Pelosi has made many suspicious trades: https://insider-trading.org/the-nancy-pelosi-insider-trading...

Suspicious trades before Trump's Iran announcements: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cge0grppe3po

Neither subjective or consensus accounts of truth (neither of which correspond with postmodernism or utilitarianism in the way you imply) are obviously inconsistent. Philosophers would not bother talking about them if that were the case.

Funnily enough, I can't tell which of Stalin and Mother Theresa you are worried will be confused with the other, given that many people have opposite ideas of which was moral and which was immoral.

Modern religions define objective morality, not objective truth (excluding metaphysical assertions, which are not what one usually means by truth).

There's what's that quote about good art disturbing the comfortable and comforting the disturbed.

Eating is very stressful for many autistic people because of trauma and lack of (non-enmeshing) support in childhood. They don't learn how to make a comfortable environment for themselves or that it is even possible. Every meal becomes stressful. Force feeding or depending completely on others.

Masking goes so deep, it's just not possible to easily convey with words, because after a lifetime of masking you don't even notice all the things that you do that count.

"Presenting behavior in a socialized way when necessary" has a hidden part. Presenting what behavior? To whom? Presenting autism-coded behavior around autistic people is stress-free.

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0: lol

1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-truth-about-h...

2: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9087551/

3: https://autisticadvocacy.org/policy/briefs/intervention-ethi...

4: citing a source for this one would be an insult to the reader's intelligence

5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania

6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamber_pot

7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Dully

I searched 'economics 101 strategic industries' and found this[1] within 30s which includes an overview of 'national self-sufficiency'. It presents the standard argument, including the parts you claim the standard argument ignores.

I personally favor decentralized planning over markets, but I find it unnecessary to slander economics.

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1: https://www.adamsmith.org/economics-101

I found working through them was helpful when learning K, and comparing the solutions to other languages can be illuminating.

Trump didn't run on project 2025 precisely because he knew it wasn't the will of the public.

My personal view is that much evil in the world occurs because people who make decisions and those that do them are not the same set. That any one, or any small group, can inflict so much unnecessary suffering seems surely to be a sign of pathology in the structure of our civilization. The fix, in my view, is to reassert direct personal responsibility, and to deny the legitimacy of looking to systems of rules to launder responsibility.

If I was a fed right now I'd probably already have been arrested for breaking people's legs. There are way more feds than there are people telling them what to do.

As executive workers, they have a legal obligation to execute the law irrespective of what is decreed. Even then, they have their own - private - moral principles. The Nuremberg trials were clear: following orders is not a defense.

When I was younger I stayed up to see what happens. The worst experience of my life was when I lied down to sleep and felt 'too tired to go to sleep' and then started hallucinating sirens. I have no idea how long I was up; after a few days I lost track. I had to paced to stay awake, which I did the entire time. I got pronounced disassociative symptoms - which I'm prone to anyway - ("it's not me in control of my body; there is a mutiny", "my reflection is weird/scary/different; that is not me", "the lines that make up the walls and reality don't seem to lay correctly"), gaps in memory, broken pattern matching (everything looks like a spider, chasing down mundane sounds to figure out what they are), and mixing up memories and imagined thoughts (e.g., fill up a cup, go to drink from it, it is empty and I'm not sure if I filled it up and then drank from it or imagined filling it up or if my memories are out of order).

Given the loss of contact with reality, I could see it being easy to manipulate people if you are in the room with them. I was alone, but if someone told me another me talked to them and then drank from the cup, the mix up could easily seem like evidence that it had actually happened that way, especially if I was trusting, vulnerable and open-minded. And once someone has a model that suggests that, they would probably make up stories on their own to support it.

So, yeah, definitely agree on the importance of sleep.

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1: https://polysleep.org/wiki/Uberman

There is some precedent; the Twin Flame cult coerced transition in some members if I remember correctly. My guess is it was emotional manipulation used to make them do something that makes them more vulnerable to control. If you transition and you are not trans, you are going to have a hell of a lot of dysphoria, and shaming people and telling them it's because they are not trying hard enough/a good enough person/etc. would absolutely make it hard to break away.

I have been diagnosed both autistic and adhd and I experienced food insecurity despite living in a house with several balconies and a detached garage bigger than my friends' families' houses because my parents thought I would get over it and start going out to eat with them if they didn't bring me any food. I don't think they intended deliberately to harm me - or realize that me not going out to eat with them didn't mean there was enough food - but their authoritarian way of thinking did the harm nonetheless and it's a completely predictable outcome of such a way of thinking; so it's not "I didn't mean it" so much as "I don't want to think differently because I value my attachment to this mode of thinking more than the wellbeing of others; and when I harm them I'll say 'nothing could be done' because changing how I approach the problem isn't on the table".

The healthiest thing most autistic/adhd people ever do is moving from 'I am sick' to 'the society I inhabit has an autoimmune disorder'.

A critical part of this is controlling information; people need to be convinced not to unite, because if they notice what is happening early on, they can brute force victory through sheer numbers.

Another element of that is maintaining/gaining control of institutions with 'true believers' who are willing to commit cruelty to satisfy the party's ambition is a critical part of progressively removing minorities without the chosen majority realizing that they might be next.

Additionally, making the situation uncomfortable and scary to get people to voluntary leave whittles down the population of people who might be capable and motivated to resist. And making it seem like they have more power than they do and making it unclear what will cause harm to them can cause people to 'obey in advance', giving up power to the party which they do not have.

I'm referring to pragmatics not semantics; the use of dictionary definitions is a category error.

No, I was not bullied. People like I describe would posture, I would raise my eyebrow and wait, and then they would treat me nice and pretend it didn't happen. Dominance as form outside the bedroom is remarkably ineffective. That's why I call it dominance as form.

"When a diplomat says yes, he means ‘perhaps’; When he says perhaps, he means ‘no’; When he says no, he is not a diplomat. —Voltaire (Quoted, in Spanish, in Escandell 1993.)

These lines — also attributed to H. L. Mencken and Carl Jung — may or may not be fair to diplomats, but are surely correct in reminding us that more is involved in what one communicates than what one literally says; more is involved in what one means than the standard, conventional meaning of the words one uses. The words ‘yes,’ ‘perhaps,’ and ‘no’ each has a perfectly identifiable meaning, known by every speaker of English (including not very competent ones). However, as those lines illustrate, it is possible for different speakers in different circumstances to mean different things using those words. How is this possible? What’s the relationship among the meaning of words, what speakers mean when uttering those words, the particular circumstances of their utterance, their intentions, their actions, and what they manage to communicate? These are some of the questions that pragmatics tries to answer; the sort of questions that, roughly speaking, serve to characterize the field of pragmatics."[1]

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1: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatics/

The actually effective strategies are available to the insecure but shunned and rejected because they cannot be tolerated, creating a self-imposed impotence.

The word alpha, in almost every context I've observed, is used exclusively to refer to such dominance as form, especially in substitution for dominance as function. i.e., it is applied almost exclusively to people who are definitionally not dominant.

The only exception I have encountered is women-focused kink literature which, being fantasy, maintains that dominance as form is dominance as function so as to make sexual fantasies seem more real.

In short: you are describing a kink, not real life. Though I consider that you might be joking too; I really can't tell.

In such a case, the existence of a higher metaphysical plane is purely aesthetic. In terms of predictions, both models are equally correct, being identical. The correctness of the internal representation is beyond epistemological limits, and arguably a meaningless or ill-formed proposition. For a significant difference, the models must make different predictions. But the conventional understanding (say the standard model) is carefully constructed and deviations by laypeople are invariably simplifications or are due to impaired reality testing.

This situation is the same as religion, because it is one. Either the religion doesn't make predictions about reality, in which case it's difference is purely aesthetic (as a model of reality), or it does and in practice is either trivially falsifiable or copying what is already known (note that the old well known religions have long since had their predictions tested).

Psychedelic experiences could, in theory, produce interesting hypotheses about reality; just like Scientology and the "Twin flame" people could. But in practice it almost always seems to produce crackpot stuff like "you can make a perceptual motion machine with time crystals and fractals; also Einstein, Aristotle, and Tupac already knew this but no one was paying attention; luckily drug-induced divine revelation has bequeathed this information via direct transmission; if only everyone else experienced ego death, then maybe they could be as great as I".

This is the hubris I perceive in the idea that scientists, philosophers, etc. that have dedicated their life to the study of particular tiny pieces of reality and honed a disciplined sense of intellectual rigor are going to be outdone by random people tripping. It is uniquely offensive and arrogant.

That said, in so far as 'reality' is 'my model of reality', individuals may gain psychological insight by partaking in 'spiritual' activity, including psychedelics, and it follows that they may gain a 'special understanding of (their) reality' in that way. The problems are the magical thinking implicated in universalizing personal insight, the pitfall of assuming independence of realities beyond subjective experience, the belief subjective perception is unlimited by physical reality, and in some a tendency to insist that such insight cannot be gained in other (more mundane) ways.

From that perspective, the experience of thinking in words or pictures is distinct from actually thinking in words or pictures. Saying one thinks in one of these ways seems to be saying what they identify thinking with.

For example, I don't usually think of fantasy as thinking. If I day dream, I wouldn't say I am thinking, but that is fairly visual. To what degree am I saying something about myself vs my identity if I say I do or don't think in words given that context?

Relatedly, I've noticed that when it comes to remembering something, it is not 'I' that remember. Rather 'I' set up mental cues and direct focus, which then hopefully causes the memory to be placed within my awareness. This happens below the level of direct experience. But I might say I failed to remember, taking responsibility for something that 'I' - the part separated from the automatic functions of the body - did not do.

So I'm suggesting statements about words vs pictures are about ego, metaphor and meaning-building, and not about actual mechanisms or communicating actual differences in the experience of thinking.

It can be difficult to talk about these things because such conversations implicitly occur between our identities, not between who we actually are - something beyond our grasp - and the noise this introduces is something I don't know how to surmount, or if it can be surmounted.

If you have a good reason to create a file, and the value you want to identify it by contains a newline, then that is a good reason to create a filename containing new lines. Filenames are arbitrary bytes excluding null. Regardless at scale, eventually such a file will end up being created. Encoding bugs, libraries, user creation, messed up copy/paste, etc. File names may not even be utf8.

`ls | cmd` is also just an sh code smell. Bash is big on discipline and suffering and not so much on correctness (like C and forth) so code smells matter more. When I worked with/maintained large bash/sh scripts, one `ls | cmd` and I would reread everything the person wrote because it was very likely it was horribly broken. Another one is 'set -euo pipefail`, which people love to set but often don't understand.

A lot of sh/bash, maybe most of it, is written by people that don't take it seriously as a language, and it shows. Also basically everything on stack overflow about it is wrong, and probably everything chatgpt says. I remember it being uniquely bad in that regard. To the point that whenever someone says a neat bash fact, it is better to assume they are part of an elaborate conspiracy to get you to write catastrophic bugs until verified independently. Anything short of that level of paranoia and you eventually do the steam thing and delete everyone's files.

The article could have been titled "why you shouldn't use sh".