Notices by sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net), page 8
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 08:04:31 JST 
sj_zero
I'm aware there are people who are basically totally "normal" -- say a girl who thinks she's a girl and she likes guys -- but call themselves "queer", and it's purely a political thing, identitying as part of a tribe.
Of course as with everything related to postmodernism, it's pretty stupid -- in order to combat boundaries, a bunch of people place themselves within a set boundary.
This is the irony and it might be the deconstruction of postmodernism, the fact that ideologies utilizing postmodernism are not actually postmodernists, they are modernist for themselves and postmodernist for everything else. It isn't that they have a problem with grand narratives or objective truths, it's just that they have a problem with everyone else's grand narratives and everyone else's objective truths.
(Sending way later than expected, thought I already sent send on this) -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 07:15:18 JST
sj_zero
The fact that some places still have covid signs up shows how often those spots are actually cleaned post-covid. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Feb-2025 11:54:17 JST
sj_zero
Democracy dies in the darkness they provide
Zerohedges motto was super clever 20 years ago when fight club came out. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Feb-2025 11:54:16 JST
sj_zero
Redpill theatre: we only play fight club and the good parts of the matrix trilogy -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 03-Feb-2025 13:22:58 JST
sj_zero
Some people think the incoming 25% tariffs are Trump bullying Canada and that he didn't expect Trudeau and Canada to fight back.
I'd argue the opposite.
Canada's Liberals are bullies. Massive bullies. They bully their own MPs and ministers, they bully their own people, and when they felt like they could get away with it they bullied the US president. And they spent 10 years spitting on the guy in charge of the United States, And now they're shocked that he is punching back (and he's got a way stronger punch).
We'd be in a totally different scenario if we had a leader like Chretien in charge, he dealt with the bully George W. Bush by being wily and clever, not by trying to out-bully the bully. But that's not how der fuhrer Trudeau functions. He only has one mode, and it doesn't work when he's not the most powerful person in the room. His little toadies only know the same language by the way. Freeland is claiming she should be the next party leader because Trump is afraid of her. I don't believe she has the level of self-deception to actually believe honestly that Trump is scared of her, it's more likely intended to continue the game the liberals have been playing, a stupid game but one that worked well for her until reality hit.
Trump isn't like a native justice minister, Trudeau can't just kick him out of the party for not doing as he's told. He can't tell Trump to sit down and shut up like he did his first secretary. He can't demote Trump like he did to Freeland when she didn't go along with his vote buying scheme late last year. When he's not able to do that, the pathetic nature of his one note bullying becomes clear. In reality, Canada's exports go 70% to the US, and US exports go 13% to Canada. Regardless of whatever power Trudeau pretends to hold, Canada disproportionately will be harmed in a trade war, and Trudeau didn't just win an election on a platform of tariffs. In fact, his political career is nearly over.
There are at least two forms of bullying. One is when a person is on the bottom of the heap and they bully to climb the heap. The other is when the person is at the top of the heap and they bully to try to keep their position at the top. Trudeau's treatment of Trump is the latter. It's similar to how hot girls become mean girls to ensure they stay the top of the roost.
He went out of his way to try to attack and belittle Trump because the president of the united states is obviously more powerful than the prime minister of Canada but Trudeau wanted to stay the cosmopolitan hero to the globalist lib left. The problem is that Trump isn't a woman, and so once he got a real mandate, reality hit like a ton of bricks. The fact is, Canada needs the US more than the US needs Canada, and so a trade war will result in the US winning.
One of the most important keys here is that multiple games are being played that correlate, and Trudeau is only good at one of them, the globalist elite game. His domestic governance has self-evidently gone sour (there's a whole superposition one can analyze there, but I'm simplifying for the purpose of argument as you'd expect given the blurriness heuristic), his global diplomacy has been catastrophic in a number of ways (In terms of diplomacy, Canada's actually made some really bad strides. We're not doing well with China, we're not doing well with India, and those are also great powers we need to be doing somewhat well with), per capita productivity has been in recession for years now, and now trade with the US is facing massive tariffs. Trump is playing more of these games, just not the one Trudeau is good at, but at this moment Trump isn't the same 2016 Trump that Trudeau could just bully because even Trump's own party didn't really support him, in 2025 Trump has laid a lot more groundwork to exercise the power of his office, and so scoffing at him and attacking him doesn't have the same outlook -- but that's the only game Trudeau and his lackeys know how to play. Ironically, in many ways Trudeau is looking more like Trump did in 2016, with a party that doesn't support him, a media that's losing confidence in him, and a new global elite that really opposes him rising.
The right thing would be to quit trying to win the globalist elite game and try instead to start doing better domestically and in terms of the diplomacy game. Chretien had some great stories about convincing George W. Bush not to implement tariffs, "Mr. President you're still eating PEI Potatoes", and I think Poilievre has a good strategy of showing how both Canada and the US can win.
Unfortunately, it's a powerful truth that Trudeau has played every card in his hand to make sure there aren't many options. He prorogued parliament to prevent a spring election (which his platform in 2015 explicitly said he would never do), and so he's basically sitting there on his own until March as the Liberals try to run a leadership campaign prior to the next election in a hail Mary play to try to deal with the catastrophic electoral collapse that polls are suggesting -- the liberals will get to third place, behind the Bloc Quebecois, a regional party with 0 votes outside of the province of Quebec. For such a party to become the official opposition (#2 in seats) as they are projected would be an absolute denouncement of the liberals and NDP who are national parties.
I suspect that this is part of Trump's calculus, basically putting a thumb on the scale of a failing government to help keep things moving towards what will be for him a much friendlier regime in the Conservatives. Unfortunately, that thumb will be a giant deus ex machina for many Canadians until the election can finally take place and some real diplomacy can start. When I say "deus ex machina", I'm invoking the imagery of a giant hand from a machine that imposes power at the end of a story rather than a specific thing that's going to magically end Trudeau when he was actually ok otherwise. The next Liberal leader will have to explain how they can go to (trade) war with the 900lb gorilla and expect to come out victorious, whereas Poilievre is already working to ensure the narrative out of his government is one focusing on mutual benefit in trade.
I fully expect that the Liberals will eventually recover from this current situation, but many smart former liberals are estimating it could take decades. Both the liberals and NDP will need to go back to the drawing board, but I suspect only the liberals will successfully do so, and it'll look like them trying to find a center-left position they used to hold before Trudeau. Unfortunately, they'll be fighting to regain trust the whole way. The NDP by contrast will keep thinking they need to just double down on their current ideas and they just didn't go hard enough.
I fully expect that once Poilievre is in, his new team will be able to talk Trump down from the ledge in part by having policies Trump will agree with, and in part by showing respect to the President instead of immediately talking about how much they hate him. We'll see how much damage is caused in the interim. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Sunday, 02-Feb-2025 13:03:44 JST
sj_zero
I've officially got it set up so I can cast audio over youtube or whatever to the stereo in the back yard. Chromecast to an HDMI to AV converter plugged into the line-in on the amp.
It was actually tougher than it sounds. The house is stucco and therefore surrounded by a wire mesh, so most radio signals don't get far. I started with an older powerline ethernet module, but it was pretty bad. I moved to something newer, then plugged in a really great 802.11ac router I had, and the setup is still limited to 32mbps according to speedtest, but that's more than enough for streaming from multiple devices.
(For people wondering "why not a chromecast audio?", two things: First, you can't just cast youtube to chromecast audio, you have to use youtube music. Second, they don't actually manufacture chromecast audio anymore)
Didn't expect to do this in the middle of winter, but it turns out little guy knows the speakers play music, so we're stomping around in the snow and he's asking for his favorite songs. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Sunday, 02-Feb-2025 01:48:39 JST
sj_zero
The whole hormone levels argument reminds me of something I said in response to that idjit Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
He made the hormones argument, and I'm like "So if you have a hydrogen atom and a helium atom, the atomic weight is different, so you just need to add neutrons and then the atomic weight for tritum is the same as helium-3, so tritium is helium-3, and if you knock a neutron off your helium-3, then it's just deuterium!"
Which is obviously wrong, it's about the number of protons.
Ironically, whether you're a man is generally selected by a number too -- the number of X Chromosomes you have. If you have two, you're a woman, if you have one you're a man. There's a tiny minority of people who have different outcomes, but that's a tragic medical error, not some wonderful proof that postmodern conceptions of sex are true. You don't celebrate that in the same way you don't celebrate having cancer -- because cancer sucks.
(And hey -- it doesn't mean we treat people with cancer badly or anything, but nobody's trying to argue that cancer is a superior state of being because it aligns with someone's politics)
Once I was talking about this concept and someone tried to counter me by saying "I like how you admit that it goes for everyone except the people it doesn’t go for. Solid grounding." I responded by going "Yes, well good arguments require taking into account all the facts. Bad arguments refuse to consider facts that don't fit." People who live in the real world have to deal with reality, and reality is messy sometimes. Sometimes stuff that never happens happens. It doesn't mean that the rule isn't a general rule, just that sometimes the universe surprises us. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 22:52:49 JST
sj_zero
https://youtu.be/J7XuGz5NFB4
Very real video. Lots of the time you want people to think you're broke and deeply in debt because Crabs in a bucket is real and once people think you have money they're like "oh can I borrow some money?" But it isn't a loan, you'll never see that money again. One good reason not just to be frugal, but humble and not braggadocios when you succeed. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 01:52:56 JST
sj_zero
I've been using the amazfit bip for years because my pebble watches all died, but the pebble was head and shoulders better in many ways. More conventional smart watches are actually terrible and non-starters. I'm not charging my watch every night, that's stupid. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Jan-2025 07:19:09 JST
sj_zero
Funny story.
Our daycare isn't run by an illegal immigrant. It's run by a girl whose family has probably been in this country for hundreds of years. She learned how to run a daycare from her mother, who also runs a daycare in this city.
But interesting thing. Thanks in part to Trudeau's immigration policy which has filled every available space with people from other countries, this young lady is shutting down her daycare, and shes leaving the city she was born and raised in. He's doing that because she can't find a place to live and run her business at essentially any reasonable price.
Food for thought when the rich and powerful on the left go on TV to bemoan their poor unloved indentured servant class who pick their cotton and raise their kids for them. Many stories have more than one side. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 27-Jan-2025 09:31:26 JST
sj_zero
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEgwnhLHy3g
Really cool 3d printer design -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Sunday, 26-Jan-2025 08:00:08 JST
sj_zero
Some people are pointing out that the dei executives in the federal government aren't being fired but are instead being given different roles. Now absolutely that could mean someone in the federal government is being sneaky and they are going to continue on their work with the dei, but it is also entirely possible that they put competent managers into at least some of those positions and with that particular mandate completed the organization doesn't want to lose a competent manager.
I know some people who has been perfectly decent people in some very stupid positions over the years. They are able to get things done, but the thing they are trying to get done is stupid. In that case, it's a net positive not losing that management, you can put them towards something productive like making sure they actually get their purpose as an organization done.
Of course, I don't want to disregard the idea that some of these institutions just are hanging on to dead wood. We've seen some dei managers and they won't be contributing positively to any organization they are a part of. Some of those people who have retained employment even though the reason that they were hired has disappeared probably should find themselves laid off as their position is mad redundant. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Saturday, 25-Jan-2025 07:17:30 JST
sj_zero
A couple more nukes and Japan could have been the 51st state.
Shamefur retureato -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Friday, 24-Jan-2025 09:29:34 JST
sj_zero
What the fuck? -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Jan-2025 19:38:52 JST
sj_zero
You know, in Canada suicide hotline is like pizza hotline -- 30 minutes or your suicide is free. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Sunday, 19-Jan-2025 11:30:59 JST
sj_zero
There was a "Japanese age of consent" joke in Solo Leveling Abridged, so I decided to look up the Korean age of consent.
20! You can shoot at North Koreans for 2 years in your mandatory military conscription before you can get a little booty! -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 13:05:14 JST
sj_zero
One thing people need to understand about Justin Trudeau's "resignation" is that it actually prolonged his regime.
Things were looking like his regime was going to effectively end by March and we would be into another election. By proroguing parliament and holding a new leadership race, he's effectively set himself up to hold onto power until the next election.
His resignation was a political move, and one that he himself criticized in his predecessor, Stephen Harper, who prorogued parliament on December 30, 2009 to prevent his failing government from facing a non-confidence vote. In their 2015 platform they called this practice out directly, and in 2017 as part of government the Liberals claimed they were still dedicated to not using the practice.[1] In fact, to make the point Trudeau refused to prorogue his parliament for the entire 4 year term, which is unprecedented. (He's on video somewhere chirping Harper, but it's amazing to say that every piece of video from that era that could look bad for the left magically disappears)
His second term was no longer a cozy majority, so he prorogued parliament in 2020, shutting down investigations into the fact that he's a corrupt piece of garbage. So it isn't like this is a new thing.
Regardless, we're stuck until March now, and it'll take time to get the no confidence motion through, by the time the election starts we're not going to be far from the election we were supposed to have anyway by law. And Trudeau will have escaped the personal defeat he so richly deserves.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/leader-government-house-commons/services/reform-standing-orders-house-commons/2017/march.html
[2] https://www.parl.ca/Committees/en/AMAD?parl=42&session=1 -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 06-Jan-2025 04:42:54 JST
sj_zero
One of the elements of postmodernism is moral relativism. It permeates our thinking and our storytelling in the west, but it's a luxury of a safe and rich society. Contrast the demons in frieren who are depicted as totally evil. Some people regardless claim they are not evil.
In the Graysonian Ethic I wrote a lot about what we could consider to be evil or good, and I considered hypotheticals of creatures that were completely unlike humans. For example, a black widow who is sentient. For them, the idea of our pro-social morality would be completely alien, and to us ideas like eating your meat after copulation would be considered horrendous.
So does that mean that morality doesn't exist and something can only be considered evil if it allows itself to accept within itself the concept that it is doing evil?
I think that it's beyond any reasonable question, if you are in a human society, and you act in ways that are evil to humans, then you are evil.
For the demons in frieren, they are intentionally duplicitous, they exist solely to eat humans, they have nothing to protect with themselves, the only social contacts that they have with other demons are based on fear and dominance, and even the way that they look is solely intended to deceive humans. The human metrics, demons are of course evil. You can say that they aren't evil because they don't think that they're evil, that sort of moral relativism is the sort of thing that people can do when they are safe and not under threat of being eaten by demons. The reality is that they are unrequitedly evil, and that's why narratively there's no problem with Freiren doing what she does.
In our ancient stories, often animals are considered evil if they intentionally go after human communities whether they are doing so I would have hunger or malice or whatever. They are evil because they exist to harm us or will harm us. In some cases that extends to creatures that are clearly not out to harm us in any way such as rats, those rats represent filth and unclean conditions, and so they represent evil because we know what will happen if they are around, people will get sick and die. We can afford not to see animals in this way today because we have largely tamed the natural world as we see it, but to a human, even the mindless and thoughtless force of entropy can be considered evil because eventually it will mean the end of everything, and it is the force against which we toil at all times.
Now, if our stories were not meant for us but were meant for someone else, then maybe you could make an argument that within the frame of that story nothing and nobody was evil. But the thing is, everyone who is going to read a story that we are aware of on planet Earth is a human, and so the inherent lens of any story that is written for us and by us will be us, even if we are trying not to.
It is interesting that the posterchildren of postmodernism, globalist neoliberals, have found their moral absolutism for example in the war in Ukraine. The Trudeaus of the world who saw every moral position as equally acceptable just a few years ago magically found their moral foundations again once a powerful country started invading their puppe-- I mean once a big country was attacking a small country and that's bad. They also seemed to find a use for moral absolutism during covid -- they sounded like George W. Bush, "you're either with us or you're with the virus!" -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 06-Jan-2025 00:25:27 JST
sj_zero
"it's easy not a special skill"
Cool, so that redditor is already doing it, right?
You know, I've been trying to grow food now for several years in a row, and it actually turns out that it's really fuckin hard. Like, you might be able to get something to grow, but the idea of growing enough that you don't die of starvation, especially when you basically have one shot at it, I'm really thankful that I can just go to the store and buy you a 3-month supply of rice for a couple hours of work.
Ironically though, we see the same thing with computers. People keep on claiming that it's just a skill set and that anyone can learn it, but that's not really true. We see lots of people who can't really learn computers. Hell, most of silicon valley at this point is facing giant layoffs because these tech companies picked up all these employees who can't actually do any productive work.
Yeah, it's great you can do a tick tock video about drinking your soy latte, but over the last couple years Facebook has gone down a few times and I guarantee you that it isn't the soy latte swilling tiktokers who got it back up and running.
I have a specific skill at work, and it's one of those skills that a lot of people think is easy because you don't have to lift up a giant physical thing to do it. One guy accused me of trying to hide all the information so that he couldn't learn how to do that thing, so I ended up spending the time and I put together a 100 page manual describing an excruciating detail exactly how to do my job, a several hour training course, and all the hardware required to do it, and guess what? I never heard from that guy again. Because it turns out that doing hard things is hard. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Friday, 03-Jan-2025 22:29:07 JST
sj_zero
Testedcthukbs hurt noq
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