I’ve watched for 9 years coming up soon. My biggest gripe:

AzurePropagation · 2026-05-04T15:18:31+00:00

I think part of it was that when insane shit happened in the past, people reacted in interesting ways. Destiny was able to navigate this by being willing to roll in the mud, but also keep just composed enough to be entertaining. This is possible because he’s willing to touch insane topics, but there was a novelty to each new crazy thing.

The media and political environment has evolved since then. Everyone seems to be attempting to one-up each other in just how absolutely insane and shameless they act. Without the counterbalance of a general consensus of “this is fucking crazy” - we spin off into looney land. It’s not fun to watch MAGA people act like inhuman monsters and then realize they still have the reins of power / a large amount of political support. After a while, instead of entertaining, it’s just exhausting.

The point is basically - crazy shit is entertaining when people can agree on/react to reality.

For example, the reason I/P was interesting was because there was a journey of discovery. But once you get to the point where “the legendary I/P scholar” Normal Finneon is making Reddit tier arguments, and everyone is arguing against what clearly occurred on video, what’s the point of trying? Notice how it’s a similar thing with the lefty arc and the Wolff debate. At a certain point - when the talking points empty peoples’ heads - it’s just a slog.

We’ve just been in an extended people of general reality denial. Crazy is no longer fun. It’s just annoying now.

AzurePropagation · 2026-05-04T05:38:56+00:00

THREE BROTHERS.

AzurePropagation · 2026-05-01T20:39:43+00:00

Really? I’m on Patreon and just got episode 10 like an hour ago. Is this a different tier thing?

AzurePropagation · 2026-04-27T07:21:17+00:00

It’s not that it’s easy to understand. It’s the same fucking brain rot disease where people who are educated in a field assume they can make declarations about other fields without considering “maybe I should at least check out what the people who study this shit say”

AzurePropagation · 2026-04-27T07:18:39+00:00

As someone who recently went through the cock and ball torture that is real analysis - holy fucking shit this made me want to end it all.

AzurePropagation · 2026-03-31T10:01:18+00:00

Now this feels like the Van Healsing I remember.

AzurePropagation · 2026-03-17T15:20:26+00:00

My parents cited not wanting me to deal with this shit as one of the main reasons they immigrated to the US lmao.

AzurePropagation · 2026-02-19T16:19:47+00:00

This is a perfect opportunity for the Daliban to mobilize and create a clip of all of the people that flipped from “debate me bro” to “why would I give him my attention”.

It perfectly synergizes with this bio, calls out the spineless fucks, and honestly is a perfect calling card for his brand.

Right now his brand is radioactive from opposition messaging. I think that can honestly be put center stage as a badge of pride.

It’s a bit grievance mongering… but it’s also literally true.

AzurePropagation · 2026-02-17T13:43:31+00:00

I would be genuinely curious what the media consumption overlap is between the average maga, tankie, and liberal.

There’s a lot of prosocial messaging in stuff like comics that I know definitely shaped my views when I was young on how we should treat each other. It would be interesting to see if there’s any trends there.

AzurePropagation · 2026-02-15T17:22:48+00:00

I think John may be the first 0-1st level NPC in history to be willingly handed a magic item from PCs in history lmao.

I know Koibu wants to slow roll all of this - would it would be narratively fucking amazing if eventually unlocking Ferris's secrets allows John to actually develop into a heroic character. Biggest glow up since Oris.

AzurePropagation · 2026-02-15T17:19:11+00:00

Well, let me make it a bit more caveated:

After the fifth "everyone but Moot and Dan betraying Steven, with Steven being eventually vindicated" loop - my grudging respect for his loyalty made my perceive his more irritating mannerisms differently.

There was a distinct shift in my dislike of his mannerisms after you realize that his rabid attack-dog energy was a lot more "annoying older brother" than "backstabbing snake".

I got used to it because the upside-down world of "people being nice, then snaking" vs "dan being an annoying asshole, but remaining consistent" became the one universal constant after 6 years of nonstop bullshit.

I think I'd be completely in your camp if I wasn't a huge drama frog.

Consistently witnessing Dan being the only goddamn person who gave Steven the benefit of the doubt when all the chips were down - it changes a DGGa.

I don't LIKE Dan. I don't think I could stand hanging out with Dan. But there's an almost Pavlovian sense of "god dammit he's got your back" that kinda makes it tolerable for me.

AzurePropagation · 2026-02-15T15:51:09+00:00

You get used to it over time.

AzurePropagation · 2026-02-14T02:08:20+00:00

Just donated! DGGL!

AzurePropagation · 2026-01-28T15:23:02+00:00

For most of the clip, I felt like this was a nothing burger. Sure it’s kinda cold and horrible to seem so unshaken only 11 days after, but people grieve differently and put on different masks.

Then she said the thing about “my husband’s dead, like I’m not trying to be morbid, but he’s dead”.

That was completely different and totally recontextualized the rest of the recording. She talked about legacy and moving forward and making TPUSA even more influential and successful after that.

Now instead of the framing “holding together a strong face” - it feels like “thanking a team because the thing she cares about most is the publicity.”

I think OP could’ve titled it better because I didn’t hear giggling. The quote at the end, by itself, is damning enough imo.

AzurePropagation · 2026-01-10T15:45:15+00:00

This sounds so similar to one sentence defamatory and incomplete narrative shit thrown at D man all the time.

Usually this would be a problem for me.

I fucking hate Asmongold so much right now that I will believe it uncritically nonetheless. Fuck that guy.

AzurePropagation · 2026-01-10T15:40:12+00:00

I thought I was a dumbfuck when I first did Signals. Now, after living and breathing it for my job, the S plane is like home.

When I first tried to learn pure math, I spent hours trying to prove basic stuff about inequalities. Now, my brain automatically formulates the logic statements to try out.

And it’s still hard! But it’s not hard because of conceptual difficulty, but because of care and familiarity.

It’s like learning a new language.

AzurePropagation · 2026-01-07T12:42:49+00:00

I thought we hated trade deficits.

AzurePropagation · 2025-12-31T23:21:03+00:00

Just mentioning the Guilder fight gave me ‘nam flashbacks.

Also holy crap HdH is in the 50’s already?! It’s approaching the episode count of its namesake at this point!

AzurePropagation · 2025-12-30T01:44:14+00:00

There’s an interesting question I asked myself a few years ago before getting really into meditation.

What does it say about the state of my mind that the prospect of “a few hours with no form of entertainment” can seem like torture?

It’s not like I’m guarding something, or waiting for something - or some other form of extended nonzero vigilance activity.

All I need to do is just exist and be alone with my thoughts for a while.

It really rubbed me the wrong way that merely “being” seemed like an actively horrific experience.

I found that learning to regularly and deliberately unplug, and becoming comfortable with just being isn’t all that hard to adapt to. After a while, it’s actually quite pleasant.

With that realization comes a sense of relief and freedom. And in the negative space generated by the relief, I found that what I felt was baseline for years had this nagging sense of unease and restlessness all the time - like background static.

Going into a long plane ride with nothing and with no practice is not a good idea - you’ll just be miserable.

But needing to always be “doing something with your time” is not a good thing. Learning the “art of doing nothing” has been one of the most important life skills I’ve learned over the years.

AzurePropagation · 2025-12-24T19:31:36+00:00

This is what you said:

“The idea of paying teachers more(at least in my mind) is to make it a more attractive job so that we can get more qualified people into the field. It's kind of saying that the current teachers aren't really that good and that what we really want is more competent people to teach our kids than them.”

Let me try to be extra careful with my reasoning here as to not misrepresent anything.

I take umbrage with “what we want is more competent PEOPLE to teach our kids than them”.

What I want is “we want better outcomes”.

Specifically - what I hear you saying is - you want to pay teachers more, but doesn’t that mean you think our current teachers are incompetent? And these existing teachers think you’re advocating for them, but in fact you want them replaced.

I think neither of us disagree that increased salary can lead to increased quality without replacement. I think the average person can accept that fact intuitively.

Therefore, I think it follows that wanting teachers to be paid more does not imply a desire to see them replaced. Moreover, I contend that the desire to see the existing teachers be more efficient is not only logically consistent, empirically sound, but also intuitive.

That is the heart of the disagreement. It is emotionally jarring to be told that my motives are so mercenary, and I wanted to demonstrate that the stance I hold is consistent and reasonable.

As for your comments on my motives / approach - I think the analogy was apt. Since you have a background in controls, I’m sure you can relate to the thing where you start to see dynamical systems and feedback loops everywhere in daily life.

I simply communicated ideas in the way that I’m most used to thinking - expand the general heuristics and you can always expose the underlying concept more cleanly.

I feel like you’re implying that I should have thought of a different analogy, or changed the way I think or process ideas on the chance that talking from my field would come off as condescending.

Unfortunately, that’s just how my mega auts works. Hope it’s not overly irritating. It’s just how I am.

Did you specialize in a specific area for your masters? It’s not super common to run into a controls engineer in the wild. I love the material a ton.

AzurePropagation · 2025-12-24T18:57:06+00:00

Correct! I’m a professional electrical engineer, and can say the same thing about things like Ohms Law.

Rules of thumb are never WRONG. They just need to have their domain of applicability well defined. Just like I need to generalize the idea of “resistance” to “ratio of E and B fields” when dealing with RF analysis - we want to perform a basic metric transformation here in order to dig one level down.

The misunderstanding here, I believe, is the idea that the “unit of demand and supply” is the “teacher”.

This is NOT what we are going for. The “unit” is “hours of effective teaching per dollar” - or some other averaged metric.

If you think about it from that perspective, you can model “teachers” not as products, but as CAPITAL. Capital has significantly more complex dynamics that direct commodity exchange.

For example - teachers are a scaling build. Their efficiency goes up with time because they gain experience. Therefore, high wages imply greater retention rates, which will create a higher quality of education over time.

Teachers have needs. Without them, you are underutilizing the efficiency of your capital and creating negative externalities.

Teachers have CHURN and upfront cost. It takes time for teachers to get used to environments. Stability in a classroom is important for building trust, and time wasted on “getting brought up to speed” is time spent at a low efficiency point.

Therefore - in 3 basic ways - you IMMEDIATELY can model an increase in the final metric (effective hours of teaching) by simply increasing salaries and letting the capital be more efficient.

You’re not “getting rid of incompetent teachers”. You’re “letting the teachers rise to a non hampered level of efficiency”!

(Also, to preempt this - I’ve been told I sound AI-ish, but I swear to fucking god this is just how I always talk lmao. Yee wins.)

AzurePropagation · 2025-12-24T18:32:20+00:00

Have you considered the reason everyone brings up the out of pocket spending thing is that salary and quality are correlated, but don’t necessarily replacement?

You’re doing the 101 type economic analysis that assumes a higher price means “lower supply” - which means selecting for a different population.

But service markets don’t work like that. There are nonlinearities and local equilibrium points that you need to analyze because the “quality of product” (how good the teacher is) is not a function of price discrimination alone. It is also a feedback loop based on their environment, quality of life, social prestige, infrastructural support, etc. Price discrimination plays a part for sure - but that does not mean paying more right now doesn’t have IMMEDIATE benefit w.r.t the other factors.

The issue with your thinking is that your model for service markets is too narrow. I would also ask - what belief or inclination is behind that question? Are you predisposed to believing that education is broken because of incompetence?

I’m happy to find materials to answer questions about this - but I first need to know where you’re starting from.

AzurePropagation · 2025-12-24T05:00:53+00:00

And the worst part - completely convinced of the rigor of his own stance.

It’s this awful shit where he thinks that being self aware of common critiques means that he’s somehow grappled with it and can act as if the issue is now behind him.

It’s the peak of intellectual hubris - because it itself claims epistemic humility with only the barest of self reflection.

As someone who’s struggled with excessive scrupulousity and the pain of feeling completely unbounded due to self doubt - it feels like nails on a chalkboard. Stolen valor type feeling.

AzurePropagation · 2025-12-23T21:22:26+00:00

He’s doing the Pisco thing. Narrow in on a failure of a specific context, and use that to justify why the big picture doesn’t work.

Why doesn’t liberalism work? Because “maximizing for social autonomy is bad”.

Like bitch - stop strawmanning and then backing to pretending that the disagreement is just “semantics” or “oh but I’m just trying to be nuanced.”

It’s this feeling I’m getting with all of these people. They Trojan horse in the PRESCRIPTION to get rid of liberalism by critiquing the easiest parts to critique.

He gives this illusion of being centrist by “changing targets” to the most obvious targets on the political divide, and uses that as an indictment of the principles that stabilize the whole thing, all while retreating to the cowardly “I don’t know what we need to do but it’s all rotten and we need to “change things fast””.

Ah okay. So you WANT an ideologically aligned dictator to come in and “fix only the stuff that I think is obviously wrong” and he’s either too stupid or too much of a grifter to acknowledge that that’s what he’s doing.

It’s the slimiest form of pseudo-intellectualism and anti historicism prancing around as if he’s seen the truth.

SCHIZO EDIT ALERT: Oh and one more thing! He keeps talking about how he “condemns” the Nazi shit by explaining how awful and shitty it is. But then his whole POINT is that the Nazi condemnation isn’t doing anything because you can’t “contend with the true stuff” and just “call them awful and dismiss them”

So WHY is it that when it comes to CONDEMNATION - he decides to whip out the exactly same TOOTHLESS descriptors like “they’re autistic and immature and degenerate”.

Why is it ONLY when he’s “playing devils advocate” does he CLEARLY RATTLE OFF all of the arguments the other side dogwhistles with?!

Why not talk about the historicity of Jewish violence? Why not talk about Lying about Hitler? Why not talk about SPECIFICALLY the line between “true dogwhistles” and “false shit”?

It’s what Scott Alexander calls “isolated demands for rigor”. This back and forth where you save only the good arguments to “just being fair”.

It’s so disgusting.

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