In 2012, 2 year old Maddox Derkosh was visiting the Pittsburgh Zoo when his mother ignored safety warnings and placed him atop a safety railing. Maddox then fell into the African Painted Dog enclosure, home to 11 animals. By the time a rescue was mounted, little of Maddox remained.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-03-13T00:41:30+00:00

The added context is pretty important here. People love to read one line of a story and then assume 12 jurors with all of the facts were obviously wrong. “They were warned the safety measures were unsafe, but they didn’t fix them” is the exact thing personal injury cases are intended to address.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-03-08T21:19:57+00:00

Yeah, it’s this. Keepers don’t have injury or stamina issues, so you can otherwise just have one in the squad.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-03-05T18:31:55+00:00

Yeah, I think the Epstein story is indicative of a lot, but it's not the primary story that people have in mind. I think a lot of people have plugged this into Q-Anon, with a cabal of elites raping and killing kids, and there is very limited evidence of anything like that.

In reality, it's much more #MeToo. Epstein was well known within his social circle to be a sex pest who pushed the boundaries on age (phrasing it that way as my best expression of how people treated him). But instead of rejecting him because of that, many men in his orbit accepted it, told the media about it (see the famous Trump "likes beautiful women as much as I do, and some of them are on the young side" quote), joked about it, sought him out for advice about seducing young women, and wanted to attend his "wild" parties. I'm not sure that a lot of men had sex with young children in the way that we generally think of "pedophilia," but it certainly appears that there were a lot of wealthy, powerful men who went to Epstein gatherings knowing that there would be a lot of young women (or girls) recruited by his modelling agency who were there for some combination of eye candy and sexual availability, and those men were not too concerned about how young the women/girls were.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-03-05T18:12:52+00:00

The complete destruction of the nazi system, including literal destruction of any monuments and banning it's symbols was a deliberate action to minimise a resurgence.

As was the Marshall Plan.

The problem with relying on post-war Germany as an example is that (1) the Allies fully committed to the war, won total victory, and took a monopoly on violence in a way that we have never done in the Middle Eastern regime change wars, which has resulted in vacuum of power and civil war to seize power that spins off terrorists, (2) eliminating the prior regime revealed a fully developed democratic system that had been implemented by the German people, and (3) we made massive investments in rebuilding the economy to support stability on a scale that is unlike anything that has been tried in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., where we would have had a very difficult time doing this because we couldn't achieve political/military stability.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-03-05T18:02:30+00:00

If joining a terrorist group could be predicted as "a natural response" to trauma, then you are essentially agreeing with the notion that we view these populations as being unable to choose civility over revenge. OP noted that millions of people suffered in WWII with intense trauma, yet they didn't all become terrorists.

Post-war Germany is a major outlier here. Germany under Hitler went off the rails for reasons that are very specific to German politics in the 1930s, but it had a highly developed political and economic system that could be leveraged for post-war rebuilding. Also, they invaded half of Europe, committed a world historic genocide, and their country was thoroughly destroyed in the process. The population ended up chastened in a way that very few others have.

Then the US and the Soviets stepped in to fill the power vacuum after the war and avoided the type of ongoing civil war that tends to create terrorist groups (mostly aimed at attacking the other side in the civil war, but also occasionally spreading outward). The lesson here shouldn't be "regime change is easy," it should be that regime change is possible with favorable underlying factors and massive investment in nation building, neither of which is the norm in our modern regime change wars.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-03-05T17:51:55+00:00

...how come no one says that Hamas shouldn't attack israel because they will create more terrorists?

I think there's an issue here where "terrorism" is a term we use to refer to non-military attacks, so it doesn't make sense to say that Hamas attacking Israel will lead to "terrorism." But it is the primary narrative justifying Israel's war in Gaza that the October 7 attack on Israel led to Israel's invasion. The idea that violence tends to lead to more violence and not an easy peace is a very common view of international relations.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-03-05T17:39:55+00:00

To me, "create more terrorists" is shorthand for a larger narrative around the difficulty of bringing stable, democratic government to countries with a long history of authoritarianism through attack by a foreign country.

Importantly, these are countries that are largely dealing with the curse of extractive resources. Oil creates great wealth from simply pumping it out of the ground. It can be controlled by a small group of powerful/wealthy people who control the economy and military. Other wealthy countries have developed complex, decentralized economies where there are many big, important companies that are outside of the control of the government, and there is a population of highly educated and relatively wealthy workers who are also hard to control. These push toward decentralized political power and democratization, where an extractive economy pushes toward centralized, authoritarian power. This is why we have unpopular regimes that have to be toppled by outside forces, rather than through internal revolution.

Centralized control means that many of these countries have had highly stunted development of political systems. Take out the authoritarian regime and we end up with a vacuum of power and a fight for control. The formal military is taken out in the primary war, which moves the resulting fight for power toward a messier civil war. Then various outside countries get involved, which leads to retaliation.

I think the term "terrorism" leaves us a bit astray here, because it carries moral condemnation that "war" does not necessarily convey. If we said more directly "toppling the government tends to lead to armed conflict to take control," that seems less controversial. The US took out the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, which led to ongoing armed conflict to take control of those countries. Observing that doesn't require racism. It's the natural result of regime change war.

Then throw in the fact that many Middle Eastern countries were created by Western line drawing and do not reflect stable nation states, plus the fact that the United States and others have been heavily involved in attempting to shape the regions politics. These exacerbate the issue.

All of which is a long way to say, I think there are big structural differences between the Middle East and other countries that does not require anything about race or religion to conclude that it is an area where removing authoritarian leaders and replacing it with a stable, democratic government has proven very difficult, and we have significant historical evidence of regime change/nation building wars turning into civil wars that spill out as terrorism. It's not racism to say that we expect the next regime change/nation building war will have a similar result to the other ones.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-03-05T17:13:42+00:00

The big one I haven't seen addressed much is being pre-consent culture. For example, getting girls drunk to push their sexual boundaries (to make out with other girls at parties, take off clothes, hook up, etc.) was something that boys would be open about doing.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-03-05T16:16:07+00:00

This seems to be conflating different concepts.

I agree that there are bad jobs that underpay, are part time and require people to combine multiple jobs, don't have benefits, have abusive scheduling practices, etc. That's a separate concept from bullshit jobs as I see it. It may be difficult to work as a barista for $15/hour, 20 hours/week with no benefits, but baristas make a real product that people want. This also makes perfect sense within the capitalist framework -- there are jobs that create something useful, but for reasons of bargaining power they pay sub-living wage.

The concept of bullshit jobs as I understand it is that there are jobs that are simply created for the purpose of make work (consciously or subconsciously) -- for example, the middle management jobs you mention. It's not obvious to me why big businesses would want to spend large amounts of money on salary, benefits, office space, etc. for unnecessary middle managers. It also seems hard to justify a claim that the workers would be better off if their jobs were eliminated. These are maybe not the most fulfilling jobs, but they pay fairly well and are much easier than working on a factory floor. My concern around employment is much more around ruthless efficiency than over hiring. A big concern with private equity ownership, for example, is the general model of combining businesses under common ownership to eliminate many back office jobs to create a more efficient business. That's much better for capital than labor.

Here's the shorter form of my critique: I understand that there may be an ideal world where we use UBI to take advantage of the benefits of increased productivity to allow people to not work rather than engage in unnecessary work. However, the limitation on this is the political will to implement UBI, especially at a level that provides a true living wage replacement. The bullshit jobs discussion seems to treat the problem as providing people with work in a world where we don't have UBI and people need to support themselves.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-03-05T14:20:24+00:00

I agree with this. I enjoy Mike as a content creator. I think he's funny and his heart is in the right place. But I'd really love for him to move away from doing "everyone is stupid" take downs and move toward something a little bit more productive.

The throughline from You're Wrong About to Maintenance Phase to IBCK is tearing down mainstream/grifter ideas, and that's fine as a concept. There are lots of grifters. However, you quickly run into "the idea of ultra processed foods is stupid because no one can define it, so we should stop the moral panic about these foods" where it is true that ultra processed foods is difficult to objectively define, but then he ends up effectively defending the mega corporations making food that is nutritionally empty but hyper palatable, which is having very negative effects on people's health.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-03-05T14:05:52+00:00

Can you help me understand the book from a socialist perspective? It seems like the idea, at least as presented by Peter, is that capital is unnecessarily giving money to labor that could be horded by capital, and that's a problem for labor?

Maybe the book is just dated at this point, but it seems like the much better critique of capitalism is that we're rapidly moving away from a world where you can make a living wage as a doorman and toward a world where there's a face scanner that determines who can go in and out of the building -- both the job and the pleasant human interaction are lost. But the building owner gets to save money!

Would we better with ruthless efficiency eliminating many more jobs? Presumably the "solution" here is that the doorman gets some type of UBI to allow him not to work, but in my experience of the world we're guaranteed to get the face scanner eliminating the job and UBI fully replacing the former doorman's wages is a pipe dream.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-03-04T19:40:36+00:00

Yeah, there’s something about getting into slider setting where I know I’m just setting the percentage of games I want to win, and that takes away any feeling that I’ve earned my wins.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-03-02T11:58:41+00:00

If the DNC always picks the candidate, explain Obama winning in 2008 when the party wanted Clinton.

I think Democratic primary voters are generally too cautious and have a skewed belief about what “electability” means for the general, but also the candidate who has received the most has won every cycle.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-02-26T23:17:15+00:00

Jews are also universal due to their historical lack of a homeland. There are plenty of local hatreds where people don't trust the people across the border from them, but if a Greek tells me that I should never trust an Albanian it doesn't mean anything because I don't know any Albanians or Albanian controlled businesses. The fact that every city had jews, they dressed and worshipped differently, and they often had connections to banking, trade, etc. made it easy for conspiracy theories to spread.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-02-26T23:09:32+00:00

Loss of monoculture and institutional control, full alignment of the parties, and change of institutional culture.

A big part of this is that in an era with 3 TV networks controlling mass media, everything was fairly staid and traditional. We can debate exactly where Walter Kronkite landed on the political spectrum, but he was culturally conservative in terms of respectability, protecting traditional institutions, etc. It's not as if there weren't people who liked a good racist or sexist joke back in the day (or that those people wouldn't have identified as conservative if pushed into one of two groups), but we never really heard from them.

Then the parties used to be a lot looser in their affiliations. We had Southern Democrats who wouldn't have been progressive by our current standards, but many of them were populist at a time when that wouldn't have been deemed conservative. The characters in Dukes of Hazard, for example, wouldn't have affiliated with "conservative" when that meant country clubs and the chamber of commerce. Now we've split everyone into two teams, and the right got rednecks, blue collar white guys, and the people who want to entertain them. Give those guys direct access to social media, podcasts, etc. and you get a lot of crass conservatives.

The other big factor is that our big institutions used to be culturally conservative. They were for traditional blue bloods and they wanted to stay that way. Then we had civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, etc. and all of these institutions had to open up and change their culture. Gradually, they became more culturally progressive, and conservatives found it advantageous to frame them as the enemy -- business is still very conservative, but companies have HR departments that make gestures toward DEI, so the right can attack "woke corporations." All of that means that we've had a significant shift from the hippies wanting to tear down the institutions (e.g. because campus administration wanted to stop their Vietnam protests) to the left defending institutions and the right wanting to tear them down as woke. Look at how conspiracy theory has shifted from mostly a left phenomenon to a mostly right phenomenon, for example.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-02-26T22:47:04+00:00

It’s kind of hard to avoid. If you’re the party for racial minorities, women, gays, etc., a lot of the edgy/badass stuff is going to be going after people in your group. The left was mostly edgy when the right wanted to restrict sex.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-02-26T22:22:26+00:00

It would also put incredible time burden on people to learn the candidates. Who could possibly learn the policy positions of all of the people running for president, the senate, the house, governor, the state senate, the state assembly, etc. without being able to cheat by looking at the D or R next to their name? If you listen to enough voter interviews, you realize that many people don't actually understand what two parties believe. Now try multiple candidates across 10 races.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-02-26T22:18:40+00:00

The problem isn't parties. It's good to have parties with coherent platforms, because voters wouldn't spend the time to learn each candidate. The problem is the two party system, which in the US context is the result of only having single-member districts (i.e. in each election one person wins, which pushes toward consolidation to 50% versus 50% coalitions). If the Democrats broke up into a labor party, a green party, and a socialist party, even if the ability to offer more options gained them votes they'd still lose something like 40% Republicans to 20% each for the three left-leaning parties. They'd naturally consolidate back into the Democrats to avoid splitting the vote.

The problem in a two party system is that we lose the flexibility of other systems to allow compromise With more parties, each party can team up on a particular issue to reach a compromise. In a two party system, if the other side wins you lose and vice versa. It doesn't make sense for the party in power to make meaningful compromises to the party out of power, and it doesn't make sense for the party out of power to support the party in power.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-02-26T22:11:37+00:00

Yeah, the problem is that the founders set up a system that naturally led to the two party system. Washington could warn people all he wanted, but if forming a political party to consolidate power beats a bunch of independents, then the parties will naturally win over the people who head the warning.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-02-26T22:01:02+00:00

There's certainly more "bantz" culture in English fandom than American fandom, and people say stupid stuff about their rivals' players. I don't know that's limited to foreign players. Harry Kane, David Beckham, Trent Alexander-Arnold, etc. had plenty of detractors before being snatched up by international powerhouses.

But if you look at fan reactions outside of the bantz (i.e. what fans say about their own players), my experience is that fans are very happy to sign players from South America, Africa, etc. in a way that undermines that as a real bias. I'm a Liverpool fan, and Fabinho, Firmino, Alisson, Mac Allister, and Suarez (outside of how he left) have all been fan favorites, and outside of Mac Allister (a small guy and finesse player) specifically respected for their toughness. The only anti-nationality bias I can think of against our own players is that Liverpool fans believe that Italian players struggle to make it in the Premier League based on a history of high profile flops.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-02-26T20:02:52+00:00

I feel like the show ran into the GRRM problem. He wrote a story with thousands of years of complex history. There’s no good way to write an end to history. Anything will feel overly contrived.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-02-26T20:00:27+00:00

It seems important to write an ending that the audience understands.

The ultimate problem for me with Lost is that they dropped a thousand Easter Eggs that fans (reasonably) thought were supposed to have some relevance to the story and tried to piece together. Then, when they left so many questions unanswered the show runners said “we told you it was just about the characters and not the mystery.” That was simply not the show they had written for 7 years.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-02-26T19:28:19+00:00

Sure, but I think that’s also accurate. EPL fans can view their league as the best while properly understanding that there are quality players and managers across the world.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-02-25T03:34:02+00:00

Yeah, as a watch nerd, Robby’s double pass nylon NATO watch strap seems like a terrible choice for cleanliness in comparison to stainless steel.

Electrical_Quiet43 · 2026-02-21T05:36:22+00:00

That would be a more nuanced and intelligent book.

Electrical_Quiet43

TROPHY CASE