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My state, despite being an otherwise unremarkable right-wing hellhole, actually requires emissions tests on vehicles if you live in its major cities--because the cities, at least, have realized that air quality is a thing to protect, especially when there are millions of vehicles on the roads in one metropolitan area. But yeah, it's very much a state-by-state thing in the US about what kinds of standards the cars have to meet and how often they need to be tested. And some states don't require inspections at all, which completely blows my mind. Edited to add--all that info is submitted to the DMV electronically so for a very small surcharge (like $2) I can skip the office visit entirely and renew my plates online. I get the tags in the mail a week or so later. It owns. Wish I could do my license that way but for some reason they want to take an actual picture of me for identification purposes?? (that was sarcasm) atomicgeek fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Dec 2, 2017 |
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Dec 2, 2017 02:21
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Cingulate posted:I didn't watch the youtube video, and I won't. I'd be willing to read a peer-reviewed academic paper that makes your point though. I can't believe I'm delurking to respond to goddamn Cingulate of all things, but seriously, dude, it's a fantastic video. It systematically lays out Murray's chief arguments and the papers and scholars he cites, and then carefully dismantles them one by one, frequently using references to other scholars, and extensively citing his sources in the comments to the video. It's a very elegant exposition of why The Bell Curve is racist garbage and does so in a way that even your overly-credulous, literalist, pedantic rear end could appreciate if you would only watch it. Which you won't, but anyone else here who was on the fence could maybe take that as an endorsement.
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Jan 22, 2018 02:40
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I just bought Das Kapital and I blame all of you fuckers. Especially you, JRod.
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Mar 13, 2020 06:49
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More pages than I'd have thought existed, yes. This is the Oxford Annotated edition even.
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Mar 13, 2020 06:59
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I kinda miss Dickeye now.
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Mar 13, 2020 07:01
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Yeah I'm fine with Elon just showering buckets of cash on 3m for this emergency. Let the soulless corp handle this one you diamond crazy
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Mar 23, 2020 09:26
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Guavanaut posted:Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, specifically the bit about how the failsons of English Cavalier aristocrats were the original power base in the South and have been reluctant to give it up. Ooh I've been wanting to read this, thank you. There is a similar passage in American Nations by Colin Woodward, contrasting New England notions of communal freedom with Southern planters' hierarchical liberty, that's also worth a read.
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Sep 20, 2020 14:47
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Jrod sense is tingling...
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Nov 7, 2020 07:36
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Caros posted:There is a reason the third most common rebuttal to Jrod is "On the other hand, recorded history." In the parking lot of an abandoned Sears, don't forget that part.
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Jan 20, 2021 10:45
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This is a really small point in the midst of the word soup JRod just foisted on us, but if you're talking about the ethics of secession, a point to consider is the origin of the region that wants to secede as well as the reasons why the people in that region might want self-government. Regions with a history of distinct culture and history that are subsumed into a greater (possibly imperial) whole might have really valid reasons for wanting to split off--I'm thinking places like Quebec, Catalonia, Tibet, etc. On the other hand, it's really hard to think of American communities with that kind of history who aren't indigenous. The people who just engaged in armed insurrection are privileged, primarily white people who are aggrieved, not because they lack self-determination or identification with the dominant culture of the US, but because they can't unilaterally impose their will on people they perceive to be their subordinates. Also, they're not from some discrete Whitelandia province that you can just partition off from the country, either. It's just the silliest argument. God, libertarians.
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Jan 25, 2021 09:07
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polymathy posted:IQ is not a perfect measurement of intelligence to be sure, but are you honestly denying that intelligence differs between people? What is intelligence? I'm serious with this question. I'm a former child prodigy (ugh) and in my middle-age, I've thankfully come to realize that "intelligence" takes a lot of forms, none of which can be precisely quantified. Does intelligence measure problem-solving capabilities? Spatial reasoning? Memory? If you're incredibly talented with words, but not numbers, are you intelligent? What if you're able to communicate with others and suss out hidden motivations or needs? What if you can memorize pi to 1000 digits but can't carry on a conversation with another person? At what point can you meaningfully separate education and innate ability? The problem with your entire premise, polymathy, is that we still don't really understand all the ways the human brain operates, or fails to operate, or anywhere in between. And we certainly don't, as a society, provide equal opportunities to everyone to learn and thrive and grow in the ways that best suit our own selves, and to show us the best persons we each can be. That's what leftists are constantly trying to tell you--not that we're all exactly the same, but that each of us has worth and dignity and potential, and most of us do not have the ability under capitalism as it exists to realize any of those things, but particularly our potential. IQ measures a tiny, narrow band of capability--capability that can be nurtured, as it turns out; children who are IQ tested, and then practice the skills tested by IQ tests, subsequently get higher IQ scores when tested again. You're basing your entire worldview on this idea that everyone has an objective, measurable set of stats--like in an RPG, but that's not how human beings actually operate. If we are given opportunities to learn and grow, we do, and the growth and change can be profound. Beyond that, IQ is extremely flawed for a lot of reasons; it measures a very small number of things, which are culturally-mediated and can be manipulated, for one. For another, IQ, like BMI (another profoundly flawed statistical measure) was meant to measure populations, not individuals. On the off chance it was applied to individuals, it was meant to be a contextual measure, not an absolute one--IQ was "supposed" to tell adults roughly how a child stacked up against their peers. Thus, it was never meant to be static, but was presumed to be a constantly evolving measure. We now know that it's a deeply, deeply flawed measure, because we understand now that tests are inherently biased by the perspectives and biases of the people who develop AND administer them, but even as originally conceived, IQ wasn't meant to be the be-all end-all measure of your INT score. Or, to put it more simply, a theoretical libertarian meritocracy based on INT is one that devalues, to its detriment, all the WIS, STR, DEX, and CHA out there, qualities that are also extremely good and cool and worthy, or all the qualities that haven't been gamified, like cooperation, compassion, insight, experience, or creativity. Polymathy, you keep reducing people to consumers or genius entrepreneurs or meddling janitors, and it's really sad, because human experience comes in such a rich variety. What leftists are trying to say to you is that our lives right now are flattened and immiserated by capitalism and capitalist technology, and that we want to be people first and consumers maybe, like, 101st, if at all, and talking about how capitalism makes us miserable, and you keep chirping about products at low prices. I fear your WIS is dangerously low. atomicgeek fucked around with this message at 10:11 on Feb 7, 2021 |
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Feb 7, 2021 09:49
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NGDBSS posted:Death to ability scores! Yes! The whole point is that all of us are worthy of dignity as human beings, something libertarians pretty much refuse to accept. Or they pay lip service to it with an asterisk at the end that says something like *but if you're not smart and wealthy, aren't you kind of less human after all? p.s. catching up to this thread, woof. I'd LOVE to live in a society without cars. My commute is 100% the largest source of stress and tension in my working day, and if I could ride a train from within a few blocks of my house to within a few blocks of my job, with a bit of a walk in there*, I'd be a happier and fitter person overall. Cars are insane. *Not as bonkers as it sounds--I recently visited a local train museum for my city. One of the cars included a display of the commuter routes that existed in the 1950s--I was astonished to learn that most of the routes taken by people on highways in my city today would have been taken by train in the 1950s. I remember feeling insanely jealous! I blame loving Robert Moses. I can do my own asterisks, it's fun atomicgeek fucked around with this message at 10:10 on Feb 7, 2021 |
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Feb 7, 2021 09:58
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E-Tank posted:DPRK is just a totalitarian state. NK to my knowledge doesn't have an underclass they are murdering off for ethnic cleansing. The leadership are monsters and authoritarian to the point of murdering those that get out of line, but they are not fascist per our definitions. The DPRK does have a very strict caste system based on (perceived) loyalty; the most loyal families are allowed to live in Pyongyang, attend higher education, and receive the lion's share of state benefits, while the disloyal and suspect castes are pushed to the margins of society. I'm not aware of any genocidal programs based on ethnicity, but people in the disloyal caste absolutely end up in concentration camps along with their entire extended families on very flimsy pretexts. NK is an oddball because its self-conception doesn't really have a golden age before the Kims? They've always been dominated by either China or Japan, and they know it, and they now add America to the list of powerful nations trying to control or eradicate them, but they don't really want to conquer anything other than SK. It's a weird situation all around, and I think you can make compelling arguments either way about whether they're fascist.
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Feb 9, 2021 01:25
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Also "homesteading" always assumes a hypothetical fertile, resource-rich land conveniently empty of any other people with a prior claim, a thing that definitely exists. So either the libertarian ideal is just completely naive about the world, or is deliberately erasing the underlying violence of dispossession necessary to a colonial project. I withhold final judgment on Jrod because that slippery fucker won't be pinned down to one or the other.
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Aug 16, 2021 09:17
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I just consider it Capitalism With American Characteristics.
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May 13, 2022 19:09
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Guavanaut posted:Founding an organization to proclaim yourself best libertarian probably does make you so, because that's near peak libertarian. Only if you are subsequently eaten by a bear, making it the Prometheus Memorial Award.
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Aug 28, 2023 17:05
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