I feel like this objection makes the most sense in a particular context, like a culture that views beef as some sort of prize, or a marker of being ahead in the competition for social status with one’s neighbors. (U.S. culture very much views it that way.)

If Person A eats only 1 unit of beef per month, what would make dropping to zero “unfair” is if we assume that they are too poor to afford more (“losing”), or engaging in asceticism, but holding on to that one unit as a vital connection to the status game, or a special treat that they covet.

But what if it’s just food? Person A may just not be that into beef, and probably not even miss it, just like Person B probably also wouldn’t notice a difference between 100 units and 99 units. In the sense that neither A or B really would notice a small change all that much, it’s fair

Anyway, random thoughts from somebody who thinks steak is just kind of meh.

You’re surprised that something that’s not good enough is… not good enough?

I’m having trouble believing that this is a good-faith comment, as the strawman bears so little resemblance to what I wrote. The vein of thinking is that reduced-harm is still harm—maybe Harm Lite—and that we can only sustain any level of harm for so long before it’s fatal. Without the metaphor: The harm-reduction argument of “vote blue no matter who” is utterly stupid, because it only works if “blue” wins every election forevermore. That’s highly unrealistic. The fascists were never just going to go away; they took over one of the only two viable political parties and were going to win an election sooner or later because U.S. elections routinely swing back and forth between the only two viable political parties.

Furthermore, the accelerationist concept is to shock the people into action with the contrast of how bad things got so quickly, while the harm-reduction concept seems to entail letting some people non-figuratively die along the way, as Sen. Ernst applauds, as long as it’s fewer people than it could have been. (No, I don’t think that the harm-reduction proponents want that, I’m just observing what appears to be the real-world implementation.) Personally, I have hoped against hope that we could change course, and fix the only-two-viable-political-parties problem before things got bad, before any metaphorical or non-figurative dying.

All of those are center-right policies, tinkering with the mechanics of a fundamentally neo-liberal system, when that system is slowly crushing us (57% of Americans living hand-to-mouth). Imagine why voters aren’t fired up to come out and support a boost to, say, semiconductor research spending to strengthen U.S. supply chain resilience.

That’s not even remotely the same vein of thinking, even though both Ernst and I used the word “die.”

Biden did very, very few “left” things. His policies were center-right. (For example, when the railroad workers threatened the economy with a strike, the left-wing response would be to temporarily nationalize the rails; the right-wing response would be to protect the railroad companies and remove the workers’ ability to strike.) Progressives showed up to vote for Harris, anyway, as the numbers show. The mythical “centrists” did not.

If “harm” and “less harm” are the only two options, then the only question is how quickly you die. There’s the argument that we have to do “harm reduction” in order to buy time to organize for something better, but we’ve been procrastinating for decades apparently. Since all of history informs us that humans act only when inaction is no longer tenable (and sometimes not even then), really the only material difference between “harm reduction” and accelerationism is, again, the timeline.

The Harris campaign tried to appeal to the centrists, and look how that turned out.

I appreciate the gamer aesthetic when scientists need to buy gear with the power to run scientific calculations for relatively cheap. The RGB lights under the case windows bring a bit of pizzazz to the laboratory.

TIL

That’s why electroconvulsive therapy uses pulses of about a millisecond. But, then, it’s not actually turning the power off, ECT is more of a warm reset of consciousness.

Huh. If traffic is more likely to kill me than violent crime, it’s a dishonest emotional reaction to fear traffic more than violent crime?

Yes, if your city has more homicides than traffic deaths, the bigger problem is—drum roll please—homicides.

But if your city has more traffic deaths than homicides, then traffic is a bigger problem than homicides. Which is the whole point of this post.

TL;DR: We can’t hold them accountable for their crimes, because they might try to hold us accountable for the same crimes.

One of the Big Lies that they repeated over and over throughout the election season was the one about the “border crisis,” where allegedly criminals and rapists were flooding into the country across the southern border by the millions. They promised to round up and deport all of them, literally millions of people. You can see where the problem arose: Lies collided head-on with reality. There simply are not millions of migrants for ICE to round up. They don’t exist. They never existed. It was all a lie.

Now, the regime has to appear like it’s Doing Something™ by actually deporting people. Stephen Miller has even given ICE a quota of 3,000 deportations a day, and it’s struggling. They have to make the numbers somehow, and the low-hanging fruit are the immigrants that they already have records on, and know about. ICE can just comb the immigration records, and go pick up people whom they know exactly where to find. Morality and logic have nothing to do with it, it’s all about throwing the red meat of performative cruelty to their base, and intimidation to their political enemies.

My guess was cave exploration. He said he was going to a remote area where pooping was an option, but he didn’t want to, which makes sense when you know you’ve gotta carry that shit out with you in your cave pack. There are only a handful of scientific cave expeditions that go into caves for three days, so I figured that if he said so, he would unequivocally dox himself.

I don’t think that that was the claim. We have car terrorism now, and since the 1980’s according to the Wikipedia list of incidents, and bollards can help protect potential victims. It’s not a new technology, they knew about them in 1931, so what’s our excuse for not installing them?

I find it easy to switch back and forth between the two color combinations: If I assume that the scene is in full sun, then the dress looks blue and black. If I assume that it’s in the shade, but with a brightly-lit background, then it looks white and gold.

It feels like 5 years ago, but it was only back in January that a man used a truck to kill 14 people in a ramming attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, LA. The city had been warned, and knew of the need to have bollards installed, but cheaped out on temporary bollards, which were apparently malfunctioning at the time of the attack. There had been a vehicle-ramming attack at the Christmas market in Magdeburg in December, and an attack in Munich following in February.

I’d say that the title is right on. Car terrorism is a thing.

It that’s true, and we’re afraid Iran might use them, then it seems like a bad idea to attack it.