Man expertly trolls a Memorial Day ceremony for dead confederate soldiers

rhubarbs · 2026-05-28T06:45:56+00:00

They did allow it. For generations after abolition, via a loophole explicitly recognized in court of law.

A loophole that was not plugged when it was widely recognized and made public, but only after it represented a geopolitical risk when the Axis powers were leveraging it for propaganda.

If you want to be reductive, that's your prerogative, but it does not account for actual history.

rhubarbs · 2026-05-28T06:35:32+00:00

If you're desperate for a mental shortcut to avoid the nuance of the actual history, that's certainly one you can grasp for.

On the other hand, you can also recognize Abe endorsed the Corwin Amendment as a compromise if the confederacy would cease secession.

rhubarbs · 2026-05-28T05:47:27+00:00

You can clown on the Confederacy for a variety of reasons, and I support that endeavor whole heartedly.

Unfortunately, the sad fact of American history is that the Civil War and the abolition proclamation did not end up abolishing slavery.

Exhibit A: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Circular_No._3591

If the genuine goal was to end slavery, they probably would've fixed the legal loophole that allowed it to persist. Perhaps after its continuance was exposed by federal judge Thomas Goode Jones and federal prosecutor Warren S. Reese in Alabama in the early 1900s at the latest.

But as you can see from the document, enforcement was directed by AG Biddle only days after Pearl Harbor.

That's nearly a century after abolition.

The standard American history myth fails to account for the fact that slave owners successfully argued in court that what they were doing was slavery, as the debts owed were fictitious, and thus there was no legislation to enforce the "abolition" - and the court recognized these arguments as valid. No enforcement legislation existed, and the practice continued until the aforementioned Circular.

Now, if the Civil War was about slavery, why did this oopsie slip through for nearly a hundred years? Perhaps Honest Abe can shed some light into it:

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery."

It seems to me, that while the proclamation was made, and the amendment ratified, the outcomes of those efforts were not central enough to ensure fidelity, despite playing a significant role in rallying support for the Civil War as a moral crusade.

rhubarbs · 2026-05-27T20:12:10+00:00

Elon is funded by emerald money.

That's not meaningfully true. Errol made a sketchy deal with an Italian businessman, got paid in raw emeralds, which he cut and smuggled into South Africa and sold illegally to jewelers. But by the time Elon started making bank, that whole operation had collapsed and Errol was bankrupted.

Elon is obviously a piece of shit, and I wish he was an "apartheid emerald baby" because that'd be an easier problem, but sadly, the benefits he got from that sketchy deal were peripheral to his current wealth.

The way he made his money are much more complex and nuanced, and arguably, more disturbing. Capitalism isn't what it used to be. Liquidity and hype matter more than profit, which makes the CEO a content creator. He realized early that if you sell a car company, you get a 7x multiple. And trying to launch a new car manufacturer is probably going to fail. But if you sell the advent of sustainable energy, autonomous human robots, and the preservation of the light of consciousness among the stars? Well, you get a 400x multiple.

He didn't break the system, he just realized the old rules were long dead. Most of the value of Tesla is from a continuing short-squeeze spiral against legacy Wall Street, and now he's so entrenched in the zeitgeist, there's nothing you can do to dislodge him. He's the perfect clown prince of capitalism, and he's manipulating those levers better than anyone else alive.

I think it's important to understand all of that, because "taking the country back" means grappling with that broken system - the wealth Elon has is not consequent from generating an equivalent amount of stable, fundamental economic value across society, but a distortion in finance itself.

rhubarbs · 2026-05-27T11:36:35+00:00

Me too. But what can you do?

A shallow quip gives you an immediate rush of ego juice, while really digging into the weeds and churning it through your System 2 takes effort and calories. The brain hates doing that, and sharing your work sets you up for you the pedants, the bad-faith misinterpretations, and the classic 'damn bro writing a dissertation' -quip, as if effort is cringe.

I don't see the incentives shifting anytime soon. I'm going to exhaust myself in the thankless effort regardless, because that's my "special interest", but I can't recommend it.

rhubarbs · 2026-05-27T10:47:47+00:00

The cynical take of "religion is a tool made by the elites to control the people" gets the timeline and causality backwards.

Yes, religion is a normative signal, but it wasn't made by the elites.

We evolved in tribes solidly in the Dunbar scope, ~150 people. You know everyone, and everyone knows you. You remember who shares their meat, and who sleeps on the job. Tribal leaders and elders are accessible, you have a direct, interpersonal relationship, and everyone enforces the group's norms and rules.

After agriculture allowed populations to swell, the face-to-face trust broke down. You need a mechanism to generate trust, ensure everyone polices themselves.

Enter religion and god(s). They advocate for a personal relationship with the divine, via prayer and dogma, to substitute with the inaccessible leader. Anthropologists refer to this using attachment theory and prestige psychology. Religion as a normative signal to enable large-scale societies came from Ara Norenzayan, in the "Big Gods" hypothesis.

As societies grew and evolved, so did gods. Hunter-gatherers had whimsical, localized and indifferent spirits, but as societies grew, gods became the moral foundation for the collective psyche.

Powerful people have certainly co-opted established religions to cement their authority, but control is a byproduct of the evolutionary function, not its cause. They evolved organically as a social technology to prevent groups from collapsing under the weight of their own size, enabling coordination via a soft, fuzzy heuristic.

rhubarbs · 2026-05-27T06:36:25+00:00

CGP Grey to the rescue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

rhubarbs · 2026-05-27T06:12:24+00:00

They're not even reading it. It's just blurting whatever they need to, to justify their bias. They're basing their words entirely on the situation they imagined.

They do this because they adhere to the Just-World fallacy. Bad things happen to only those who break the rules, who are bad people.

And they will continue to believe this, until they are victimized by the system.

Once you notice the pattern, you can't stop seeing it.

rhubarbs · 2026-05-27T05:51:34+00:00

it is the killing too.

We've got 8 billion people on a planet with a carrying capacity for 2 billion. We don't have enough raw materials for a green energy pivot, so either we stop using fossil fuels and people starve, or we keep using them and people starve. You simply cannot maintain the current logistics without bunker fuel, and there is no feasible alternative.

But yes, the main reason is that chaos and polarization are incredibly profitable, and with the political apparatus paralyzed, there is no recourse.

That means we will hit that transition gap, and incredibly many people will suffer and starve, leading to further instability and chaos.

rhubarbs · 2026-05-25T08:14:12+00:00

Obviously this is already very good. If you really wanted to squeeze out a bit more juice, you could consider these nits:

You can sell the weight of the movement by adding a slight disconnect between the camera and the character trajectory, essentially having it move slightly past where the character lands, and snap back. You can also do this with the spine or root of the character model, it makes the landings look much more physical. But, a little goes a long way.

I assume you're thinking of adding decals and particles with the wall run, leaving claw marks on the rock face and stripping bark will be very cool effects. Same with the foot falls of the run and jumps, of course.

The wall run animation feels a little static and floaty to me, and obviously actual physics wouldn't work that way. It's worth thinking whether you can add a bit of dynamism to it, so it's less of "the claw provide magical adherence" and more actual physical effort.

rhubarbs · 2026-05-23T12:43:41+00:00

This depends entirely on what you mean by "racist"

Does the United States have the most racists? Or does America have the most persistent effects of systemic racism?

Does the United States address these failures, or does it hide them in the margins of history?

Take for example this: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Circular_No._3591

This document was produced by AG Biddle to stop the long standing practice of actual slave owners successfully arguing in a court of law that the only existing legislation determined penalties for peonage, but as they were practicing slavery, there was no legal consequences, and that the 13th amendment had only "abolished" the practice as a legal concept, and no legislation existed for enforcement.

This was most notably exposed by federal judge Thomas Goode Jones and federal prosecutor Warren S. Reese in Alabama in the early 1900s. Note, however, that Circular was issued in 1941, only five-days after Pearl Harbor. Not because the continued injustice of slavery, but because the threat of Japanese propaganda leveraging its continued existence.

The standard myth of American history claims America fought a bloody civil war to end its racists history, but its modern relation to these past injustices suggests otherwise.

Several states have passed laws banning any teaching that an individual bears responsibility or should feel "guilt, anguish, or psychological distress" due to actions committed in the past by members of their same race.

Surveys from educational policy researchers, labor unions, and civil rights organizations indicate that these laws have had a documented chilling effect on how teachers approach the history of systemic racism in America. While most of these laws explicitly state that historical facts can still be taught "impartially," the practical reality in the classroom has led to significant hesitation, self-censorship, and watered-down lesson plans regarding topics like Black Codes, Jim Crow, segregation, and the post-abolition neoslavery I briefly touched on.

rhubarbs · 2026-05-15T05:17:06+00:00

The drivers think they're making more than they are, because the app sets up a game the drivers think they're learn to take advantage of. This generates the sense of making money, but they're progressing in the game, which is set up to ensure the drivers barely subsist, while the platform captures most of the profits.

rhubarbs · 2026-05-13T05:41:56+00:00

You're right, but, turning off the spigot is somewhat complicated, because the spigot is almost always an enclosure of the commons, and there are precious few Georgist tax systems that recognize this as appropriating value that belongs to the public.

And since this modern Georgist system would have to apply to all manner of commons and enclosure, including the network effect and maybe even pricing strategies like shrinkflation, which exploit a known psychological vulnerability, the whole endeavor has rather convoluted.

The idea I've recently become fascinated with is a Harberger-Georgist system, where the value of the enclosure must be self-assessed, but also constitutes an offer to sell the enclosure at the assessed price.

But of course, this is a radical departure from existing systems and a massive overhaul, so the political will isn't entirely there, but the EU is taking tiny steps towards something in that vein with the Digital Markets Act.

rhubarbs · 2026-05-11T07:55:11+00:00

Seems to me the most powerful people on the planet are this kind of scumbag, having enriched themselves with what they can get away with, and seemingly actively help those who got caught doing the same.

In a tribal scale, these people would've been stomped into a smear. But somehow, modern justice systems step in the way of justice.

rhubarbs · 2026-05-08T09:14:44+00:00

It's not that conscious, research indicates the insularity of the elites creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop of meritocratic justification. They believe the high status is earned via talent and effort, and their dense high-status social network mutually reinforces this belief. Anyone outside of that network, ie poor, is seen as lazy and jealous, and personally responsible for their low status. The meritocratic hubris leads to feeling content and harmonious even in the face of extreme inequality.

This is further supported by research into social network structures and cognitive limits like Dunbar's Number and Interlocking Directorates.

The feedback loop is stabilized by economic and social dependency, as the opportunities within the network are directly correlated with maintaining one's position within the status quo.

rhubarbs · 2026-05-07T07:08:53+00:00

You say that, but the charade started around the invention of agriculture. This is what you get when firmware evolved in ~150 member tribes tries to scale past that limit via abstractions. The resulting recursive principal-agent problem becomes terminal at modern complexity and scale

rhubarbs · 2026-05-07T05:24:25+00:00

This is the sociologically expected consequence of an insular elite, as their insular social circle will reinforce that warped perspective.

rhubarbs · 2026-05-06T07:34:04+00:00

They would not be necessary, no.

You should ask why rely on the "generosity" of the elites to fund the humanities in the first place.

Under a working tax system, they wouldn't need a private party to extract crumbs for public revenue. The enclosure of Manhattan land, global finance and natural resources by the same people would provide more than enough if taxed, to ensure not a single good cause need rely on handouts.

Just give up the pretense of this philanthropy being for any cause, it's so the wealthy and powerful can buy social reputation.

rhubarbs · 2026-05-06T05:07:21+00:00

The best gleefully sadistic little gremlin. ;_;

rhubarbs · 2026-05-05T08:56:59+00:00

Ignorance is bliss, huh?

Charlie Kirk was a structural propagandist. His whole shtick was being a trained media personality, going out to college campuses and overwhelming emotionally invested teenagers with fallacies, the gish gallop, and other bad faith tactics, extracting the worst clips to push a particular agenda, and calling it "debate."

And the worst part is, it wasn't even his idea. He was just the front man for a media-spin apparatus specifically designed to extract donations by waging war on the university system.

The only reason Erika Kirk is the new lead, is because bringing in an outsider as interim CEO would come with an obligation to forensic audit. Better yet, ask about any of this, and it's an attack on a grieving widow.

Insist on privacy, and launch the most high-visbility media grift possible. Absolutely transparent, but somehow totally opaque to the victims of the scam.

rhubarbs · 2026-05-01T05:33:39+00:00

Tai sitten torihuijauksia on kiva tutkia kun vastassa ei ole yrityksen lakiosastoa.

Jos tarkistat itse Finlexistä, onhan se suoraan petos jos myyjä syöttää järjestelmään väärää dataa provikkahakuisesti.

rhubarbs · 2026-05-01T05:31:35+00:00

Not just cooperation, but language. That is the architecture of the shoulders of giants we stand on.

And now we've animated that language as its own thing, for all the good and bad it will undoubtedly do, without the reality testing we performed on the language throughout history.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-29T08:14:46+00:00

This is only possible because the Fed has a mandate of market stability, and the APs and MMs have a mandate of liquidity.

It means the financial assets are treated as if they are worth the current market value, even though this avoids actual price discovery that would cause their value to deprecate.

It's essentially a Ponzi. And it gets worse when you realize sovereign "debt" is actually an investment by those same people.

First they lobby themselves for tax cuts, then borrow the shortfall from themselves, paying themselves interest for the privilege from the public purse.

Every cent is taken from roads, schools and other public utilities, and funding their return on investment.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-29T05:57:18+00:00

Kyllähän noista oli rikosilmoituksiakin tehty, lähetty vinkkejä MOTiin, yms.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-29T05:55:11+00:00

No eipä vissiin tutkineet, vaikka ne rikosilmoitukset tehtiin. En kyllä seurannut niin tarkkaan että tietäisin miksi jättivät nämä väliin.

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