This could easily have been avoided with a search for any other numbers associated with the man and a call to them to confirm.

...Huh. On an EXTREMELY tangential note, I wish I'd known about this when I was drawing a political cartoon comparing California to a burning building which [redacted] was turning a "Green New Deal" ("Green Dream or whatever") fire engine away from. Tracing and recoloring a random US fire truck didn't quite have the same kick this would have.

It is astoundingly difficult to get collapsing gel sheets, and I imagine that it has something to do with Purple existing.

I looked into buying just the sheets or a topper after returning the one I trialed. I really enjoyed the feel of it, but not to the tune of $2000(!) for a twin(!!!).

More than anything, I'd like a one-handed steno scheme to become available. It would be a game-changer for wearable and XR input.

Unfortunately, I think English language input will always be at a disadvantage compared to those that use ideograms. Steno-ing radicals would be ideal; one stroke per "word" without having to worry about pronunciation.

Swype-style input is actually quite fast, but the necessity of looking directly at the keyboard to ensure any measure of accuracy is limiting. I wonder if force feedback to help users know where on the keyboard their finger currently is, as well as improved input of punctuation, might bring it up to steno's speed (which would be revelatory in a world where a huge portion of text input is done on mobile devices).

Cheap keyboards can't "do" steno. They're unable to register simultaneous keystrokes.

If only. Arguably, part of their secret sauce is their restrictiveness of new users. You have to spend quite a bit of time in-game to gain the ability to even be seen by a lot of other users, and more still to be able to upload avatars and worlds. I'd planned on opening an art gallery space on the platform this summer, only to find that I didn't have enough friends to reach the "trust" level necessary to upload worlds. It's probably a good thing for the quality of the community itself, but anathema to growth or casual use.

(And as for me, I'm stuck trying to figure out how to hack up a WebXR experience with, ah, limited programming skills. Until then, it should be at https://vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_559152a2-44d3-44... , but it's inaccessible without adding me as a friend and accepting an invitation to an instance I spin up. So, practically useless. And support is no help in terms of what, exactly, I'd need to do to raise my trust level.)

AFAIK, the main issue is transport, not manufacturing capability. The reason the latter is so tightly controlled is because it's not difficult once the process is known. And African countries are experienced in the former.

Some thoughts, stream-of-consciousness-like.

>My first encounter with this game was a text Let's Play and the Wikipedia article, as posted on reddit in October 2008. Reading through both caused my first existential crisis in adulthood and a minor nervous breakdown. The game gets a lot of praise, but it's heavy. Very heavy. Use caution.

>Though released quite some time after, I find the parallels with Final Fantasy VI fascinating. Yes, that Final Fantasy VI. Both games feature a ragtag troupe of characters - some of whom deal with issues of trauma and identity over the course of the narrative - who traverse a post-apocalyptic world, resisting the machinations of an omnipotent, insane being that itself draws its abilities from a triad of powerful entities. It's hard to tell if FFVI was influenced by IHNM, but if not, then it's interesting to note the parallel evolution of themes, and the modes of conveying them, in wildly different properties. And if by some chance it is so, then it's not a stretch to say that the renaissance of narrative-based games heralded by the following entry in the FF series has its roots in Harlan Ellison's writings and IHNM. In that case, it didn't just slip into obscurity; its DNA is in every modern game (that isn't descended from Metal Gear Solid) that's trying to tell a complex story in a direct and linear manner.

Depending on what part of Africa you want to talk about, they already have robust drug manufacture and transport lines in place. Ebola'll do that to you. The issue isn't the stand-up capacity so much as, well, the recipe for COVID-related manufacturing specifically.

While we're on the subject:

https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2020/07/22/covid-19-remdesi...

We've got a really big problem on our hands if "privileged" is "divisive newspeak." There's not even the "unearned" qualifier.

>As a former educator I'm going to say it's because when it comes to the skills companies are looking for on average children of upper-middle class people are better if for no other reason than they've generally had much more money spent on their education and training, to the tune of over a million dollars compared to lower class peers.

This is funny to me, because in most debates about the function and efficacy of public schools, I'm assured by the other side that money isn't the issue.

Somewhere, from across the bay, blows a wind, and on it wafts the faintest whisper, an echo of an echo, which seems to say, if you listen closely, closely,

Institutional racism~

...Jokes aside - and not to make anyone feel guilty, or to be divisive, but to point out a natural consequence of the above described dynamic - I went to an HBCU. Companies did not visit campus with the frequency that I came to understand they did PWIs of similar cultural or academic standing. I imagine that if companies don't visit your school, you're not on the shortlist for, er, "meritocratic" recruitment preferences.

I want you to understand how terribly unconvincing this is. You seem to have an agenda, but not necessarily the facts to support it, so you're engaging with hand-wave-y generalization and, "Just trust me"-level rhetoric.

This conversation began with concrete numbers, and if you want the initial presumption to stand you're going to have to end with them, too.

Huh. Never noticed the swastikas before.

This is goalpoast-moving. You should include the average payout of retirement planning in the private sector, for comparison. I will be shocked if we find a substantial difference, or advantage to the teachers.

>Many lower quality teachers successfully avoid much or all of that unpaid work, especially in situations where they have strong job protections (tenure)

We'll need citation for this too.

Another post in the thread questioned why this happens in otherwise "civilized and enlightened" societies. My personal response - because we're not - lead me down a train of thought to Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter. The common thread is a lack of mutual oversight, accountability, and responsibility for others in our communities. Civilization is a wonderful thing that enables any number of deep and extensive value-adds to quality of life for any given individual member of our species, but the specialization inherent in a free society means that people are trusted to attend to their own affairs (and in the case of hierarchy, the affairs of their charges).

As a society, we share responsibility and consequences for the outcomes determined by the actions of individuals. This is the reason that the limits of individual freedom are somewhere in between the capacity and the demonstrated ability to infringe on the rights of others.

What seems to have happened is dereliction of the duty to shape those limits in response to demonstrated infringement in the past. We know - we know - what the status quo wrt, as examples, the penal system and firearms has meant for individual and collective suffering. What you're feeling is the same sense that we're not learning from the past and dooming ourselves to gory, nightmarish repetition.

Teachers don't have summers off. They engage in work-related training, administrative duties, and other labor (e.g., teaching summer school courses). They're also required to pay for far more of their required equipment than other professions. Only $250 of school supplies can be deducted if filing with the standard deduction.

This is a case of "just presenting the data" with a comically obvious agenda (per what's missing).

Most of the people here simply don't care that most of their peers are languishing at 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 their starting salary, years into their careers, despite engaging with our education system equally. In fact, I think HNers secretly revel in that fact. What's the saying? It's a feature, not a bug.

The lack of self-awareness on HN is galling but terribly predictable.

>The problem is that the consciousness bestowed on us is just barely sufficient; if we are to achieve inner freedom, it is necessary that we become more (much more) conscious than we generally are. If men and women learn to occupy their own inspirited beings fully and freely, Fromm posited, they will gain self-knowledge and thus no longer be alone: they will have themselves for company. Once one has company one can feel benign toward oneself as well as others. Then, like a virus that had been stamped out, humiliating loneliness would surely begin to wane.

Oh, hey. Furries.

Recognizing that the odds of this thread turning into a ****show are high, a piece of general advice:

Note whatever you feel compelled to say within the first 5 minutes of your deciding to leave a comment here. Discard it. Write an entirely new comment. Post that instead.

What if the point of taxes is not simply to redirect and redistribute funding, but also to reduce economic activity and, by extension, emissions and inflation?