Yes, it’s, once again, a bunch of random thought triggered by podcasts. Sue me. Note on accompanying music. I usually try to have at least a peripheral relation to the Item at hand, but it only worked out for one this time. So a couple are just random music links triggered largely by comments in the previous weeks. So sue me again.
Item the 1st – This one is from Episode 295 of the Darkhorse Podcast. They, like everyone else were having a discussion about the Charlie Kirk assassination, nothing really objectionable(to me at least) until the very end. Bret Weinstein was talking about a tweet (Xeet?) he had made regarding the COVID gene therapies and the murder (I don’t do socials, or at least not X, facebook, tik-tok, etc, so I don’t see some of this stuff except via reference). The gist of it was, essentially, “let’s ban these shots for Charlie, in his name, since he thought they should be banned”. For context, from fairly early on, Weinstein has advocated for banning the shots. I found his invoking Charlie Kirk a bit disturbing and he apparently got push back, but, from my perspective, not for the right reason. Push back came down to there was no proof that Charlie Kirk believed that about the COVID shots. Weinstein addressed that by sharing private messages he had exchanged with Kirk indicating that indeed Kirk was on the same page. But, to me, that’s pretty irrelevant – it’s not whether Charlie Kirk agreed or disagreed with the point that the shots should be banned or at the very least no longer subsidized or coerced. My objection is to that whole “we should do it in his name, for Charlie!”.
That’s taking advantage of an emotional response, in essence using his death to further a disconnected (justified, IMO) cause. In addition to his opinion not being particularly relevant to the question, even if one thinks it is (the argument can be made), it’s a bit ghoulish to be pushing an orthogonal agenda in his name a week after his death. To say nothing of the danger of such appeals to emotion. After all, emotional manipulation after 9/11 got us the Patriot Act and the Iraq war. Every shooting (if it’s high enough profile and can be contorted into the correct narrative – we don’t care too much about a handful of deaths every weekend in Chicago or Baltimore) is followed by people climbing on the dead bodies demanding gun control. The COVID shots should never have been recommended let alone continue to be recommended. They should never have been coerced, either in a ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ fashion. The whole COVID debacle should never be allowed to happen again. But not in Charlie Kirk’s name, but because it’s the right thing to do. Maybe emotionally manipulating people is the only way to accomplish political goals – it certainly seems to work – but it doesn’t sit right with me. Maybe that’s why we lose…
Music choice because Ron made me think about Dream Theater.
Item the 2nd – This one is from Episode 2694 of the Tom Woods podcast. A good pod cast in general with some discussion about nutrition and farming and health care – no earth-shaking revelations or insights, but a good discussion. As one point the guest mentioned his objections to SSN and number tracking based on his religious beliefs. It occurred to me that this is another example of the inversion of cause and effect. Well, maybe not inversion of cause and effect, but rather another instance where a simple proscription replaces a more fundamental argument/idea so as to simplify the application of the fundamental idea in a day to day context. If one views it as an inversion of cause and effect, the effect is SSN and tracking of individuals by the state is bad and the cause (reason/justification) is that my religious doctrine says so. In reality, IMO, the cause is the state assigning numbers and tracking individuals is bad and the effect is we enshrine that idea in our religious doctrine to simplify the transmission of the idea down through time.
Stated differently, the objection is fundamental truth and the instantiation is carried within religious doctrine.Of course, this reasoning goes against the idea of, to be specific to say Christianity, religious doctrine being the revealed truth of the divine being. It rather posits that a well formulated religious doctrine is the distillation of cultural ‘knowledge’, perhaps even epigenetic knowledge. That’s why I’m very favorably inclined to what is sort of broadly defined as western religious traditions, if not the metaphysics of any particular realization of that tradition – they largely have gotten the base ideas right and codified them in a reasonable way so that those lessons, some learned over evolutionary timescales, some generational, can be passed down without having to, in essence, cram a hundred thousand years of accumulated knowledge into a single human lifetime of learning.
Item the 3rd – And in keeping with a theme – This time from Tucker Carlson’s (or as we like to call him around these parts, Tuckerson) podcast, believe it was this one. Obviously, with Shellenberger on, the conversation went pretty quickly to free speech issues. I have no particular issues with the general conversation, but one statement by Tuckerson sort of triggered one of those, “huh, that sounds so ‘reasonable’ but is really a bad idea” moments. Something along the lines of “censorship is supposed to protect the vulnerable”.
It’s one of those statements that just slip by, and over time, become the baseline/backdrop. But it’s really fundamentally wrong, both in implementation and principle.
From a practical/utilitarian perspective, censorship almost never ‘protects the vulnerable’. Almost by definition, those least in need of any postulated protections are the only ones in a position to implement a censorship regime. So even if you accept the premise that it’s OK or justified to censor speech or ideas to protect the vulnerable, a censorship regime will never be restricted to that; it will always be justified and presented as such, but will inevitably be used by the powerful and connected to maintain their positions. So it fails from a utilitarian perspective.
More importantly, at least to me, is that it fails in a fundamental idea sense as well. Speech is manifested thought. Free speech protects thought and censorship restricts and attempts to control thought. If one excuses censorship to ‘protect the vulnerable’, you are explicitly advocating to control thought. And that’s impossible as humans, by our nature (or endowed by the creator if you want a more axiomatic statement), are thinking creatures. That nature cannot be restricted – not should not, cannot. So censorship to protect the vulnerable is simply not possible – that’s why it fails from a utilitarian/practical perspective. To be fair, Tuckerson never said that censorship could be justified to protect the vulnerable, just that that’s what is supposed to do and it fails at that. But it will always fail as it is in direct conflict with human nature – the failure to accomplish its (stated) utilitarian goals is a manifestation of that fundamental conflict.
As a counterpoint, advocates for censorship have a point. Social norms and cultural heritage impose a sort of global censorship – maybe something like the codification of good ideas into religious doctrine. Those norms and codes can, and do, become corrupted, but the hope is that those that survive and become inculcated into doctrine have some modicum of utility. The only response I’ve thus far formulated to that is that those norms and heritage have developed over time and generations and are in a functioning culture, hopefully distillations of the best path (see Item the 2nd). They are not imposed by what one’s immediate impulse is, uninformed by unseen consequences that are not obvious in the moment. But they can be corrupted over time, hence eternal vigilance and all that.
Note on music link – Someone mentioned music in another language and French came up, so I thought of this. But the Item the 3rd link is my favorite from them.
My objection is to that whole “we should do it in his name, for Charlie!”.
Saint Charlie would have wanted it this way.
Fuck
off.
And that goes for every other emotionalist mindreader argument.
Agreed. It was just as dumb when Lefties didn’t want Trump to be allowed to appoint another SC justice (per the Constitutional procedure) because it was Ginsburg’s “dying wish” that someone other than Trump appoints her successor.
She could have gotten her wish by retiring while O’Bama was king.
Yes. That was an astonishing display of megalomania that she just could not force herself to let go of power. Jaw-dropping really. I still chuckle about it. She fucked ’em good.
Someone mentioned music in another language and French came up, so I thought of Sunday Girl.
Mmmmm, Blondie. I feel a tingle going up my… leg.
Speaking of censorship. TW – Ars
To shield kids, California hikes fake n— fines to $250K max
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/to-shield-kids-california-hikes-fake-nude-fines-to-250k-max/
From a subheading: American families “are in a battle” with AI
Gee, it really sucks that there’s no way for families to monitor or limit what their kids are doing online. They have no choice but to give them 24/7 access to computers and smartphones. Too bad. Better just regulate the AI companies instead.
Funny this was in today’s WSJ as well.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/ai-avatar-likeness-sora-68bf426c?st=LJJV7r&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
California hikes fake n— fines
Rachel Dolezal hardest hit….
I got lost on Item #2.
How so?
I can get verbose and convoluted, it is known. If I can try to be more succinct, though that usually doesn’t work.
The main point is that objection to government numbering and data bases of people is often framed as a religious objection.
“My religion warns about the number of the beast. Therefore, this is wrong and I object.”
versus how I think it really works:
“This sort of behavior leads to bad things. Therefore my religion has incorporated an objection to this activity into its stories and doctrine for me to refer to.”
While I think the later is the correct ‘intellectual’ understanding, the former, by virtue of its simplicity and axiomatic nature, is a much more practical way to object to bad ideas and is how humans pass down generational knowledge.
I am a caveman libertarian. The second example confuses and frightens me. Is the sun being swallowed up by the moon? I don’t know!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AzAFqrxfeY
The first way of explaining it works better for me personally. Either way, don’t cater to the caveman.
caveman libertarian
I thought you were a bug-eyed alien?
Wrt to the “first way…works better”. That certainly seems to be the case for most people and, one might argue, the most robust realization (hence why it works for most people?). It doesn’t particularly work for me, but, while arrogant, I’m not so arrogant so as to assume the first way is wrong. In fact, I think they are the same thing, modulo the question of “why does my religion say it’s wrong?”.
I knew a guy back in a now defunct chat-room who refused to get his daughter a SSN. I wonder how she is doing now?
Remember 5 and his sisters 3 and 4?
https://peanuts.fandom.com/wiki/555_95472
https://peanuts.fandom.com/wiki/3_and_4
I am not a podcast guy, but I have fallen into watching the “Chris Harris on Cars” podcast, which I have mentioned previously. Four men talking (mostly) about car world. Some of it interests me, some does not. In the most recent one, one of them told a story about being accosted (not his word) by a fan who told him how much he enjoyed listening to them and how cathartic and therapeutic it was. This is England, by the way. Which is all true. They were all very pleased and flattered and humble.
However, I, being me, was struck by the bizarreness of this. How can it be in any way remarkable or extraordinary for intelligent sensible people to say intelligent sensible things?
These are the times in which we live.
I find assertions based on objections to [X] based on religious beliefs to be enraging.
Perhaps. In the past I’ve been more prone to that reaction. But it does provide a convenient (necessary?) short hand way of passing down knowledge and experience, so long as the religion remains functional and at least somewhat adaptable. That might even provide an evolutionary explanation for the development and utility of religious belief as a means of simply transmitting acquired experience and knowledge.
Humans have been asking the basic questions: “How should I best live my life?” “How should society be organized?” “What is the nature of reality?” for a long time. Religion is as you suggest, a primary way that we collect, distill, and transmit the progress we have made toward finding answers.
That certainly doesn’t mean that any particular religion has found ultimate truth, but the modern dismissal of religious ideas as silly, or backward, is very stupid. Science is only useful for answering the last of them, and discarding the ideas that thousands of years of our predecessors collected and tested and distilled because they are unscientific misses the point.
To me, the better question is, “Is what’s trying to be enforced more important than someone’s beliefs?”
Usually, the answer is no. Doesn’t mean the beliefs are right, but I grant people the ability to be amazingly wrong about items, as long as it impacts them alone.
Interesting talk about the Spanish Civil War and the parallels with our current situation.
https://rumble.com/v70962y-lessons-from-the-spanish-civil-war.html
Oddly enough, I have been reading about Italy’s Days of Lead, and how that is a good way of looking at our current societal problems.
Something along the lines of “censorship is supposed to protect the vulnerable”.
I was reading something a little while ago about the Supreme Court preparing to further rip the guts out of the Voting Rights Act.
All I hear, in those arguments about giving black people a voting district of their own is, “Them darkies is nothing but pathetic feckless children, and we must aid and guide them.”
If the voters in some majority minority district had elected Herschel Walker, or God forbid, some random white male Republican, by a landslide, we’d be hearing a different tune.
If I recall correctly, this occurred when I was in college, swapping my New York drivers license for ne from Colorado.
Anyway, the clerk said, “We can just use your Social Security number for this.” Dumb as I was back then, my first reaction was, “That’s just stupid. Why on earth would I do that?” I declined.
Happened to me when I lived in Maryland for a year – the clerk insisted I needed to give them my SSN. Being prepared for that, I was able to cite chapter and verse from the statute that, no, you cannot require my SSN. Still took me 30 minutes and a supervisor or two to get a DL issued without providing a SSN. I’m sure I’d have a different experience now…
When they implemented SSNs, they vowed they would just be used for benefits administration, not identification or tracking. Aaaand here we are.
It’s something I always bring up when people want some apparently small encroachment on our rights and swear that it would only be used for a few extreme cases where public safety is at stake. Like a gun registry.
Government seeks to grow itself and expand power. Always. It will never turn the power dial up just a little bit and leave it there. It will just wait for you to get distracted so they can crank it up.
I just heard yesterday that Europe now requires biometrics on your way in and out.
I guess I will never visit Europe again.
I don’t ever want to travel to Europe again. But business travel is always a possibility
I just heard yesterday that Europe now requires biometrics on your way in and out.
It’s Schengen Zone only.
Scratch that. The UK changed its rules. Tourists from the US require a visa or ETA now. The ETA requires a face picture which tells me they’re collecting biometrics. Visas require biometrics now.
That includes all the major countries at this point. Even Italy.
Poking around more:
The UK is not in the Schengen Zone.
The Schengen Zone biometrics checks for non-EU citizens started October 12th.
The UK is using its own system.
Ireland and Cyprus, at this time, are not in the Schengen Zone and so are not using biometrics.
I thought Ireland and the UK were in an immigration zone union, so I’m surprised that they aren’t using biometrics.
Several Balkans countries are also not in the Schengen Zone or EU at this time and so aren’t part of this system.
Going to the UK, we had to do an ETA (electronic travel authorisation) before we left. When we landed, to go through customs and get into the country was a nearly fully automated system. Step up, picture taken, scan passport, get a green check, and the gates open for you. Similar process to come back into the US.
At no point did I have to talk to a single person to either enter or leave the country.
In college my student ID number was my SSN. It was also the number they used to post test results outside the professors’ offices.
Same at my alma mater. I wonder if the ID thieves went after those with the lowest or the highest grades. 🤔
40 years later, I still remember my student ID.
Heh. I still use mine as an identifier on a website for log in.
Your student ID was “doktor of BRAIN SCIENCE!”?!?!?!?
Well, they did know me after all.
My Air Force ID number was my Social Security number.
The Army posted rosters, memoranda, etc on bulletin boards with name, rank, and SSN until the 90s.
1.) It’s much easier to lead people around by the feelz, versus convincing them onto your side through a critical review of the facts. Our pitiful education system doesn’t help much in this regard.
2.) This is a good example of the most important role of the church (in my mind, as a nonbeliever) – formulating a consistent moral philosophy, and teaching that moral philosophy to its subjects. The fully secular version of ‘the mark of the Beast’ can be phrased as, ‘Anyone who can track your movements and finances automatically has a great deal of power over you, and that power can all too easily be used for selfish or greedy ends.’
3.) Anyone so stupid as to think, “…censorship is supposed to protect the vulnerable,” should be publicly horsewhipped. Cui bono? Censorship is supposed to protect the censor.
Re: 2 – Agreed wholeheartedly. The issue I’m getting at, I think, also as non-believer (insert JBP froggy voice – what do you mean by ‘believe’ or ‘true’) is that the religious and secular are not separate versions.
The secular version, necessarily learned over the course of generations, is the religious version. Just encoded into a religious framework so we don’t have to relearn the lesson over every few generations (though we still seem to have to, strangely enough…).
SSNs are not bad because God says so, God says they are bad because people have learned the consequences over time.
Maybe that distinction is not important, but it keeps sitting in the back of my mind as being important.
Yikes.
https://x.com/PicturesFoIder/status/1977702789498143014
Windmills should be banned.
Look at UnCivil Quixote here!
No pilot cars? This wasnt in the US. I see them on I 40 and they have four or more support vehicles per blade.
It isn’t in the US.
timid drivers are more dangerous that aggressive drivers.
Also, the gas pedal can get you out of trouble nearly as often as the brake pedal. Regardless, I don’t know why people insist on lollygagging next to trucks on the freeway. I can’t think of a worse place to be from a personal danger perspective.
I don’t know why people insist on lollygagging next to trucks on the freeway.
Especially when they just leisurely migrated into the left lane to pass said truck, cutting me off as I was going around both. And insist at passing at dv=+0.1 mi/hr. So now I’m also stuck lollygagging next to the behemoth instead of being past them and out of (that) danger in 1 sec.
中国人
🤷♂️
inorite?
Yikes.
What a dumb fuck. If you get next to something like that, stand on it.
Look…I’m not saying it’s the greatest troll of all time…but has to be top 10 right?
https://x.com/NickJFreitas/status/1978061617431531586
When I was fairly young my mother asked my brother and I if we wanted SS#’s. It was optional then. I guess I could always smell a rat because I was horrified at the idea and said not no but hell no. My brother agreed. She got them for us anyway and told us about it when the cards arrived. I am still mad at her about that. Did I mention that she still thinks Jimmy Fucking Carter hung the moon and Obama is just dreamy?
My parents still think MSNBC is telling them the truth.
I am guessing they went to jr. college in the late ’50s to early ’70s. The CCs were et up with fucking hippie/commie professors. I guess they still are. That is what happened to my mother. My father went to Rolla School of Mines – exactly the opposite.
You would think that, but they were definitely not hippies. They both grew up in Lake County, IN, where Democrats have always been in power. There are refineries and steel mills, so there’s a lot of union presence. It was driven into their heads that the Democrats were the party of the working class, and Republicans were the party of the rich. They haven’t gotten the memo that’s no longer true, because as I said they still watch MSNBC and read their AARP newsletters.
Look upon my mother’s donations and despair. Voted for Carter twice. 🤦🏻♀️
A major point of contention with my mother was her filing out my draft registration stuff after I explicitly told her not too. Fortunately, she did not have my SSN, so I never got fully registered.
Ooh. I’d be furious.
“Just do it. At any U.S. post office. Hey: thank you.” Grrr!
Not having a Y chromosome, I sometimes wonder if I could have gotten away with not registering.
Ooh. I’d be furious.
Would have been bad enough if she’d just done it, could be forgiven as maternal over-protectiveness. But to call and after being explicitly told that I was ignoring it intentionally, on principle, and for a purpose, please just throw it out; To go ahead and do it anyway in that situation was not ideal for out relationship.
As to ‘getting away with [it]’ – has never really negatively affected me. I never intended to get student loans and it ensured I would never be tempted. It’s good to be stubborn, but when one is not sure they’ll be able to eat at the end of the month, principles can be tempted.
It is a question on security clearance forms: Are you registered: “No” If no, why? “I own myself, the state doesn’t”. Strangely hasn’t seemed to cause any particular issues.
👍 and a 🫸🫷.
Yeah, I didn’t need student loans. Heck, I didn’t need college.
Thank a teechur
There’s little good news in the spring 2025 reading scores. They show slight gains made across grade levels in 2022 have been erased, with students across grade levels mostly performing at or even below pandemic-era achievement lows.
In short, students from third- through eighth grade are still performing worse than students in the same grades in 2019. This “stagnation is consistent regardless of race/ethnicity or school poverty level,” NWEA said in a press release.
They’re overworked and underpaid.
Tom Kane, of Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research, likens these rounds of student achievement data to helpful health checks to see how students are doing.
This report shows the children stubbornly refuse to improve.
Why are we wasting teachers’ time making them administer these tests, when they have important teaching and teaching related things to do?
I got a SS number when I got my first real job, in high school. They wouldn’t hire you without one. Weird, right?
The move to give districts and states more data to help inform their decision-making – including on whether and how to spend scarce school dollars on academic interventions – comes as the Trump administration has gutted the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the division within the U.S. Department of Education that collects, analyzes and publishes federal student achievement data.
These fucking people…
“Scarce” dollars. We spend more than any other country per student last I looked at the numbers, and we get nothing back in return for it.
The lowest performing districts (read – black school districts) have some of the highest dollar-per-student ratios in the country.
It’s almost as if hiring teachers based on ideological purity, insisting that no student ever repeat a grade, refusing to punish misbehavior unless all demographic categories receive punishments at the same rate, and basing every decision on an ideology at war with reality doesn’t help students learn no matter how much money you throw at it.
I was going to say “doesn’t work” but then my critical thinking kicked in and I realized I was imposing my naive definition of ‘working’ as students learning basic skills like math and literacy, when the system is clearly deigned to produce future antifa members and demoralized subjects.
And there it is. Trump went back in time fifty years and started the ball rolling on idiocracy.
Huh, California passed a bill banning Glocks, effective July 2026:
https://www.guns.com/news/2025/10/13/california-becomes-1st-state-to-outlaw-sale-of-glock-similar-semi-auto-pistols
Background checks to buy firearms barrels too. With all the televised temper tantrums from the Oregon and Washington leftists I had forgotten how much Cali sucks.
They outlawed a brand. I wonder if that is going to hold up.
It might be overturned. We’ll see in ten years or so after appeals and whatnot.
They outlawed “cruciform” trigger mechanisms, which all Glocks and a few other manufacturers’ models use.
Exempting LEOs. OFC.
Why are we wasting teachers’ time making them administer these tests, when they have important
teaching and teaching related thingsSocial engineering to do?hth
I was just informed by my brother that Flava-Flav’s ex is now dating Bill O’Reilly. I thought you guys needed to know this.
Further proof this is a simulation?
Bridgette Nielson? Stallone’s gonna be pissed.
I thought that Freddie Mercury was dead…
Lol.
It’s not a rental property, it’s a safe house!
https://archive.is/Hsj1e
Why am I not surprised?
So Alec Baldwin appears to have tried to pass truck on the shoulder and the truck decided to pull over at the same time.
https://x.com/Bubblebathgirl/status/1978119883293331815
I am disappointed that karma is still delayed.
I had a long conversation with a young person recently. He says the consensus in his generation is that they feel born into bondage, that the boomers and X’rs got theirs and slammed the door behind them. The American dream is beyond their reach.
He is really pissed about the Charlie Kirk murder. This is not JFK and it aint 1963. They have social media. It is much harder to hide things and lie about things than it was when the MSM had complete control of the narrative.
This is true. I started paying more attention and it looks to me like his take is mostly accurate.
Here is where this is going: The PTB will be forced more and more to control social media and what people can say. We are seeing it now in England. If you had told me 20 years ago that England would be imprisoning people for opinions that deviate from the approved state narrative or even for telling off color jokes I would have laughed at you, yet here we are. Child protection act my ass. The only thing they are censoring has nothing to do with children.
The notion that censorship exists to protect the vulnerable is pure fucking evil. A deliberate and calculated evil.
The for the children stuff is just the camel’s nose under the tent every time. The Brits are in big trouble, what with the digital ID and AI being there to tie everything together it’ll be almost impossible to get rid of the trash that makes up their government. We, of course, aren’t that far behind though.
firearms
the only real difference
We are yet to be a broken people due to over dependence on the government. The British rebelled when told they needed to cut social spending. We still celebrate in many corners.
We celebrate in this corner; the people at Reason might; that’s not that many really. Try cutting social security.
Spoiler alert: the adults are the children.
I had to end a friendship with an Englishman. Lovely man when we weren’t discussing Brexit, vaxes, et cetera. He seemed sure (because Cantabrigian?) that he’d be one of the clipboard-toting contingent.
Where’s our Limey been, SOW?
Huh, when do I get mine?
The thought occurred…
She could have gotten her wish by retiring while O’Bama was king.
She wanted Hillary to pick her replacement. Hillary was the sure thing, remember?
nyuk nyuk nyuk
nyuk nyuk indeed. Once they get their claws in power they cannot force themselves to let go. I cant understand that then I remind myself: We won the scariest monster contest.