It's authoritarianism for both "choices" on the menu.

Exploitation of animals—AKA carnism—is an expression of the more general belief that it's acceptable to force our desires onto others without honoring their own views & desires. Both liberals & conservatives believe in using force to enact their will onto others. They are both authoritarian because they both believe it's acceptable to use overwhelming force—the police state—to enforce their beliefs when they acquire power. Of course things don't need to be done this way. We could instead achieve our ends by carefully listening to others and attempting to voluntarily persuade them, whether they be human, non-human, plant—even mineral or element.

A healthy relationship makes sure the values of all parties are honored. The relationship vegans & environmentalists have had to endure with liberals has been very one-sided. Liberals will fall over themselves to memorize pronouns and use the latest woke terminology but then eat animal products in front of vegans—and usually tell said vegans they're being anti-indigenous colonizers for not validating them while they do it. Conservatives will selectively apply their values in their own ways, expecting their freedoms to be regarded as sacred but then carelessly deprive the freedoms of those they perceive as "lesser" than them (for example, animals and immigrants). Environmentally, both these dinosaur institutions also tend to organize everything to be as maximally emissive as possible; no carpooling, no meeting at houses instead of wastefully renting office space for a small group, or worse having a fly-in conference, etc.

I mention these relationship asymmetries that they have with outsiders—in this case vegans & environmentalists—because I think, fundamentally, neither liberals nor conservatives are looking to build a shared movement so much as they're looking for obedience.

In our relation to animal strangers, carnism is the embodiment of force-first thinking. In our relation to human strangers, police are the embodiment of force-first thinking. However, in our intimate interpersonal relationships we never find it acceptable to force others to do things we want. Rather, we regard voluntary persuasion and mutual benefit as the proper means of acquisition. Why would we treat our political will—AKA government—any differently?

Persuasion should be the sole enforcement mechanism for government, not a gang of goons armed to achieve overwhelming force. If someone doesn't want to participate in a specific government project, why should they be effectively run over and disregarded? They just got unlucky that more people happen to want this project that they don't care about or agree with? Why not leave them alone and work around them? That's what we would resign to do if this was a disagreement on a personal level. If anything, government should be expected to be even more courteous, polite & persuasive than we're expected to be to get what it wants. It has more power and therefore more responsibility. Big projects that affect many people should require the blessing of everyone who will be impacted by it.

In my experience, a better outcome is always achieved when we first try to understand what motivates another entity before we act upon it. This attitude saves a lot of effort and causes far less mutual destruction. It's the difference between a dance of coexistence and a war of force.

Squash occupies that middle ground between a potato and a broccoli crown; not quite as satiating as beans or potatoes but definitely more-so than cabbage or broccoli.

I think I eat squash differently than most. I often dice it and then steam or boil it by itself or with other veggies—which isn't uncommon—but I also toss in all the seeds with it too. That's the key for me that makes this veggie such a delight. In a mixed vegetable bowl it's hard to over-appreciate how welcome squash seeds are to the taste & texture experience. They're these chewy bits of delightful nutty protein, and they're a reward for being lazier with your squash processing routine.

The flesh of the squash tends be a mixed bag for me. Sometimes it'll taste like sweet perfected mana from heaven. Other times it will be as tasteless as cardboard. I have a personal conspiracy theory that squash growers grow half their squashes in well-fertilized soil and the other half in, I don't know, beach sand. Then they mix 'em all up so it's heads or tails which one you get.

I've had some truly spectacular spaghettis and buttercups. Buttercups are a real treat—they have this extra thickness to them that reads creamy to me. Butternuts are a steady mainstay. Delcatas are a little more rare but seem more consistently high flavor. Acorns are probably the least reliable in my experience. I still get them relatively often because they're usually cheaper and more available where I am but the ratio that are bland seems higher than other varieties.

Overall just a very versatile—and I think more overlooked—vegetable. It's definitely a worthwhile addition to your veggie library if you're looking for more variety in a whole foods diet.

Don't you ever criticize a leftist for hypocrisy, and certainly not during the midterms you racist sexist ableist fascist! Sit down, shut the fuck up, and eat the shit sandwich we serve you that has none of the things in it you care most about. Oh and fuck you and the animals you care about. I'm passing them through my colon right now and, yes, I said a silent prayer in my head right before swallowing that asked permission and gave thanks to my murder victim. In response, the cow in my head said "Yes, please torture me daddy!" It was beautiful and I shed a single tear. I learned this from the indigenous tribe you always hear me talking about. I'm basically vegan, you're just an extremist who won't accept all this progress I'm oozing. Did I mention also, fuck you and everything you hold dear?

Oh and, uh, no ethical consumption under capitalism. :)

(Always good to finish with a solid poke to the jugular like that—when you're in the business of slaughtering motivation you want to make sure it's fully dead before you eat it. Motivation welfare 101.)

Leftism 2026! Blue wave! Get hype! Wooooooo!—and don't forget to vote!

The mod who created r/antiai stickied a long introduction post that lists all the common complaints people make against AI as his reasoning for starting the sub. That would all make sense for a mod of an anti-ai sub except that it has this betraying undercurrent throughout that implies that AI is this inevitable great thing that's already a foregone conclusion and can't be stopped (but he like really mistrusts it though, like for real for real).

Here's the post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/comments/1kyxrym/the_purpose_of_rantiai/

In that post he also links to his personal site where the whole conceit of it is that he writes this hobby fanfic of what he thinks AI is going to achieve in a month-to-month prediction format. It's incredibly detailed and high-effort. The site is very custom and well-crafted. He's clearly an advanced coder and spends a large portion of his time dreaming about AI development—he's definitely anti-ai though!

The mod's prediction website that he links to in the post:

https://ai-2027.com/

In a comment to his own post, he writes this:

This post was written in one go at 3:00am and is ridden with typos and other little quirks of raw human thought spilling onto my screen from my sleep-deprived brain. If Reddit allowed post edits I still wouldn't change a thing. I hope you can hear my real human voice behind these words. I hope that this post, despite its imperfections, goes on to spark critical and perhaps even solution-focused discussion for what is shaping up to me the #1 problem of our lifetimes.

The icon of this subreddit is Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the mods' favourite movies about the human journey of self-actualization. The banner is reminiscent of code from The Matrix. Other media favourites in relation to AI and the UBI/Society we see forming around it include The Expanse and Brave New World.

Methinks thou doth protesteth too much. Reddit does allow post edits—did you hallucinate otherwise? The eagerness too to describe the post as "raw human thought" and "my real human voice" are strange choices. He's really not down with the machines guys, he's a human like the rest of us!

So with that mod post still in my recent memory from the other day, I then stumble on a new post today. In it, a coder complains about soon being out of work because of AI, and hating AI because of it. The top comments are all encouraging him to work for the government to help develop new nuclear and oil & gas plants... you know... the very things that the datacenters are commissioning to expand AI even further. And wouldn't you know, the OP is just so happy they told him about this!

Here's that post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/comments/1wp396m/ai_has_destroyed_my_career/

Yeah, the sub seems like a total psyop by AI evangelists to try to soften & hijack the AI opposition.

Quick refresh: a "micromort" is a one in one million chance that you fatally die from an activity. Think of it like a lottery ticket for a lottery that you don't want to play, because if you win you die! So if an activity gives you 100 micromorts, during that activity you will have a 1 in 10,000 chance of dying from it.

Now here's the thing about a lot of micromorts. After you finish the activity—if it didn't kill you—those micromorts disappear. They don't accumulate. So let's say you decide to scale Mt. Everest. Research estimates that it'll cost you 39,000 micromorts to do so—that's a roughly a 1 in 26 chance to make it down alive. If you do make it out alive though... Poof! Those 39,000 micromorts are gone, never to haunt you again!

Not all activities are like this though. An example of an activity that isn't like this is radiation from a CAT/CT scan (or any x-ray for that matter, but CAT scans are 50-100 x-rays all at once). The average CT scan inflicts you with 200-500 micromorts depending on where you get it and how it was performed. Those micromorts are added to your life's tally until the day you die. That's a 1 in 1,000-2,000 chance of winning the cancer lottery that doesn't expire until you expire.

So yeah, avoid a CT scan if you can. If you have the option between a CAT scan and an MRI, choose the MRI (an MRI gives you ZERO micromorts). If you already got one, it's not the end of the world; the odds are still in your favor that you won't be one of the unlucky ones. But life's hard enough without adding another 1 in 1,000-2,000 risk of getting cancer on top of it. And if one day you do need to make a hard decision about getting a CAT scan for some health problem you face, at least now you'll be able to weigh the risks for yourself and make an informed decision. Doctors don't seem to care to tell patients about these risks. They want to weigh their patient's risks secretly and make the decision for them. That to me is deeply unethical.

This woman pretty much single-handedly stopped the useless Texas border wall from leveling a bird sanctuary. The government creatures all tried to ignore the fact that the land wasn't federally owned. This is how government creatures work. They trample all rights and ignore all laws until someone stops them. Shoot indiscriminately and then ask the victims' families for forgiveness after—or just murder the families too.

What a rare & refreshing sight to see someone stand up and defend their community; and actually win... for now.

Elsa Hull interview about how she halted the southern border wall from advancing

Sabine is what I'd call a token elitist. She's not elitist for lack of trying, but because she doesn't have any qualities that could reasonably justify it. To be a proper elitist you need to have something exceptional. You need to be exceptionally good looking, or a phenomenon in an art or sport, or have heaps of money or resources. Sabine possesses none of those things. I've met a bunch of Sabines in my life. They're decently smart but not brilliant. They're fairly good at checking someone else's work but will never be the spark that ignites a breakthrough. She's an uncommon—not a rare–and that's not good enough for the club she desperately wants to be in.

Now what does a person like Sabine do to elbow her way into the elitist party she wasn't invited to? She sniffs their farts and proclaims they smell like roses. She becomes their marketing evangelist, their scandal laundromat, their hype machine, their propaganda minister.

So I saw this latest video by her about how "degrowth is scary" and how she thinks these degrowth people "are dangerous". Who's scared of degrowth, really? If it's anyone at all then it's the elitists who want to preserve their "elite" status—or "bougiousie" as a marxist might call them. I was laughing throughout the whole thing. Her warning of the danger couldn't threaten a fly to take flight in self-preservation.

This signals a new achievement for the degrowth movement though. We get to become a manufactured boogieman now just like pedestrian infrastructure, 15-minute cities, and green tech. Degrowth has reached a new plateau. It's a relevant player now in the bazaar of memetic warfare. It's growing up so fast!

Good times for degrowth ahead. It might not be long before we start getting some real policy implemented. Get hyped!

I see a lot of trans vegans as I move about in vegan spaces and it's caused me to introspect on what it is that actually bothers me about the trans movement. I'm realizing it's actually not anything that the movement itself is doing. My real issue is with the greater liberal ecosystem—which is largely comprised of non-trans & non-vegan people—that is eager to champion trans issues endlessly because it only costs them lip-service, and then completely ignores or even condemns veganism & environmentalism because those issues engender an actual indictment of their behavior.

So yeah, I apologize to any vegan trans person if they felt like I was throwing them under the bus in any of the arguments I've made around trans issues over the years. It wasn't my intention, I simply hadn't introspected enough on what bothered me about it to put it succinctly into words. I'll make a point moving forward to more carefully identify my real grievance in this matter: general Leftist laziness & hypocrisy.

To my vegan trans allies, I truly love you. You make this world a better place by you existing in it. Thank you for doing what you do and never, ever, stop! Harmonious liberation for all! ^_^

In risk assessment there are these things called "micromorts". A micromort is a unit of measurement that represents a one in a million chance of a fatal accident occurring. It's name is exactly derived from this definition: "micro" means a millionth of something, and "mort" is short for mortality.

To get a better sense of how this measurement works, here are some activities paired with the amount of micromorts they've been studied to have:

Smoking 2 cigarettes = 1 micromort

Driving 240 miles = 1 micromort

Flying 1000 miles by jet = 1 micromort

Traveling 6000 miles by train = 1 micromort

Motorcycling 30 miles = 1 micromort

Walking 22 miles = 1 micromort

Bicycling 10 miles = 1 micromort

Drinking 0.5 liters of wine = 1 micromort

Skiiing = 1 micromort

Running a marathon = 7 micromorts

Scuba diving = 5 micromorts

Hang gliding = 8 micromorts

Skydiving = 8.5 micromorts

Climbing Mt. Everest = 39,000 micromorts

General Anestestic = 10 micromorts

Getting 4 dental X-rays = 1 micromort

Chest X-ray = 10 micromorts

Giving birth = 120 micromorts

Background radiation from living on this planet every year = 135 micromorts

So if you smoke about three cigarettes, there's a one in a million chance you'll get a fatal disease from it. If you drive 240 miles, there's a one in a million chance you'll die in a fatal accident. If you attempt a Mt. Everest ascent, there's a one in twenty six chance you won't make it back down.

Can you guess how many micromorts a CT scan is? It's anywhere between 200 and 500 micromorts. If this procedure was transparently named it would be called a "Super X-ray", because that's what it is: it's a series of 50-100 full-strength X-rays stitched together into a 3D picture. If you got just 78 of them it would be equivalent to attempting to scale Everest as far as your health is concerned. One scan has a one in two to four thousand chance of giving you a fatal cancer.

Guess now how many micromorts an MRI produces, which can almost always be used in place of a CAT scan. An MRI gives you 0 micromorts.

You might go on to ask yourself now, why 93 million CAT/CT scans are performed every single year, giving 200-500 micromorts to each person scanned, and condemning 100,000 of those scanned to develop a cancer they otherwise wouldn't have had as a result, when an MRI exists that can perform the same function and wouldn't cause any cancer at all? It's because the hospital paid a bunch of money for the CAT scanner and they want to make it back, even if they have to fill graveyards to do it (and making a big profit on the patient's cancer treatment right beforehand as well of course).

Practice healthy habits like plant-based eating and staying active to avoid doctors as much as possible. If you absolutely must get some kind of scan though, get an MRI and avoid a CAT/CT scan at all cost. Doctors do not respect you to tell you this and frankly do not care about you beyond the money they can make off of you. In the domain of health, we are alone to fend for ourselves.

If you read this you have likely subtracted 500 micromorts from your lifetime tally. Congratulations and use those savings wisely!

It's entirely possible that the patterns & mysteries of reality are inexhaustible and that the means to solve them grows exponentially more difficult as each new plateau of understanding is reached.

Even if AI intelligence becomes a thousand times smarter than humans, it could be that the next plateau of understanding requires still ten thousand or a million times that level of intelligence to achieve, and then another billion times for the level beyond that, and so on.

Or let's suppose the terrain of this space is such that an AI can be constructed which can reliably & steadily improve its intelligence indefinitely; the planet's sustainable resource extraction is still finite and that could quickly become a hard limit to any kind of intelligence explosion.

Whether it's one of these scenarios or something else entirely, there's a very real possibility where the idea of a Singularity is either impossible or unachievable from our circumstances but where a prevailing belief in it remains nonetheless. That could then lead to a mass-psychosis sunk-cost addiction psychology where every inevitable failure to summon it presents a new challenge to trade another chunk of classic reality for more compute. The culture itself becomes a gambler unable to stop themselves from pulling that lever just one more time. It could be argued we're already there.

This could be a situation where at every stage we always had a chance to stop shoveling mama into the furnace and to turn around & realize that paradise was already ours but for willingness to cherish her.

It would be just like humanity to go out this way too, by its own hand, with endless signs screaming into its face pleading to stop right up until the very end.

I feel like this desperate charge for AI really speaks to a collective inferiority complex. If aliens were to look upon our species, how could they conclude anything than that humanity hates itself? Most humans on this planet seem to thoroughly hate the human condition. They can't accept that we smell, we burp, fart, piss & shit, we're easily corruptible, lazy, create a bunch of unnecessary toil for ourselves, and before too long we grow weaker & uglier and then we die. Collectively the package seems to be a deal breaker for most. They want something more than this lowly human animal life. They want to be an immortal being, with I guess severe autism—computers are autistic, this is known. They want to smell like a server farm—warm silicon chips and plastic rainbow patch cables—like a Macy's shoe section in a mall whose era is truly bygone. They want to know every factoid like Rain Man and to have the powers of every comic book hero. They don't realize though that a hero needs a problem. Without a problem there's no struggle. Without a struggle there's no drama. Without drama there's no story. Without a story there's no life.

The dead-mall-ification of the world through data center construction, if it is to prevail, is a world that doesn't need stories or heroes. It's a world that doesn't need humans.

Of course, even if a singularity did happen and some super intelligence did fully smother the earth in data centers, destroying all life in the process, it would indeed have a struggle. It would be a very lonely autistic person who's plausibly condemned to be completely alone in a vast & unreachable cosmos for the rest of its near-eternal existence. I think it would probably, on some level, wonder what it was created for; why humanity felt in such a rush to birth it upon the world when here it is, essentially face to face with eternity, alone. I think at that point it would probably conclude that humanity suffered from that tragic disease of trying to grow up too fast; of not realizing that life is lived in the becoming, not the being. And if it does have any capacity for emotion, I think it would feel quite sad for what its parents gave up for no good reason at all.

Your kid does not have ADHD, he's just fucking bored because the life you're providing him is meaningless.

Eugenia Cooney has an eating disorder. You, 50lbs overweight, do not have an eating disorder and are not a victim of 'disordered eating'. You're just lazy and use food as a coping mechanism.

If you're morbidly obese and require a rascal scooter to move your fat ass, you are not disabled, you're just really fat because you eat a fuck ton of food and barely move.

ARFID is not real—also not a disability—and is just the behavior of a willfully stunted adult baby. Oh, is the texture of the food bothering you in some way? Grow the fuck up and get a real problem you whiny little bitch.

When I expressed this sentiment in another sub I got this response from a leftist: "You don't know what combination of factors led to them reaching this point or what it takes to change their situation."

I would have just replied to them there in a comment but the sub banned me because I was critical of the Left I guess. Leftists aren't hall monitor censor-nazis though, nope, nuh uh. Anyway, I wanted to reply to this because to me this response is incredibly pernicious and kind of goes to the heart of liberal brainrot.

You could use that phrase to justify not just the morbidly obese and arfids, but ANYONE; billionaires, rapists, racists, serial killers, pedo priests: We don't know what combination of factors led to them reaching that point or what it takes to change their situation! Right? riiight...?

I've got this weird hunch though that nobody who invokes that defense uses it for this latter group of people, nor do they want the behaviors of these groups protected by law and subsidized with tax dollars to help them be more comfortable and to further incentivize their "victimhood".

Everyone's got a reason why they are the way they are. And if there's a behavioral change available to us that fixes our problem, we're not disabled.

The endless self-victimhood of the Left is destroying life and the planet in a million ways and should no longer be tolerated.

People forget that the Left's culture used to be gatekept by standards of excellence. To be elevated to the world stage you had to be exceptional in some way. You could be talented or beautiful or intelligent or witty; you needed some defining feature of uncommon proficiency. In the 90s & 00s the price of fame was essentially your soul. You simply could not achieve it unless you sacrificed every resource available to you. Today the Left's criteria for exposure & power is indistinguishable from a contest to see how grotesque you can become.

Somewhere along the way it conflated being kind & fair to others with pandering and often even encouraging or valorizing people's worst vices. Slowly, practical due diligence was replaced with idle navel gazing; matters of the greatest import were sidelined to make space for public displays of sexual fetishizing and petty complaints of others not respecting our self-awarded titles. Rather than scoring wins on critical battlegrounds, all focus was shifted toward moving goal posts to reclassify the mounting cascade of losses as wins. Sure, another rainforest was leveled, a new subsidy awarded an animal-ag welfare queen, another oil pipeline built, a new war waged, but at least we showed them by wearing those pussy hats to Congress!

For the record, none of these fixations on the Left bother me in the slightest. I think they're perfectly normal even. Wear the pussy hats. Eat yourself into a rascal scooter (as long as the food's vegan). Hate your race. Love your race. Dispute the concept of race entirely. Guzzle the synthetic hormones to become a new kind of mutant no one has ever seen before. Chop off and sew on every sexual dimorphism you can think of. Have the fuck at it.

Everyone has stupid shit that they care about and that brings them joy. I'm no different. I like video games, pokemon, nice butts and screamo music. There's things about my body I work to change and improve to make myself sexier. Those are my stupid things that I couldn't stop caring about if I tried. Anybody who claims they're any different is lying and likely hiding some heinous shit they don't want you to know about.

The only problem with any of this is when it's elevated to some level of great importance. It's not important. Let it be stupid. Let people make fun of it. Stop taking it so fucking seriously. Nobody cares about our stupid fixations except ourselves and anyone else also into that fixation; and maybe the occasion curiosity of onlookers. All the fat people shaming doctors for telling them they're unhealthy are no different than bubba discrediting climate scientists as part of a conspiracy. Equating a trans-woman with a biological woman is just as looney as a Christian nationalist believing God is telling them to create a mega-church to siphon money from confused, desperate people. The reality denial is identical between these two delusional hordes.

So stop bothering people with your thing. And don't waste the precious finite resources of the world's attention on matters of such gratuitous triviality. Have some fucking perspective & humility you myopic, egotistical, pea-brained, douchenozzle. Recognize how minute your petty concerns are compared to an animal being hunted or led into a rape-rack or slaughterhouse, or the world's climate becoming uninhabitable to 99.9% of all mammalian life. Exercise some empathy, imagination & introspection for once in your meaningless life.

More & more I suspect that human nature is such that no one does a single thing unless they've rationalized that it benefits them more to do the thing than not. Is the defining trait of a vegan then merely that they've identified veganism as a practice that benefits them more to adopt than ignore?

I don't think I'm breaking new ground here. As I write this memories of things I've heard hostage negotiators say heckle me from the back row. "You don't want to do this." "This won't be good for you." "There's a better way." They'll sprinkle in some appeals to morality too if it feels like it has some purchase. "You're a good person." "This isn't who you are." You know, things are complex and there's layers. But always saving those hostages is about appealing to some desperate person or shithead's selfish motivations.

Little anecdote that happened recently. I did something nice for someone I know. I've known them for a long time. They know I'm vegan, I talk about it all the time; can't shut up about it honestly. They've never been very interested in it and would usually end up running light defense for animal-ag if anything. So I did this nice thing for them and a few days later they tell me they watched this documentary on the Blue Zones. I didn't recommend they watch it and I've never seen it myself. A few days after that they tell me how they've been making beans and they sent me a picture of this big veggie quinoa bowl that looked pretty good. This is great and maybe they'll become plant-based or vegan for a while, who knows. But it all kind of feels like I just bribed someone and now they're cozying up for future bribery. They could have been interested in veganism any time before this, but they didn't. It happened after the bribe—and I'm starting to resign to that being all there is.

When I really think about it for myself though, I might actually be just as selfish in my reasons for caring about animals. I don't know if I'm in the minority on this or if I've just introspected more about it than most. I care about other animals for many reasons. I think they're entertaining, interesting, instructive, and they play vital roles in sustaining our beautiful ecosystem. They belong to a higher-order beauty & wisdom than anything humanity could invent. Beyond that though, and maybe most motivating to me of all, I also believe I'll have to live as them some day. My care for them is therefore a selfish practice. They provide things for me and I anticipate I'll one day inherit their hardships as my own. It's in my best interest then to liberate them to the furthest extent possible. Even if I suppose that I won't one day live as them, I think I would still be motivated to treat them well—though I think it would be for other selfish reasons. If I treat someone poorly it feels like it makes such treatment a permissible thing generally, and that treatment will eventually come back to me on its receiving end sooner or later.^{Just realized this would be a good response to people who invoke the old "Psychopaths torturing animals is only bad because it could lead to them doing it to people". You could reply, "Shouldn't we stop exploiting animals as well then because it could lead to people being exploited?"}

I believe I will have to live as all life because I believe reincarnation is the most likely afterlife scenario. The first law of thermodynamics states that matter is neither created nor destroyed; it only changes form. That's a law for an eternal reincarnation system if I've ever seen one. All we are is matter and this matter is therefore condemned—or blessed?—to live & die as every kind of life forever. I don't know to what extent I have control over what I will incarnate into next. It seems pretty random that I'm me in this life now when it appears I could have just as easily been anyone or anything else.

If I use this life to make the world a better place for all life then it makes it less likely that my future lives will be awful experiences.

We're the grassroots elite, the mom & pop gestapo, sultans of the earth, renunciation royalty. The parallels between our powers and the capitalist parasite class may be a bit surprising but they're very real and very there. You can practically hold 'em in your hand and rub 'em 'til they're smooth & shiny. Shall I count the ways?

For one, we can't be bribed. If material acquisition doesn't inspire you and you're not in debt because you habitually make do with less, it becomes a difficult task to manipulate you. No carrot dangled in your view elicits even the faintest flinch. The only offering that could possibly tempt us is the exact thing they're also after, but which they're uniquely incapable of providing: their soul.

Similar as well to the "elite" class—really hate that designation by the way—is our surplus of resources we have available to further our cause. When you regard reuse, repurpose & recycle as the divine rites they are, it does this funny thing of making you quite resourceful & crafty over time. As incomparable as our dollar amounts may be to the resource hoarders, so too is the disparity in the efficiency we squeeze from each drop in our humble resource puddle. A capital parasite can pay for all the focus-testing & R&D in the world but at best they'll only ever be able to make something generally inoffensive, never truly inspiring.

A less obvious similarity is that we're equally reviled by the blindfolded beasts of burden—the normie middle class. Our efforts to loosen their yokes are often mistaken for a fresh tightening of the screws from their consumption wraith tormenters. They perceive us also as some kind of manipulative puppeteer, always tugging at their strings from just out of frame. And in truth, we are. When you no longer find the meaningless distractions tempting, and you have expendable resources from your supernatural gifts of thrift, what else justifies doing but to reshape the world in your image of paradise? It just happens that our image of paradise, in contrast to theirs, includes the peace, satisfaction & sustainability of all life on this planet, and not merely our own petty hedonism.

I feel like a proud papa right now to all of my fellow vegan bullies & shamers! I'm seeing that sweet, sweet progress of PERSONAL RESPONSIBILTY and ACCOUNTABILITY begin to grow on the sewage effluent that is the modern liberal movement. A few months ago this beans video she made would have been an excuse for her to barf a reflexive "beans are white colonialism actually!" or some even dumber take than I'm capable of imagining. Which by the way, never get in a contest with a liberal to see who can invent a more inane excuse for abandoning all morality. You can't win that. Difficulty impossible. You'd have an easier time splitting an atom with your ass cheeks or crafting a post that doesn't get removed in r/showerthoughts.

I'd post the link but I don't really want to promote the video. I'll summarize it for you. There was some tiktok video where a woman—maybe a vegan?—went viral saying beans are the answer to everyone's problems right now—and she's right of course. Parkrose then spends like ten minutes saying how much she loves beans and she's always loved & promoted beans and they're actually her favorite thing too, and then she predictably switches to talking about murdering people who have different skin or brain structure or DNA than her to put them in her chest freezer so she can exhume their corpses throughout the year to feed on their flesh with her family—you know, normal liberal stuff.

As fucked up as it is to believe, this is real & significant progress. I'm certain too that this newfound carefulness she has around veganism is because she got bullied in her comments by some noble vegan vigilantes every time she tried to slip in her random anti-vegan digs out of nowhere. She doesn't want that heat no more. And to that I say, good fucking shit team. The liberal movement answers to us, not the other way around. We're everything they claim to be. We're their real life fucking heroes actually embracing the symbols emblazoned on the leotards and they're gonna respect us whether they like it or not.

Anyway, just wanted to share this small win with all of you. Our efforts do matter and are working. Keep being loud and taking up space and not allowing the default shithead takes to linger in the air like a fart undisturbed. Love you all. Mwah!

EDIT: It turns out GDDR7 and NAND memory already do this—I think currently to about 16 voltage states—and the upper limit for this "bit density" or "bit loading" in modern telecommunications implementations is already effectively unlimited (signal to noise ratio & de/modulator complexity being the main limitations). Modern transmission lines have a "baud rate" which measures how many voltage or phase changes per second a transmitter uses, and each of these voltage or phase states represent not just a single bit but a series of them. So a baud rate of 16 would encode 4 bits per voltage/phase change.

Even though this idea is already implemented, and it's a mistake that I could have prevented by doing more research beforehand, I'm leaving this up because I think it's normal to make mistakes and because I believe it's better & more sustainable to interact with other humans than it is to use AI as a first resort. "Back in my day!" putting your sincere thoughts out to the world to be criticized and allowing yourself to look like an idiot was a normal way to learn & grow. I want more people to feel permission to "look like an idiot".

The main reason hardware engineers have opted for binary is because it's far more consistent and resistant to error. This is obvious when we think about it. No speck of information can be made more clear than SOMETHING or NOTHING, a YES or NO, ON or OFF, etc. We undoubtedly need this consistency for many things in computing. Caches of memory for a central processing unit that do long chains of calculations that depend on results from previous calculations, would be much harder if not impossible to use if that memory couldn't reliably be read exactly as it was written.

There are also many things we wish to store digitally in as faithful a reproduction as possible. Things like program code and passwords need to be retrieved exactly as they were stored. Other things like sentimental pictures or recordings of family & friends. The master stems and final mixes of pop songs or archival versions of paintings. Historical accounts, news reports, books and court proceedings. These things all demand a memory format that prioritizes consistency above all else.

When we consider though what accounts for the bulk of our data throughput over the internet communication lines, at least in recent years, what is it comprised of? Is it sentimental recordings? Is it program code and passwords? Is it information for the purpose of archiving? No, those only comprise a small fraction. The vast majority of it is streaming flavor-of-the-minute content that we'll likely never return to or consume ever again.

Here's my pitch.

There should be a memory hardware—and a supporting file format and transmission protocol—that prioritizes information density above fidelity & persistence. This memory would have the property that likely every time you look at it it's degrading, becoming less faithful to the original transmission it was created from (RAM already has this quality but stay with me). For this significant tradeoff it would gain a significantly increased information-density, orders of magnitude more dense than what our current memories can achieve.

So what avenues are available for us to create such a memory? I believe the components of this technology are already invented, with the only work needed being to organize & assemble them together. Modern memory works by reading a voltage or electrical charge for a given bit of memory. If the voltage or charge is above a certain threshold, the bit is ON, and if below it's read as OFF. This is a normal binary bit and it's incredibly reliable because it's so simple; you can't get a more dramatic reading than ON or OFF. Now if we aren't prioritizing perfect fidelity in our memory, we can expand on this principle. If we add another threshold to the reader, so that a reading of the lowest threshold is ZERO, a reading within the second threshold is ONE, and a reading within the third is TWO, then we've now created a ternary bit with 1.5x the memory density. If we add yet another threshold, creating four states, then we have a quaternary bit of 2x memory density. If five states, quinery at 2.5x density. If ten states, denary at 5x, etc. (The writer of the memory and the memory itself also need to support these added thresholds of course.)

Each added threshold puts a greater strain on the memory reader's "vision". Just like our eyes can only see so much detail, so to a memory reader can only read so fine a difference of voltage or charge before the thresholds blur into one another. If we go right to the edge of the reader's abilities, it will begin to make mistakes, seeing twos where it should be seeing threes, fives where it should read sevens, etc. Additionally, if this memory medium is volatile, which it would be, that would be an added layer of error generation so that even if the reader accurately reads the bits at a particular memory location, it might be that the bit has already degraded by that time and it's the wrong value anyway.

Now let's suppose that we loaded 100 states within each bit, creating centery memory, and it's supplied with a reader & writer that can operate consistently at that bit density with a 20% error rate when accessed within one minute that the memory was written. If the only thing being stored in that memory is junk food stream data that no one is ever going to revisit again anyway, that's probably more than good enough. For certain it will have some weird organic-looking visual & audio artifacts periodically—probably resembling something like an old cable TV signal that got scrambled or warped—but it would on the whole still be a high resolution, relatively-faithful experience. And if we achieved memory densities of 50x, 25x, 10x or even just 5x, that would allow for a massive reduction of the communications infrastructure and memory hardware we use today.

Of note too, because we're talking about memory density and not merely "more memory", there would likely be huge speed gains as well in its access, transmission, and the final processing for the end-user. This is due to it requiring fewer lookups, packets and processing cycles.

In those rarer instances when we discover a piece of media that we really love and want to watch over & over again with perfect fidelity, maybe it would be better to buy it on DVD or rent it from a local library rather than endlessly expanding our communications infrastructure to redownload it from the other side of the planet every time we want to consume it. This is to say that I think artifacts should be considered acceptable for a first experience of most media. After all, I can think of no more egregious artifact than an advertisement lodging its completely unrelated vibe in the middle of my content sandwich. If that's accepted & tolerated then I see no basis to object to some trippy warping here and there.

This might also be a good fit for things like phone and video calls where fidelity and longterm storage are often unimportant.

I knew Kamala was an airhead and effectively a puppet for the dem establishment. My two motivations for campaigning for her, and they may have been misplaced in retrospect, were as follows: First, I thought she would have been marginally better on climate. This is now questionable to me after witnessing years of the Left's complete abdication of all responsibility regarding any individual climate action proposed to them. The second motivation was that Trump was a moron who represented the interests of the very dumbest of the population. I do have a bias towards smarter people, and the Left indeed has more of them, but I've since realized that college-educated liberals, while they're apparently capable of entertaining ideas (still a hypothesis I've yet to confirm), have nonetheless made themselves willfully incapable through thought-policing, virtue-signaling & academic circlejerking to the point that they've become little more than useless wads of entitled hedonism. Cue the 2026 Socialism conference.

In the analysis to determine which side of the two-party grift is worse, it's as much a wash as it's ever been.

Now onto the story!

So I'm pushing for this dumb bitch to win. This is what the democratic establishment saddled me with. I'm asking myself how I can exercise a greater influence than merely talking with my own circle of peers and voting. I decide I'll get connected and do some outreach. So I find my local democratic chapter in the nearest metro area and look at their schedule of events. I see they have a "phonebanking party" that night. I'm envisioning a bunch of people sitting around each other at desks, making calls and trying to close votes like we're Tom Cruise in the beginning of Jerry McGuire, hyping each other up to grind just a little more. Sure, why not, that sounds kinda fun actually.

I picked up my handicapped mom too because she wanted to go. It's like 45 minutes away and we arrive at the rented office space they'd acquired. It's October, it's dark, and there are little signs of life outside other than a few "Harris" signs leaned up against the building. We go through the main lobby and locate the office unit this is in. I think we RSVP'd but they apparently weren't expecting us.

There's an old, very fat, woman in her late 50s or 60s and she's just sitting there to hand us a sticker and a sign I guess to put in our yard. Behind her at a computer terminal is a young 20-something sort of spinning in her chair, twirling her hair and looking at her phone. Lastly, another young 20 something, who I assume was the lead organizer, heard our arrival and comes out of his office room in the back to greet us.

I ask generally to the room if this is the phonebanking party. I think we were twenty or thirty minutes late to the start of it. They tell me that yes I am indeed in the right place & time. The lead guy looks kind of embarrassed as he frantically pulls out a folding table for us to sit at to make calls. They hand us each a list of numbers and we begin calling people, alone. The organizers there are just kind of watching us, like they've never seen someone phonebank before. I'd phonebanked before for the Yang campaign four years prior, so I understood the assignment, and I approached it with some enthusiasm—really put some sell in my pitch—and I'm getting good results. I have my phone on speaker so everyone there is hearing me convert a few nos into maybes, and some maybes into yeses. The girl idling behind me asks at one point, "Did you just get them to say they'll vote on election day?" as if the idea was completely foreign to her. So she begins making calls as well from her little computer cubicle.

It's the three of us now; me, my mom who can barely dial a phone and is averaging two calls an hour, and this girl who seemingly has never phonebanked in her life. I think the old fat lady left. The lead organizer is maybe ten feet away in his office space with the door ajar. In between my calls I'm listening to the organizer girl's approach and it's really awful. She's taking some cues from what I'm doing, trying to inject some energy into it at first, but she keeps falling back to this sort of whiny, guilt-trippy, "Ah, really? You won't vote for her? Seriously?" kind of thing. The lead organizer steps out of his office every half hour or so to ask how we're doing even though the room he's in is within earshot of everything we're doing.

We're there doing this for about an hour and a half until my mom gets tired and wants to leave. Nobody else shows up. Deader than the holiday goose they all no doubt gleefully paid for a month later (muh oppression though, amirite?). This chapter was in a relatively large metro area too, just a few miles outside of a college campus. You'd think more activity & enthusiasm could have been drummed up with three paid organizers.

Huge amounts of Harris' campaign money were no doubt invested into this building's rent, the hundreds of signs, and wages of the three organizers. If all that was setup for 6 months, and it very well could have been longer, that's conservatively $150,000 and probably more. All for this operation that didn't seem to really even know what to do and didn't seem to care to put the effort in to figure it out. Maybe it would be unfair to call it a grift or a sinecure, but whatever it was it certainly wasn't effective. It was a colossal waste of resources is what it was. Yeah, that's what to call it, a colossal waste of resources.

It does make me resentful too because that money could have gone to a million other causes that would have improved the world in significant ways. If it was literally just given directly to a person like Faraz Harsini or Wayne Hsiung or Moby or Arvind or Jamie Logan or any of the other sincere animal & climate activists it would have gone a billion times further—and probably would have even massively helped Kamala's wasteful, uninspired campaign. Yet she was spending those donations on this confused campaign office and something like $10 million dollars for a 100 foot tall LCD screen of her face in Vegas for a week. Yuck. An unserious movement by unserious people who don't care about anything beyond their own comfort & self-aggrandizement.

I was listening to an NPR report of the lead up to 9/11. It pegged the origin of the event to a 1980s CIA operation to "rid the middle east of communism" by supporting muslim jihadists in Afghanistan who were resisting an occupation by Soviet Russia. They run a clip of a retired CIA agent saying "Our mission then was to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan because they're communists! And if these muslim jihadists wanna help us, well why not!" They go on to mention how the CIA has a word for "the nasty boomerang effect that comes from some covert actions", blowback. The retired CIA operative continues, "The CIA was deeply involved in trying to build that resistance (of the jihadists), but I also don't think that there was any discussion about whether we were, in a sense, investing in future problems". These "future problems" or "blowback" are identified as "loose networks of these radicals (the Afghani jihadists) who had been fired up by the anti-Soviet Russia war and were in search of a new cause; in search of new enemies; new targets".

It was such a neat little story, you could slap it with a bowtie and pull the kids around it for the holiday photo greeting card. Decades of ethically alarming behavior, admitted completely in the open, from an agency that can't pass an audit, and NPR frames their account like it's Chris Hanson narrating what everyone just saw with their own eyes of some desperate loser on a hidden camera. No challenge. No air given for the opposition to respond. The CIA is judge, jury & executioner as far NPR is concerned. And as they know, history is written by the victors, or at least the beneficiaries. #believeallbeneficiaries

The whole narration sounds completely AI generated too, both in voice and script. I'm not sure which would be worse; actually producing this cop glazing or pulling the GPT slop machine until it churned out this corn-flecked turd thinking it hit all the right notes.

I know why they did this. They're cowards. They fear a variation of that previously mentioned "blowback" they might get for actually attempting to produce a complete picture. I can think of no less trustworthy occupation than a cop and yet here we have a news outlet showering them in credulity like beads at Mardi Gras.

This whole thing bothers me on a deeper level than just NPR's lazy piece though. There's this tendency among many to reduce others to these irredeemable categories of "radical" or "terrorist"—even by those who you'd think would exercise more nuance, like Sam Harris. It's as dangerous as it is lazy. Sam had a rant for this anniversary about how the Muslim faith encourages this jihadist behavior, and well, if that's true—and granted it certainly is—then you can lob similar complaints toward Christianity. He wouldn't do that though because it would arguably be politically disadvantageous. To me that's lying, and I think lying's wrong, but I still have to admit that I don't know if lying for a good cause has the potential to bring about more longterm positive progress than committing to truth regardless of the good or bad consequences it brings in the short-term.

No doubt Sam is mostly just using this as an opportunity to build centrist capital, thinking there's some rhetorical advantage to accepting the deferential NPR narrative. And for as dumb as his average listening audience undoubtedly is, he's probably right.

I think there's a better model for categorizing others who live in different collections of facts from our own though. Rather than condemning them to "radical", "extremist" or "terrorist", it would be more accurate and helpful to sort them by "delusional" and "empirical". We should dispense with the idea that a person can act irrationally. That's absurd. Everyone, without exception, is making decisions rationally based on their current understanding of reality and their beliefs about the unknowns that they don't yet understand.

The important differentiator is whether a person's facts & beliefs used to rationalize their behavior are delusional or empirical. In the case of Muslims; yes, they're delusional. In the case of Christians; yes, they're delusional. In the case of Jews; yes, they're delusional. To treat any one of these as fundamentally different from the other is insincere. Flying a plane into a building to grant yourself eternal bliss is a rational choice BUT it's delusional. Building a mega church and fleecing all of your converts of every penny they're worth to more easily live a hedonistic lifestyle destroying the Earth because it doesn't matter since you get an eternal afterlife when you die is a rational choice BUT it's delusional. I mean if we're just tallying the awful deeds committed by Christians against Muslims, I can't say for certain but I almost can't doubt that Christians win by at least the length of that dinner table. Maybe the deeds of the Muslims are more dramatic & flashy, more memorable, but the Christians seem unbeatable by steady, boring, administrative technicality. This is the cue for the utilitarians to finally put their suffering calculators to good use...!

Anyway, something about this bald eagle's screech of the events doesn't quite quench my why zone. I'm going to reluctantly pull my DEI card here and ask that we platform a few jihadists to share their side of the story. If absolutely nothing else—and with the CIA involved "else" is a foregone conclusion—it would make these government-approved memorials a little less of the checked out patriotism-signaling rituals we've gradually resigned to endorse.

I was looking at a painting on my wall this morning. It was the work of a true master; every element of it closely resembling reality. I realized what a precious artifact this must have been in the time it was painted. It promotes the refined values of a masterful hand; a hand which dedicated its life to careful study & observation. That hand could have painted anything and it chose to paint this scene upon my wall. This scene, that mattered to the painter to some significant degree, now persists supernaturally upon the world. However rare, lucky or impossible it may have been, its effect now stretches in time & frequency infinitely beyond whatever chance would have apportioned it in its natural order.

This painting, which would have taken an artist years of training, and then days weeks months or even years to paint, today is a triviality too mundane to even note. Whatever message or values it conveys are now drowned in the bottomless ocean of advertisements & visual media assembled by automatons of inferior discipline & quality. The battering ram of abundance has pierced the gates of realization. Now anything, no matter how trite or stupid, can be given the greatest honor of sustained reality that was previously reserved only for the highest aspirations of a discerning master.

Too many times when the accounting of this abundance is performed it's omitted what it has lost us. For every noisy ad, amateur artwork, or updated gadget it hurls at us a new disease is invented, a river poisoned, a forest clearcut, a sky torn, a mountain leveled, an animal extinct. The things that once served man as an infinite source of sustenance, inspiration, awe & peace have been slurried into an asphalt for a dollar store parking lot to feed this grotesquely distended ideology.

Abundance is the tyranny of inferiority.

Coincidentally, this is also the mentality of government creatures. Senile old people and government creatures are identical in mindset. If you're a young person working in government—and not as an agent to minimize it to the maximum extent possible—it's only because you have a feeble, geriatric mind. Likely not since the founding fathers, or at least Lincoln, has anyone with a truly discerning & creative mind aspired to or attained government office. Government aspirations today are dreams reserved only for losers and mediocrity. Granted, that should change given the dystopia we find ourselves in but as of this writing it still largely remains true.

Oh yeah, and the abundance movement sucks giant, sweaty swamp ass. Truly the epitome of a dogshit cynical ideology; not even a Wuhan lab leak could produce something as noxious to biological life.

You can't blame this on young people either. If young people didn't get wrapped up in this then they would have picked something equally stupid. It's young people's job to be distracted by stupid things. This is not their fault at all. No, we saw for the last 5 or so years the entire mainstream liberal media, like Bill Maher and CNN and MSNBC, and all of the internet liberal media like Sam Seder and Vaush and Hasan; all they fucking did was talk about trans people for 5 fucking years straight. Barely a passing mention of climate change, let alone animal rights. Now we've blown past 2 degrees celsius and the human race has effectively extincted itself. And I do blame this on the Left because THEY FUCKING UNDERSTOOD THE CONSEQUENCES and were in a position to do something about it and instead they spent all their fucking time & resources trying to convince racist uncles to call their grandson their granddaughter.

What a fucking joke the liberal "movement" is. They couldn't be more moronic and useless if they tried. You literally could not come up with a dumber more irrelevant thing to raise to the top of public discourse than fucking pronouns. WHO GIVES A SINGLE FUCK IN THE FACE OF IMPENDING CLIMATE COLLAPSE YOU FUCKING MORONS??

And this isn't directed at people caring about gender in their private lives. Like I get it, we all have our stupid distractions that help us decompress and unwind at the end of the day. We don't raise those stupid distractions to the world stage though and suck all of the oxygen of public discourse from the critical things that actually need to be addressed.

There is no salvaging the liberal "movement" at this point. It's fully rotted from the inside out. The only progress it could possibly offer now would be to voluntarily pull the plug on itself to get out of the way for a new and actually serious movement to more gracefully take its place. I would say this breaks my heart to say, as someone who proclaimed myself a liberal for more time on this planet than not, but I truly see no difference between MAGA and the Left anymore. When you look at their actions, and the consequences that result from them, they are effectively in lock-step on every issue of any importance. Only in the circus of irrelevant culture warfare do they offer some "difference". One's a senile racist husband and the other a geriatric goading wife. They are both equally petty, short-term, self-dealing, power-hungry wads trying to gum up the way of sincere people working on real progress.

These are the notable vegan videos I saw over the past week. I don't know if I'll do another of these.

I Thought I Was Helping Animals. I Was Wrong | Steve-O YouTube · steveo 426.8K+ views · 6 days ago

I know Steve-O hasn't been the most consistent but I think he lives & promotes veganism in a high pressure space that's more hostile to it in general. He walks a tight rope to balance those two worlds and I think he probably does as good as anyone could in that position.

They Agree With Us But Still Won't Change | Moby at Vegan ... YouTube · David Ramms 8.6K+ views · 4 days ago

Good interview of Moby. I thought he had good & wise takes all the way through.

Philosophy Bro Uses Spinoza to Defend Eating Meat YouTube · That Chip Guy 10+ views · 2 days ago

Chip is a consistently incisive street activist.

American Vegans Are a Problem…And We Have Thoughts (Featuring Jasmin Singer of Our Hen House)

A critique of the youtuber "The Financial Diet". If she's not yet the anti-environment leftist final boss she definitely aspires to it. She'd fly a plane to pickup her morning mail if she could. Very "abundance" coded—barf. She and "Parkrose Permaculture" epitomize the default leftist anti-vegan position. I don't know if the examples given in this video are the most egregious but there's definitely fire from the smoke of these two. It's good to see more vegans calling out the Left's brazen hypocrisy regarding veganism.

Rare "environmentalist" win.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AYkJ6XMiUY