sean

The political terms "left" and "right" have an actual meaning. Democrats are nowhere near left. Sources pressing narratives like "98% of media is leftist" are very right-wing. Sean

Alan Moore's Swamp Thing is my favorite "superhero" hands down. It's both hilarious and sad and a sign of our times that the right-wing sociopath Rorsach was portrayed as the antihero of the Watchmen film. Sean

I've found that people who claim they're "neither right nor left," especially U.S. citizens, are usually center-right at best. (And often worse, e.g., right-wing libertarians or crypto-antisemitic conspiracy-theorists.) The political terms "left" and "right" have ideological meaning. Likewise "centrism" is not defined via an attempt to locate a compromised middle ground somewhere between right-wing Republican monsters and diet-right-wing corporatist Democrats. The U.S. political spectrum is ideologically center-right to far-right. There is effectively 0% mainstream representation or discussion of actual leftist praxis in the United States. The handful of mildly-center/center-left politicians are virulently attacked, even by (center-right) Democrats. The result is that people, often averse to appearing "too radical," assume the truth must be somewhere between center-right and far-right, the only positions credibly represented and discussed. This is what passes for "reasonable" politics. Meanwhile, we have literal concentration camps in the U.S. set to a backdrop of catastrophic environmental destruction while tens of millions of people live and die in extreme poverty. Universal healthcare is "unaffordable" while we have ludicrous billionaires who can't imagine anything else to do with their money than play with rockets and flame throwers. We literally invent money for trillion dollar wars. The right-wing is fiscally conservative only when it comes to the poor. ✊ Sean PS — joeblast, hey man. It's been ages. 👋 I had fun hanging out with you as well. No offense but please don't start spamming this topic with toilet paper rolls of your elaborate, personal conspiracy theories. 😆 I, like anyone else here who's spent more than five minutes in Off Grid, am quite aware that you deeply believe you've cracked the case on a vast global conspiracy. if I'm interested in reading anymore about that subject I'll go to one of the many topics containing several hundreds of your posts cataloging it at length. 🙏

😎 Alan Moore's the shit, nice. Yeah, this is a good point. It's a strange bird. On one hand you have outright bigots that believe not being able to say racial and homophobic slurs at their workplace is "political correctness". But on the other I've also seen what I would consider extreme silliness from SJW types. I'm biased but think the latter is because SJW is not really an ideologically leftist movement. Yet their excesses are still used as a cudgel to fabricate some incoherent boogeyman of "postmodern cultural marxism" gone too far. Sean

Hey Rich! ✊ I'm fascinated by the psychology behind what lures people into conspiracy theories. I think they're an incredibly seductive rut for certain temperaments. It also doesn't seem traditional spiritual practice does much to inoculate against, in fact maybe it leaves one more susceptible? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Thanks for sharing. Sean

Huh, yeah, page load does seem to be struggling. Machine is pretty beefy already. I just tweaked some knobs and will keep an eye on it.

Some discussion recently about creating subforums here, for Taoist discussion in other languages. So, I'm curious, what languages do you speak? Would you like to see a subforum dedicated to it? Are you relatively even-tempered, moderately sane and available to moderate a subforum here in your native language? Can you see any implications, positive or negative, of this change? Thanks! Sean PS - I speak a bit of Spanish and German, neither well, but I would enjoy seeing subforums for both, if there were enough interest.

FWIW I was missing some context when I responded to this. I conceded that repeated and similar tirades without substance could be considered a kind of unconstructive spam. I didn't realize this was specifically a "Trump Talk" topic already in Off Topic. I also wrote that I tended to give more weight to insults based on how likely I imagined the "target" would 1. ever receive the insult and 2. be hurt by it. In the case of Trump I think both are close to 0% chance. (Maybe especially #2 since Trump in particular appears to lack literally any ordinary human capacity for dignity or shame. Ziing! 🙃) In any case, this topic has been moved to Hun Dun now, yes? Sans "forbidden content" I think it can just be let be without moderation now.

i'm partial to weirdo sighthounds as my pup is a borzoi.

Hi there bums, Besides getting a glorious new Yin Wood Goat in our header, you may have noticed we've also gotten a name change. To explain, very simply, in the last year I've been getting a bit more serious with my Mandarin studies. The mishmash of defunct Wade-Giles and modern Pinyin was really getting to me. Apologies to anyone with strong attachments to the T. It may take some getting used to, but I hope it's a change for the better. Maybe one that encourages us all, at least in some small way, to more deeply appreciate the rich language underlying much of our interests here. Let me know your thoughts and feelings. And especially please report any glitches or anomalies. Thank you! *deep bow* Sean

also zuowang introduction and santidao.

http://www.gnosticweb.com/index.php?PageID=333 I'm starting it. Not sure how long I last, my attention span is rather slim the last few weeks, but I always wanted to learn how to do this. Sean [edit]Of course notice the PageID ... I'm cursed.

Bumped into this post on Quora the other day, thought I'd share: Sean

can you give me an example of a URL that is throwing a SQL error for you? thanks! sean

I renamed it to "Thank you". I hope everyone likes! Sean

One thing that would help. If you see this error again, please post the exact time w/ your timezone that you saw the error. That help help me match up the error with what was going on with the server at the time. Thanks! Sean

Thanks for the reports. They really help. Please keep them coming. Sean

Thanks for heads up. Will investigate. Sean

Ordered a copy last weekend but shipping from UK so expected delivery is late March. Sean

Oh, just run of the mill revolutionary plotting, supersecret scheming, confidential shenanigans, etc. You know, ordinary shit webmasters do when they collude.

I'd never even noticed profile stars until recently. Personally, am glad they're gone, thanks dawei. At some point though I would like to reopen the conversation around the post Dislike button. I recall some of the concerns around it damaging member's public reputations, etc. But I think if the reputation aspect were separated and/or privatized, and the Like/Dislike buttons were repositioned as Upvote/Downvote this could be a beneficial feature. In this case, ideally speaking, an Upvote would come to represent "I may not agree with your post, but it contributes value to this topic" and a Downvote becomes "I may actually agree with your post but it detracts or contributes nothing to this topic". I could then add a feature where you might choose to have posts below a certain configurable threshold be "collapsed", i.e., the post is not shown in full unless you click a link to "expand" that post inline. For example you might specify to auto-collapse posts that have received more than 5 downvotes and less than 2 upvotes. With some tweaking, I feel like this might empower the community to then curate a "least common denominator" filter within topics. TL;DR Imagine browsing a topic where the derailing posts are all auto-collapsed to your specifications, but you still have a one-click option to show any of the collapsed posts if you choose. Sean

Haha. Nice. I love Berkeley. Spent a decent chunk of my life roaming the East Bay. BTW, Andrew Nugent-Head recently relocated Association for Traditional Studies to Asheville. Sean

Well, if you move to Asheville your school is a few blocks from my house. (FWIW I recently moved to Asheville from LA. Was in Berkeley before that. Funny enough, top three choices of where to go next were Portland, Austin or Asheville. Happy with the choice so far. Sunnier and way less rain than Portland. Milder, less brutal summers than Austin. Way cheaper than both. It is very small but also packs a punch above it's weight class.) Sean

Married to a Chinese woman + access to world-class Mandarin teachers? Sean