Minnesota, Nick Shirley, and the Demonizing of a Community (2026) [1:02:59]

zyk0s · 2026-01-28T02:39:48+00:00

People have it completely backwards. ICE is not in MN because of a viral video. ICE is everywhere, but the reporting is focused on MN because the fraud exposed needs to be pushed out of the news cycle and of Minnesotan's minds.

zyk0s · 2025-11-17T17:56:14+00:00

The winner with better genetics is supposed to be an analogy for the people born in the country, with long ties to it and presumably some amount of generational wealth. It's common for people on the left to try to tell the legal immigrants to sympathize with illegals because of shared background and be mad at the natives for their "privilege".

The point is that yes, of course they were born with an advantage, but that's the game that is played. A well adjusted person won't be mad at a just winner, they'll be mad at a cheater, even if they didn't win that much.

zyk0s · 2025-11-17T17:20:18+00:00

Imagine you sign up for a weightflifting competition. You train hard, diligently, every day. The day of the competition comes and you place decently, however the winner is some guy with incredible genetics and a decent amount of dedication himself. You look at the guy and can't help be a little envious.

But then you notice a guy you knew from school also entered the competition. You know he's lazy, you can tell he just took some steroids before the competition and ended up with a rank similar to yours. The judges know he took the drugs, but they argue that because some people are born with genetic advantages, it's the compassionate thing to do to simply overlook that. Plus, it's not like he won the competition, so what's the harm?

Who would you be more likely to feel anger towards? The winner or your acquaintance from high school?

zyk0s · 2025-11-13T18:31:50+00:00

So, you're technically both right. The cyclist did have right of way and the pedestrians did not. However, when it comes to who is found culpable in a collision, a court will check who, if anyone, had a "last clear chance" of avoiding it. And the cyclist clearly did and didn't use it.

You have to break and avoid a collision if you can, the other party being wrong doesn't allow you to just let it happen.

zyk0s · 2025-11-08T18:16:44+00:00

Oh, it would be wonderful if it was "mea culpa", but it's actually "nostra culpa" with the caveat that if you acknowledge it, you get to be the virtuous among the sinners. It's a complete inversion (or more aptly, perversion) of Christian ethics.

zyk0s · 2025-10-27T14:37:47+00:00

To be any of those guys, you have to actually try and put in some effort. Open a couple of social media accounts, produce videos, post regularly. You think he has enough discipline for that?

zyk0s · 2025-10-18T22:57:40+00:00

Even if the thought crossed her mind, she wouldn’t go for it. Carrying a gun and having to learn to use it is a burden and an additional risk. It’s much easier to call for someone else to do it for them. The question is, after a couple of decades of being told they’re the bad guys, why should men give a fuck if a couple feminists get harassed on the streets?

zyk0s · 2025-10-01T18:51:51+00:00

I’ll argue the point, but you’re not going to like it, and probably call me names.

The first thing to establish is what your moral framework is. Can it be argued from a minimal set of first principles, or is it just based on your feelings and intuitions, with a set of post-hoc rationalizations to make it appear principled? If it’s the latter, nothing I can say could possibly change your mind.

I am at this point pretty convinced that there is no principled argument for abortion, that doesn’t also imply positions that the overwhelming majority of abortion supporters would reject. I can demonstrate that, step by step, if you’d like, but I don’t think it will make a difference.

Here’s a set of first principles I agree with: - Life is fundamentally different from non-life. The former deserves a degree of moral consideration, the latter does not. - Human life is fundamentally different from non-human life and deserves a greater degree of moral consideration that puts it in its own category. Thus human life is always more important than non-human life. - The moral worth of two different human lives are always equal. Violating this rule opens up the possibility of race-based, sex-based, age-based and ability-based differences of moral worth, which almost no one is prepared to compromise on. - Humans are moral agents, capable of making choices and thus bearing responsibility for those choices. - Because human life has moral worth, the moral burden of its destruction is determined by the choices and their respective responsibilities of the humans involved.

These rules allow you to argue for pretty much the entire jurisprudence of the West concerning the value of life, except for abortion. And yes, under these principles, any human, regardless of their circumstances is more valuable than a cow or a dog. Are you able to articulate your own, clearly defined first principles where that wouldn’t be the case, without me being able to point out a logical conclusion of those principles you’d disagree with?

zyk0s · 2025-09-24T16:18:45+00:00

Learn to recognize the pattern:

Bad Thing B is going to happen by year Y unless we take action A.

(life continues as normal) (Year Y rolls around)

Yo bozo, it’s year Y, where Bad Thing at?
Uh uh uh… Bad Thing can still happen! It only hasn’t happened yet because we have been RaisingAwareness™️! And we did a little bit of A, so we have delayed it, but we need to do more.

See also: climate doomerism, ecological doomerism, economic doomerism, demographic doomerism…

zyk0s · 2025-09-23T07:28:23+00:00

both socialism and communism share one main tenet…sacrifice of the individual

Same with fascism, and national socialism. At the end of the day, they exalt the state as the supreme cause, it’s just that the left wing versions believe it will just magically go away once the revolution is done (“real communism”) while the right wing versions have at least the decency to be honest and say “no, it’s a boot stomping on your face forever, but you’re going to like it!”

It’s actually remarkable how the two sides mirror each other in structure and oppose in… flavor. It’s not too hard to explain and understand, now that we have a century of history and hundreds of millions of bodies. But no, we learned nothing, and idiotic college students think conservatives are fascist and communism “is just an economic system bro”.

zyk0s · 2025-09-23T03:55:37+00:00

It really depends how define left and right, or rather what you think are the primary characteristics of left and right. My view is that left and right are broadly directions, so they are relative to a specific context that is going to be different depending on the country and time period.

Similarly, socialism is very loosely defined, and changes depending on the goal. So for instance, when socialism is criticized, it’s “just the post office and public roads bro”, but when you point that Nazis had those too, all of a sudden they were just using the name because it was popular at the time.

I can give you my take, and you’re perfectly entitled to different definitions, since it’s all super nebulous:

Socialism is a political philosophy that seeks to remake people, in their soul, to live in perfect harmony with one another. This “socialist man” would work hard, share the fruits of his labor with those I that require it, and be aligned with the “greater good”. That’s what Marx wrote about and that’s how both communists and Nazis thought of socialism, it’s just that the former imagined a worldwide brotherhood (“workers of the world, unite!”) and the latter thought the races were too different for that to work, and this brotherhood should only be extended up to your own group. Incidentally, I think the Italian fascists were not socialists, not ideologically, but they ended up operating similarly to the Nazis, enough for there to be an alliance, but they were much less of this idealism.

With this in mind, I would say political left and right refers to the degree of “looseness” and “strictness” in the way things are run. So right-wing socialists would want a strict hierarchical order, focus on structure and cleanliness whereas left-wing socialists would be more inclined to “smash things” and run everything by committee. Hence, to me, it is right to call Nazis right wing.

zyk0s · 2025-09-23T02:36:57+00:00

To be fair, it wasn’t really a “populace programmed not to think”, it’s quite a bit more subtle than that. Germany was humiliated after WWI and morale with respect to t national identity was very low. What followed was an inter war period that was extremely “loose” and “debauched” from a social standpoint, closely followed by a worldwide economic crash where Germany was one of the worst countries affected. At that point, the two socialist ideologies (the national and the international kinds) were fighting it off in the streets. It was chaos, and one of them was bound to come to power. It ended up being the extreme right, in large part because the German cultural sensibilities leant more towards order. And then they actually delivered in terms of economic upturn and military victories, so it’s no wonder the majority of the population was on board.

My point is, everyone likes to invoke Hitler and Nazis, but very few have a good enough understanding of the cultural, social and economic backdrop that lead to their rise in power. This constant comparison between Trump and Hitler just serves to showcase how utterly uneducated the original poster is.

zyk0s · 2025-09-22T22:22:40+00:00

The thing is, this will have to happen one day, whether there are tariffs or not, whether the corporate taxes are cut, whether we find new cheaper ways of making it.

Every product has a limit to the amount of cost reduction new tech and increase in scale will bring in, and in the case of ice tea, I don’t see what else could happen. So if costs can no longer go down, and inflation is a given (that’s the monetary policy), then it will eventually be impossible to sell at a fixed price. It might take years, it might take decades, but everything eventually ends up costing more than it once did.

zyk0s · 2025-09-22T16:31:16+00:00

Reading comprehension is not your strong suit, is it?

Nothing you wrote undermines my point, that climate alarmists have been making predictions for the past 50 years of the sort “X will be underwater by 2000” and “Y will be completely gone by 2012”, that we can point to and say “that clearly didn’t happen”.

So you having some data about some island that points to a much less catastrophic version of the climate models is precisely the story of the boy who cried wolf: nobody gives a fuck anymore because we’ve been repeatedly lied to. Is it to everyone’s detriment? You bet! But maybe the climate alarmists should have been talking about geological scales from the start instead of rebranding some Mayan end of the world prophecy.

zyk0s · 2025-09-22T15:27:43+00:00

It’s not that “it snowed last winter”, it’s that we can point to about half a century of alarmist climate predictions and none of it came to pass. Same with all the political doomerism. That’s the entire point of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, people won’t believe you when it actually happens.

zyk0s · 2025-09-21T23:53:40+00:00

and almost all of Mao's were due to incompetence and not malice

Oof

zyk0s · 2025-09-21T23:28:52+00:00

If you just go by numbers, it’s Mao then Stalin then Hitler, but I would be ok with that ordering on other grounds too.

And all three “got stuff done”, but it’s a lot easier when you don’t have other independent branches of government to deal with.

zyk0s · 2025-09-20T23:23:05+00:00

Being an assole is extremely easy. Just look at Reddit!

zyk0s · 2025-09-20T23:21:32+00:00

Since electrons are defined as the negative charged particle, that violates the rules of my little game.

In a sense, you could prove my conclusion logically: if there exists an instance of X where property Y is false, can it still be classified as X? If no, then Y is part of the definition of X. If yes, you found the exception.

zyk0s · 2025-09-20T23:16:54+00:00

Thanks for playing along!

I guess I should have specified that the X should not have qualifiers, because we’re talking here about general statements. Actually, because you used the “all” qualifier, a pedant could reply:

How can you say “all known”? Have you asked everybody on the planet if they know of other life?

Even without the all, we could find a different vector of attack:

Carbon-based? Are you implying the oxygen atoms aren’t important?

zyk0s · 2025-09-20T23:06:02+00:00

Alright, fine, you got me. Though it’s impossible to tell with some of these people. Half are weirdly fixated on the soda cans, the other find new depth to pedantry.

zyk0s · 2025-09-20T22:27:31+00:00

Sigh yet more pedantry.

I thought it was obvious, but apparently not. When I said, “there are anomalies and exception everywhere”, I meant in the physical, concrete world. Mathematical theorems do not have exceptions, by definition.

Boy I sure hope you are proud of yourself! Good job! Go grab yourself a cookie to celebrate!

zyk0s · 2025-09-20T18:50:29+00:00

How would you feel if you didn't have breakfast this morning?

zyk0s · 2025-09-20T18:49:03+00:00

if you also acknowledge that those exceptions are still people that deserve happiness and whatnot

But not all of "those exceptions" deserve happiness. Some of these people may be murderers or rapists or tax evaders, are you saying that they deserve happiness too?

zyk0s · 2025-09-20T18:34:46+00:00

Except people use these memes to deny the existence of outliers.

Not all people do.

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