YTMND

In the eyes of a ranger. The unsuspecting stranger. Had better know the truth of wrong from right. 'Cause the eyes of a ranger are upon you. Any wrong you do, he's gonna see. When you're in Texas, look behind you. 'Cause that's where the ranger's gonna be.

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Last Notes

2024-09-26 12:17:23 UTC

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Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.

2024-09-25 13:07:15 UTC

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It can be true that US involvement in world politics has blowback effects without it also being true that all modern terrorism is a product of western meddling.
I'm not saying that everything the US does is appropriate, but I am saying it is a fatal naivete to imagine that the rest of the world just reacts to western aggression and has no regional or global ambitions of their own and that those ambitions are interested in promoting individual rights as understood by you or me.
The fact of the matter is that any large enough society is going to come into conflict with other large societies and not for anything more than it's people just trying to live their lives. This is an unavoidable aspect of human existence. The US could remove it's military presence from the world, it could stop all foreign aid, and it would *still* come into some form of global conflict.
Is this the point where people in the US are allowed to morally say "fuck you" to the one's complaining about our behavior? Seriously, at which point are we allowed to say "No, I'm doing this thing I want to do because I'm allowed to, and if you try to stop me, I'm going to defend myself and my friends"?
Because if, in your mind, such a situation can possibly exist, then you're ultimately talking about the US signing bomb shipments.
This is all to say nothing of the fact that some people are, in fact, bad. Bad people deserve rejection and frustration of their goals, which are bad. I am comfortable saying this because I am not a moral relativist.

2024-09-24 23:41:37 UTC

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We could be like Panama (although, we do use the threat of our bombs to protect their canal), but there are likely real consequences that involve eventual large-scale violence if the USA just abandons the world stage.

2024-09-24 23:28:18 UTC

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Would it have been inappropriate for the Allies to booby trap Nazi radios during the Battle of the Bulge?

2024-09-24 23:26:17 UTC

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Except for basically everything that Hamas and Hezbollah have been doing for decades.

2024-09-23 11:45:37 UTC

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Just add captchas to each post?

2024-09-23 11:44:56 UTC

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Then you realize that they weren't that wrong after all.

2024-09-22 15:48:01 UTC

I am once again humbly requesting that would you please not?

2024-09-22 12:22:03 UTC

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In my opinion, the most important feature of Monero is that it prevents blacklisting your coins.
Bitcoin maxis tend to think that the state is just going to accept defeat when Bitcoin use becomes ubiquitous. In reality, the government is going to do forensics on the chain to determine who owns which coins which they will then blacklist for whatever reason they want.
If you guys all think "de-banking" is bad, just wait until the literal unit of money you're trying to use has been deemed illegal by the government.
Unless someone can figure out how to anapnymize the blockchain, then I think the more likely scenario is not that Bitcoin frees us all from government overreach, but becomes the noose with which it strangles us.

2024-09-22 12:03:02 UTC

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What?

2024-09-22 12:00:40 UTC

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It's actually between unmarried, childless white women and everyone else.

2024-09-22 04:11:25 UTC

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Oh wow, flex on blind people, jeeze.

2024-09-21 23:42:56 UTC

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You're begging the question.
There is a qualitative difference between dogs and people. That difference is the capacity for judgement. Reason. The capability of moral understanding. A dog (especially one infected with a disease that makes it rabid) is not capable of moral judgement. You shouldn't "hate" a dog for acting according to its nature; a nature fundamentally incapable of understanding the meaning of its actions in any moral sense. This is the same reason we don't judge a child the same way we judge a full grown adult.
Humans are different. An adult is capable of understanding the meaning of his or her actions. There is no "affliction" unless they are rendered incapable of exercising their own agency (in which case, yes, we wouldn't consider their actions in the same light).
Whether or not you should "hate" people who engage in evil behavior is not necessarily a required reaction to facing evil (although if there is a valid use for hatred, it is probably of evil per se).
Nevertheless, it is certainly incumbent upon each of us to oppose evil honestly. That means recognizing it that it exists and that fully coherent humans are capable of it. If that means you go to war in order to protect yourself, your family, your friends, your community, your country, etc - then that's what it means. Pretending the problem away isn't going to solve anything.

2024-09-21 04:11:56 UTC

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How do you do, fellow hotel worker?

2024-09-21 04:09:18 UTC

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Pic unrelated

2024-09-18 11:10:10 UTC

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Yep, you're still a virgin.

2024-09-18 11:09:13 UTC

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This is ridiculous. This was one the most targeted anti-terrorism operations in history. They targeted literally only members of Hezbollah and as of my last check, that's almost exclusively who was injured or killed by this attack. Simultaneously, Israel took out the comms of an enemy combatant.
Big Snowden L here.
Frankly, criticizing Israel for this, at this point in time when all information appears to demonstrate this operation as damn near surgical, is fishy. It begs the question as to whether Snowden just doesn't like that anti-Israel forces took a huge loss.

2024-09-18 03:59:42 UTC

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So your problem is the corporate tax cut? I guess it doesn't matter that the corporate tax is notorious for being passed onto consumers in the form of higher prices. Regardless, the idea that reducing (not eliminating, but reducing) the corporate tax has so dramatic effect on the income distribution as to be describable as "selling it the 99%" is just brazen hyperbole.
Regardless, it is an out-and-out lie that the lower and middle classes pay more in taxes than the upper class. The top 10% of income earners fund something like 90% of the entire federal budget. That was true before and after the Trump tax cuts. In fact, the biggest relative cuts landed on the middle class!
Also, the idea that the majority of Americans are poor is laughable. The median income in the United States is one of the highest in the world, as is the GDP per capita. Americans, even the poorest ones, are some of the wealthiest people on the planet.

2024-09-17 11:36:58 UTC

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Donald Trump has been incredibly normal from a policy perspective. The only thing he did that you could even begin to consider as beneficial exclusively to the wealthy were his tax cuts, but that's only if you ignore that he cut everyone's taxes.
His most controversial policies, like banning nationals from Middle Eastern warzone countries, or extending the Obama-era detention policies of illegal immigrants in border states, can't be considered a "1%" program by any stretch of the imagination.
It is interesting that Trump is the pro-1% candidate while Harris is literally stealing Trump's pro-middle-class policy ideas like "no tax on tips" or increasing the child tax credit for new parents. She also has the backing of major banks, hedge fund, and the like and her administration has made zero effort to do anything remotely opposed to "the 1%".

2024-09-17 03:10:38 UTC

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https://image.nostr.build/59b86845ce2c1af689f796f1a6c7cc1856146ed2526b9913424b306a9d61415e.jpg

2024-09-16 12:18:09 UTC

#GM nostr, stop saying "touch grass". Speak like a normal human being who doesn't combine online cliches into semi-coherent sentences.

2024-09-16 02:00:58 UTC

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Looks like they taught you to get easily distracted.

2024-09-14 12:37:47 UTC

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*fewer

2024-09-13 18:57:52 UTC

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[ three weeks later ] "salmonella has taken nostr by storm lately"

2024-09-12 18:11:08 UTC

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LPT: don't let "pleasing others" be the main reason you do things.

2024-09-12 11:04:35 UTC

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This is actually a good idea, albeit it should be enforced by parents. Parental controls on nostr clients would be a good, forward looking feature. The global feed is *not* for children.

2024-09-12 11:01:17 UTC

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Impossible. Mises already explained that commies can't calculate.

2024-09-12 10:58:34 UTC

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Well, a matrix can represent vector fields

2024-09-11 13:10:45 UTC

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Wtf are you talking about? Where did I say I was okay with the growth in state power? Oh, Kamala Harris would be really bad for the country, but let me make sure I say the required rites about how much I loathe the government too. Better make sure I signal to everyone like a damn robot about how much I don't like the size of the government. Trump would be bad too and yadda yadda and okay, now can we move on the actual conversation and stop acting like the only conversation we're allowed to have is how much it sucks to be anti-statist in a statist world?
I've been in and around libertarian organizing for much of my adult life and I swear that we're some of the worst culprits of NPC behavior. It's like, unless we recite the lines in the correct way, then we're elidong a secret desire to dominate others! We're actually secret statists because I didn't say the Constitution was actually a victory for the statists! How dare I make a point about contemporary political realities without first reciting The Ethics of Liberty verbatim!

2024-09-11 11:08:52 UTC

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That's still a choice. Pretending that it isn't doesn't do anyone any favors. Having more time to alter the course is not something you can just write off.
Libertarians have a value set that is extremely specific and this makes the philosophy extremely sensitive to being opposed to even the most dogmatic of policy agendas. This is how you get essentially blood feuds between libertarian factions - Rothbard's legacy vs Rand's legacy, Mises Institute vs CATO, etc - over the variants of libertarianism.
The typical approach for libertarians faced with this sensitivity is to opt-out of the broader conversation entirely as if this puts us above it. "Ah, they both suck." isn't an enlightened perspective. It's how everyone except the personality cultists already feel. It's how everyone has felt in American politics since forever. The whole country is built upon resolving the conflicts of mutuality opposing factions, by overcoming everyone's "you-all-suck" impulse.
There is almost certainly plenty for libertarians to lose with the election of the kind of progressive fascism Harris represents. Trump doesn't have to support getting rid of the income tax to offer a meaningful distinction against Harris' radicalism. I would absolutely take the ravings of a narcissist over a power-hungry ideologue.
Again, even if you think the ultimate vision of trump is something you wouldn't accept, there is room to realize that participation is still in your best interest. Bitcoin isn't going to save you when they serve search warrants on your home and seize your cold stores. When they do forensics on the blockchain to figure out which wallets are yours, which bitcoins are yours, and blacklist them.
No, there is plenty to lose if the momentum dies in the progressive direction.

2024-09-11 03:59:56 UTC

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Paradox: the only way to get to a team that strong is with a good leader.

2024-09-11 03:58:42 UTC

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The "I'm above it because I hate both sides" argument is a bit tired. There are legitimate stakes here. Kamala Harris wants to pack the Supreme Court. This action will effectively destroy the separation of powers and turn Congress and the Court into the equivalent of the Imperial Roman Senate.
This is an actual thing that could happen. She is extremely radical and will pursue the most anti-freedom policy agenda of any candidate except maybe Bernie Sanders.
Trump can be a fool and this is still a true statement. I will happily take the narcissistic fool over the power-hungry ideologue any day of the week.

2024-09-11 03:15:12 UTC

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The way this question teed up the scripted monologue from Harris is extremely fishy.

2024-09-10 11:42:01 UTC

Listen y'all, if every post you make is about Nostr being awesome, do you not see how this is like, the social-media-content equivalent of circular reasoning? If Nostr is good, then it has to have good content, but all the content is people talking about how nostr is good!
Please, post interesting stuff. Say something controversial. Get some current events conversations going. Literally, anything other than "GM, isn't nostr just the best?"

2024-09-08 16:23:48 UTC

Please stop saying "societal" all of the time.

2024-09-07 14:26:21 UTC

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Y tho?

2024-09-05 17:34:53 UTC

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The first five chapters of this book https://a.co/d/1De3DOw are great

2024-09-05 11:26:40 UTC

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How else are they going to be able to deal with the fact that they live in France?

2024-09-04 01:36:50 UTC

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"more cohesive neighbors"
Canada and Mexico aren't exactly the picture of functional societies.

2024-09-03 17:04:54 UTC

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This is a frustratingly popular perspective on here.
Like, if you legitimately believe that people who use social media are desperate for some kind of content recommendation algorithm, then instead of being like "You plebs! You must do the work yourself!", we could instead be like "hmm, maybe we could make a content recommendation algorithm that plugs into the protocol?".
We already have clients. We already have relays. There is nothing about the design of nostr that mandates you interface with it as a raw, global feed of notes. Granted, if people are pseudonymous, then personal information can't inform those algorithms, but so what?
This is actually a great project for people who know how to design social media content recommendation. The theory behind these algorithms certainly does not inherently require that the users all be on servers owned by the same firm.

2024-09-03 16:52:37 UTC

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This is not helpful

2024-09-03 14:18:00 UTC

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*except when people pay back loans made in the form of deposit account balances.

2024-09-03 14:16:27 UTC

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Hopefully you have some time to pasteurize it on your stove top.

2024-09-03 13:09:31 UTC

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It should be a NIPS standard for relays to respect note edits and deletions if it isn't already.

2024-09-03 12:31:52 UTC

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Exercise and use good judgement.
#nevent1q…dvh9

2024-09-03 12:11:36 UTC

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I mean, one of the primary components of a former and possibly repeat president's message to voters has been the danger of the deep state. Something like half of the country is at least not opposed to this idea to such a degree that they'd vote against him for saying it and many support him because he does say it.
Idk, maybe I'm not totally blackpilled, but the fact that we have the kind of opposition to this in America that frankly just doesn't exist in Europe, is primarily due to our robust free speech protections. And we have an economic system that offers a single person with a particular value set to straight up buy one of the most popular social media platforms just to prevent it from censoring people's speech.
Granted, he isn't perfect about it, but it did happen. It happened in America.

2024-09-03 11:41:43 UTC

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Are you mad that laws aren't self-enforcing?

2024-09-03 11:18:37 UTC

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Yet America still has more civil liberties than European states.
You guys need to understand arguments as people present them, not as you read them offered to you in one of Rothbard's essays. I'm not saying that the Constitution is the panacea. I'm merely making the obvious point that writing down laws that explicitly limit the authority of a state provides an avenue for people to check the growth of the state.
It isn't perfect, sure, and in some ways it might actually expand the powers of the state, but if you are a strict constitutionalist in America in 2024, then you're a libertarian. That obviously isn't true in reverse.
Let me put it this way, if you're going to try and understand the Constitution, you're obligated to learn the theories of the framers, who, with few exceptions, believed in appropriate limits on state power. It informs their thinking in everything related to the government. The debates of the founders on the role of government exist in the larger context of the broad debate on the role of government headed by Locke and the other enlightenment thinkers. This was undeniably a debate on what are the government's proper *limitations*.
You can be salty that they weren't anarchists or that there plans on limiting the state don't work as well as hoped, but you can't just ignore the bill of rights and the Constitution as inherently a part of the effort to delineate the proper bounds of government, nor can you deny that compared to societies with similar cultures (like Europe), it has resisted the *same kind* of growth (multiple times) into the circus we see on TV every day.
The Constitution and Bill of Rights is part of America's small-government culture whether you like it or not. No one who supports reducing the size and scope of the state in America should think that treating it as a poison is going to be at all practically effective in long term reductions in the size of the government.

2024-09-03 03:16:03 UTC

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The difference is one is people dissociating with you because they don't like you, the other is people locking you in a cage and killing you if you try to leave. Also, people cancelling you has literally zero to do with the constitution, so bringing it up in this context is a non sequitur.
The government using their enforcement arms to make your life miserable is actually illegal, which means there is an avenue of recourse available to you that other states don't offer because they don't have things like the first, fourth, and eighth amendments.
If you're going to come at this from the perspective "The state is bad and there is nothing left to talk about." Fine. You can have that position, but if you're going to try and say that, in the context of existing states, the Constitution doesn't make America qualitatively different than European states, then you're just wrong. It's a libertarian contrarian position that avoids answering hard questions about the structures of states while pretending to be above it all.

2024-09-02 23:48:40 UTC

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Ah, ok, that makes sense

2024-09-02 23:47:42 UTC

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Fine, but you're not going to prison.

2024-09-02 23:46:54 UTC

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What is the benefit of a local-only relay? Amethyst mentions drafts and stuff, that's fine, but as far as participating in the nostr protocol, what's the point? Maybe I'm missing something here?

2024-09-02 23:35:24 UTC

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We don't, actually.

2024-09-02 22:46:31 UTC

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Laws are meaningful checks on the authority of particular individuals and institutions even if they aren't 100% effective. The Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, have done more to check the growth of America into resembling modern day Europe than any kind of independent political activism since ratification.
Compared to the Articles, sure, it was a growth in state power. Compared to the rest of the world or the ambitions of modern statists, it has been useful. No matter what, ensuring an environment of freedom requires more than one tool. No one ever claimed otherwise.
Let me put it this way, if you get rid of the constitution now, you're not getting the articles, you're getting the modern UK, France, Germany, Canada, etc.

2024-09-02 02:48:19 UTC

Y tho?