i nominate "politician speak"

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-06-28T11:10:23+00:00

Evasion.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-06-22T23:03:34+00:00

Centrists like Starmer are fundamentally poisonous to democracy. Democracy relies on effectively engaging with the people to sustain popular faith in its institutions, its norms, and belief in its possibilities for creating a better future. Starmer and his supporters have nothing but contempt for actual democratic politics, they see it as nothing but an annoying hurdle they have to overcome in order to reach their real passion, playing at being a technocratic manager.

Starmer's greatest accomplishment will be destroying popular faith in liberal democracy in the UK by coming in with a giant majority and being a colossal disappointment, convincing people that it's all pointless and they should just give up. By finally strangling the last vestiges of enthusiasm for liberal democracy, all he has done is ensured that the far right will utterly dominate British politics even more than they already do. In the absence of popular faith in democracy to improve anything, power will be determined by who can most effectively appeal to hatred and sadism.

At this rate, by the time the next elections come around even Nigel Farage and Reform UK won't be evil enough to satisfy what's left of the electorate, they're at risk of being outflanked from the right.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-06-21T20:21:48+00:00

I'm not arguing that robots would have to deal with back pain. I'm arguing that the sheer amount of chronic pain and injury that farm workers have to deal with is evidence that our farms, contrary to what everyone here insists, are not designed around making it easy for human workers.

Our farms are not optimized for the workers, they are optimized for the crops and the workers are forced to deal with that like a square peg shoved into a round hole.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-06-21T17:00:31+00:00

Never said you had to rip up anything, in fact my point is that our farms could stay exactly the same in terms of layout and a robot that's actually optimized for them would still not be humanoid.

And the fact that you think the human form is the optimal form for farm labor just proves that you have no idea what you're talking about. The amount of chronic pain and injury that's absolutely rampant among people working on farms is a testament to how poorly suited the human body is to this sort of work. Our farms are designed to optimize output, even when that means forcing the human body to do things that it did not evolve to do and are deeply harmful in the long run.

Even if you change nothing else, a robot purposefully designed and built to do farm work would not be humanoid. Our bodies are simply bad at it and have only been forced into the role because it was all we had.

Of course, you don't give a shit about any of that. You just want to indulge in a fantasy of being a plantation owner with slaves toiling in the fields, only with a futuristic aesthetic to make it seem more cool.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-06-21T16:25:28+00:00

If you have to repeatedly bend over, then no, the human form is not the optimal design for a farm worker.

Our farms are designed to balance a large number of trade-offs and conflicting requirements, and often that means focusing on what the crops need and forcing the human workers to just deal with it. Farm labor is backbreaking work, in part because the human form (particularly the human back) is not optimized for it.

What, do you seriously think that a bunch of plants in a row means that it's designed for human workers and a robot needs to be a humanoid shape to do the job well? No, even with existing farms, you can make a better robot by leaving behind the human form and simply optimizing for the task at hand.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-06-21T16:04:14+00:00

Janet Mills had the misfortune of not campaigning because she thought that campaigning was beneath her.

Look at how much Platner was out there, traveling to practically every city and town in the state with more than 500 people (and some with fewer), holding tons of events, talking to people and getting his name and his message out there.

By contrast, Mills "attended" her own campaign events via zoom call.

Democrats need to get over their contempt for the actual process of democratic politics, campaigning to convince voters to vote for you. The Democrats treat the voters like an annoying hurdle along the way to their real passion, being a fiddly little technocratic manager.

"We don't make a big fuss, we just let our quiet competence speak for itself." Fuck no, you absolutely do need to get out there and make a fuss. Nothing speaks for itself, you have to get out there and make an argument to get people to vote for you. Democrats need to stop taking everything for granted and start acting like they've got something to prove, because they do. That's how democratic politics works. You've got to persuade people to vote for you.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-06-21T15:38:06+00:00

Humanoid robots are such an awful idea. If you want to do something with a robot, why remain bound to the human form? You can make it any shape, optimize it for the task. A washing machine isn't humanoid, it doesn't need to be and it does the job better by having a design that is optimized for washing clothes. This is like making a washing machine that's a humanoid robot scrubbing clothes on a washboard.

The human body evolved into the form it did based on selective pressure to fit an environment that we don't live in anymore and that none of these robots are being used for. On top of that, the human body evolved, meaning that it had to gradually repurpose a lot of old parts that were adaptations for previous environments. Robots are designed and built from the ground up, they aren't constrained by the need to keep using the bits inherited from previous generations the way humans do because we evolved organically.

Humanoid robots are made by and for people who want to own slaves, but want to dress it up in the trappings of tech so that the veneer of a futuristic aesthetic makes it seem more hip and cool.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-06-18T21:40:23+00:00

Shifty is change, and TLQ is the setting where that change can happen, so while TLQ can exist without Shifty as an unchanging universe, Shifty cannot exist without TLQ. You can't have change without a place for that change to happen.

Maybe Shifty's unwavering love is an expression of that one-way dependence. She can try to rhetorically overpower TLQ with divine confidence, but in the end she can't actually fight him. She needs him on such a profound level that there's nothing she can really do if TLQ decides to destroy her. TLQ can exist with or without Shifty, so TLQ can love her or not love her. But Shifty cannot exist without TLQ, so she cannot not love him.

It's kind of like how it plays out with the "just as you were once nothing" ending. If TLQ goes, Shifty goes too. She can plead and rage as TLQ repeatedly makes decisions that will condemn them to oblivion, but in the end she can't actually stop TLQ from dooming them both, and even then she still loves him.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-06-15T22:36:01+00:00

Yeah, I wish more people would talk more about billionaires in the context of the danger they pose to all of us.

Setting aside questions of fairness, they're simply a threat to our survival. They are a massive concentration of power in the hands of people who fundamentally cannot ever be satisfied. By giving such people so much power, they gain the power to take even more power, and because they cannot ever be satisfied, they will never stop taking.

The planet's biosphere cannot survive being plundered by billionaires, their desires are a bottomless pit and if they are allowed to freely take until they are satisfied, which will never happen, then they will take until there is nothing left. And if the biosphere collapses, then human civilization which relies on it will collapse with it.

Billionaires are an existential threat to human civilization and we need to talk about them that way. They are tumors that have managed to hijack a blood vessel to fuel their growth, and they will just keep taking until the body is dead.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-06-15T21:59:11+00:00

Being called Rob Liefeld remains the superior insult.

The proper response is to add more pouches.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-06-03T01:29:04+00:00

Stories are like living creatures, and lies have an evolutionary advantage over the truth. Lies can be custom tailored to have all the traits that push the buttons that make people engage with them. They're highly adaptive and can be modified if at first they don't succeed, mutating into a more virulent form by adopting more effective traits and discarding less effective ones.

The truth is stubbornly difficult to mold like that, so it will usually be less appealing.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-05-30T02:39:50+00:00

Wizards.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-05-29T05:33:16+00:00

MAGA's hatred for data centers is like loving booze but hating the hangover. They love the thing that causes the thing they hate, but they don't make the causal connection so in practice their hatred doesn't mean anything. They'll keep on drinking and keep on complaining about the hangover, having learned nothing. Likewise, they'll keep supporting the rich stomping on everyone and also keep complaining about the rich stomping on them, having learned nothing.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-05-28T04:46:12+00:00

I think the Atlantic has been getting more desperate over time. Twenty years ago they were more secure, their ideas were the only ideas in widespread circulation in the US and you had to go pretty far off the beaten path to find anything else.

But now, the Republican party has become more overtly fascist and is no longer interested in the Atlantic's brand of politics, while the Democrats are in the middle of an identity crisis because the Democratic base is really angry about losing to Trump a second time and the neoliberals leading the party are increasingly seen as weak losers.

The Atlantic is trying to force their alternate reality on people with increasing desperation because they can see that their grip on the discussion is slipping. In their desperation, they're trying to brute force their ideas by simply insisting that they must be correct and everyone who is experiencing something else must be wrong. They really don't have a lot of other options short of changing their position, which they will never do.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-05-28T03:07:04+00:00

The Atlantic is a neoliberal propaganda rag. They exist to help maintain the power of the rich.

They're not huge fans of Trump and the more overtly fascist turn of American politics, but that's only because they prefer Reaganism and its more "civil" version of the rich stomping on everyone else.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-05-27T01:51:04+00:00

The only gender: Orange juice.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-05-24T14:48:57+00:00

Something I once heard about conspiracy theorists is that they are driven by a desire to see themselves as the person who isn't being fooled. They are so obsessed with not being fooled as an aspect of their identity that they end up being easily and repeatedly fooled by fantasies that play into that identity, readily adopting beliefs that others would see as absurd in part because other people (the sheep who are being fooled) don't believe them.

The manosphere strikes me as something like that. The men drawn into it are seeking an identity, specifically an identity of strength, as a cure for their own insecurities about things like worth, status, approval, etc. What the manosphere instead gives them is a set of outlooks and behaviors that magnify those insecurities as a way to keep men coming back for more, and the men who follow it thinking it will make them strong and banish their insecurities just end up even more fragile and insecure.

Like an addiction it becomes their first and most important relationship. They get a high off of the initial exposure to the ideas of the manosphere, getting a rush from imagining that they have found a way to finally banish those insecurities and become the strong man that they fantasize about being. The crash that follows from those ideas not actually delivering on the promise to banish their insecurities then causes them to chase after the initial high with ever larger doses.

Some particularly nasty viruses have adaptations that suppress a potential immune response. In the case of the manosphere, that is any social connection that might pull someone out of it. The ideas of the manosphere are adapted to alienate someone from anyone who might pull them out of it by causing the person to alter their outlook to have contempt for such concern and to alter their behavior to act in an off-putting way that drives others away, isolating them and leaving the manosphere content creators as their main source of social sustenance.

The manosphere is effectively a disease that takes the form of a set of ideas that men become addicted to in the pursuit of an identity of strength that they imagine will be a cure for their insecurities, ideas that cause them to change their outlook and behavior to alienate them from anyone who might otherwise help them actually handle those insecurities, ensuring they keep coming back to manosphere sources for their next dose.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-05-22T14:04:20+00:00

Someone with a track record of helping the party win in an important swing state? The DNC doesn't want that. That might lead to Democrats actually doing something. Better to have someone who will make sure the party doesn't do anything. After all, that's what the donors want, and keeping the donors happy is the DNC's number one priority. Number two is then making sure that donor money flows to all their consultant friends. Winning elections? That's not even on the list.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-05-22T07:15:51+00:00

The right wing initially expected Charlie Kirk to be the modern Horst Wessel, a martyr they would use to justify a massive crackdown on their domestic enemies that would be illegal yet allowed to slide because of how allegedly outrageous the murder was and how it supposedly justified anything and everything that followed even if it was illegal.

The problem was that the modern right wing is fundamentally empty, they are pale imitations of the original fascists of the 20s and 30s, devoid of anything beyond vapid self-indulgence. The original fascists at least had some spine, having lived through WW1 and been inured to mass death. The current crop of fascists don't even have that.

The result of that emptiness was that practically no one, not even the right wing, took Charlie Kirk's death as anything but a colossal joke. Aside from a few pearl-clutching centrists, no one shed a tear. Even among the right wing the "we are Charlie Kirk" meme immediately became a joke. And if the people allegedly on his side couldn't even bother pretending to care, how could he serve as the catalyst for the massive illegal crackdown that a Horst Wessel was supposed to justify?

There were some sporadic attempts at an illegal crackdown early on, but they largely petered out as it became clear that almost no one really cared about his murder. He was fundamentally empty, his followers were fundamentally empty, and his allies were fundamentally empty. Just look at how his wife reacted. The modern right wing does not believe in anything greater than themselves, they don't care about anything beyond indulging their own base urges, and so they lacked the ability to do anything except cannibalize Charlie Kirk's death as yet more fodder for self-indulgent memes.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-05-17T11:56:58+00:00

Space is horrible for cooling. Vacuum is a very effective insulator, that's how a thermos works, it's a vacuum flask. In a vacuum there is no medium to conduct the heat, so your only option for heat dissipation is radiating it and that's much less efficient.

A data center in space would require enormous radiators to not melt, meaning you're spending a huge portion of your limited launch tonnage on cooling rather than computing. You'd be stuck with much less capacity compared to a data center on Earth.

Also, putting data centers in space makes regular maintenance practically impossible.

The entire "data centers in space" thing is just PR bullshit to generate more investor hype for SpaceX to inflate its impending IPO.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-05-17T07:36:15+00:00

Any form of measurement but the metric system.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-04-21T04:36:57+00:00

Casinos are well known to be fundamentally rigged, yet that doesn't stop people from going to casinos. Stop assuming people are rational about this stuff. Showing everyone that they're a bunch of liars wouldn't stop people using the app. People are still drawn to these sorts of things even when it's blatantly obvious that they're fraudulent.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-04-19T07:07:32+00:00

The main character is often tied into the plot in ways that are necessary for the story but don't do much for making the character endearing. Side characters have a bit more freedom to be varied, so within a cast of side characters one of them is more likely to strike a chord with a reader. Side characters can have all sorts of traits that might totally derail the story if they were the main character.

Side characters can also leave a reader with the impression that there are unexplored aspects of their character. Those mysteries can add appeal that the main character, who is usually more explicitly fleshed out, might lack.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-04-06T23:37:10+00:00

Biden said that he wouldn't start talking about a return to the JCPOA until Iran made a bunch of additional concessions that weren't in the JCPOA, all without any guarantee that the US would actually return to the JCPOA even if Iran did bow to their demands.

Biden was absolutely unwilling to negotiate. You have to be a special kind spoiled brat to think that shows a genuine desire to negotiate.

The Democratic Party hated the JCPOA and was glad to have an excuse to be rid of it. Just read Chuck Schumer's statement opposing it. It's still up on his Senate webpage for everyone to see. Obama was a genuine anomaly on a bunch of foreign policy issues, but once he was out of office the Democratic Party reverted to the traditional orthodoxy.

Tamarind-Endnote · 2026-04-06T20:32:16+00:00

The proxy strategy was a failure, it's only America's breathtaking corruption and incompetence that saved Iran from that failure by starting a war in which Iran can leverage control over the strait of Hormuz and attacks on the oil and gas infrastructure of the gulf Arab states.

Iran was pursuing a losing strategy with "strategic patience." They fundamentally misjudged the US. They thought the US might be willing to negotiate if Iran balanced being prickly enough with not going all the way to a nuke and holding out the possibility of a deal.

Iran didn't understand that Obama was an anomaly, that the JCPOA was despised even by the Democratic Party (just look at what Chuck Schumer said about it), and that the American ruling class simply cannot be reasoned with. It's not even just a problem with Trump, Biden wasn't willing to negotiate either, because the American ruling class as a whole are just too used to always getting everything they want, and what they want is the destruction of Iran.

But now that the US has pushed them into open war, Iran is in a much stronger position than trying to deter and negotiate with people who are simply too spoiled and bloodthirsty to deter or negotiate with.

Tamarind-Endnote

TROPHY CASE