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mudil

8,652 karma · joined December 7, 2009

"The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology" — E. O. Wilson

"Fascism, Nazism, Communism and Socialism are only superficial variations of the same monstrous theme-collectivism." -Ayn Rand

"The dream of absolute, universal equality is amazing, terrifying, and inhuman. And the moment it captures people's minds, the result is mountains of corpses and rivers of blood." -Vladimir Bukovsky

"It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle." -P.J. O'Rourke

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." -James Madison

"Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing." -George Orwell in 1984

"Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, social justice." - Thomas Sowell

"This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can. This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist or communist or anarchist or Marxist. But the fundamental character is always the same. It’s always the same.

It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation, an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world. Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us. The old dogma was wrong. The old dogma was wrong; none of this is driven by idealism. It is not utopian. In fact, it is the opposite." - Marco Rubio

“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” – John F. Kennedy

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free." - President Ronald Reagan

“At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It basically gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue.” - Elon Musk

"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it." - H.L. Mencken

“Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed.“ -Barry Goldwater

“Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.” - Christopher Browning in “Ordinary Men“

"Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole." - Thomas Sowell

“It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.” - H.L. Mencken

"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world". - President Calvin Coolidge

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." -Ronald Reagan

"Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed." -Robert A. Heinlein

"One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." -George Orwell

"There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining “punishment” and “being supposed to punish” hurts it, arouses fear in it. “Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish? Punishing itself is terrible.” With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence." -Friedrich Nietzsche

"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing." -Thomas Sowell

"If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning." -Aristotle Onassis

"For quality of life, it is better to err on the side of being an optimist and wrong, rather than a pessimist and right." -Elon Musk

"Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge and self pity are disastrous modes of thought. Self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia, and paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity." -Charlie Munger

"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy." - George Orwell in 1984

“I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists, I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners.” ― George Orwell

"Asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare’s Dream) at transforming my humble chamberpot into a bower of aromatic perfume." - Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

"Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial." -Friedrich Nietzsche

"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." -Paul Krugman (1998)

"But we’re very clear of our principles and our purpose, which is to be aligned with our Allies, understanding that — I mean, listen, guys, we’re talking about the potential for war in Europe." - US Vice President Kamala Harris, Munich, Germany February 20, 2022

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mudil··on Amazon, Apple and Google Cut Off Parler
How about we look into censoring family environment? Why not to take kids away from the family and transfer them to the state so they are not exposed to racist parents? Where's the end to it?

PS I came from Soviet Union and this is not a theoretical idea.

mudil··on Amazon, Apple and Google Cut Off Parler
How did antifa continued to get organized in the last 5 years? Did they have a purge of accounts? Any apps got banned from app stores?
mudil
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·on ACLU Counsel Warns of 'Unchecked Power' of Twitter, Facebook
How did antifa continued to get organized in the last 6 months? Did they have a purge of accounts? Any apps got banned from app stores?
mudil··on Apple has threatened to ban Parler from the App Store
Exactly. Remember when this was OK? https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1047935416182235136?s=19
mudil··on Apple has threatened to ban Parler from the App Store
How did antifa and others organized in the last 6 months? Did those apps get banned?
mudil··on Reddit bans subreddit group “r/DonaldTrump”
Exactly. Remember when this was OK? https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1047935416182235136?s=19
mudil··on Reddit bans subreddit group “r/DonaldTrump”
Trump (and his supporters) has been in possession of the entire federal apparatus, from CIA/NSA to the military, and yet he's been a pretty ineffective in overthrowing anything. It's your fantasies that need to be overthrown.
mudil··on The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire
A phrase that comes to mind: Make Orwell Fiction Again
mudil··on The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire
Actually, reality is quite conservative, as in evolutionary theory. Our wishes have a liberal bias.
mudil··on The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire
Taibbi and Greenwald are two people on the left that still have a healthy attitude to question things, and not to follow the left echo chamber.
mudil··on The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire
“Cutting down the public’s ability to flip out removes one of the only real checks on the most dangerous kind of fake news, the official lie." Perfect summary of the article.
mudil··on My Resignation from the Intercept
A phrase that comes to mind:

Make Orwell Fiction Again!

mudil··on Over 80% of Covid-19 patients in a hospital study have Vitamin D deficiency
Wow! Thank you!
mudil··on Over 80% of Covid-19 patients in a hospital study have Vitamin D deficiency
Do you have a reference to Vit D content in mushrooms and their exposure to UV? Pretty cool fact!
mudil··on EU launches probe into Google-Fitbit takeover
I did an interview with the FitBit reps at the last CES. And what they described to me was truly Orwellian. The company's big push is in the B2B offerings, all based on constant monitoring and the big data. Health insurance? Put FitBit on to monitor employees exercise levels and activities. Workplace safety? Put FitBit on. Heart rate data and arrhythmias? They already monitor and they are working on more. They even have a sleep score monitoring. And so on, and so forth...

From our writeup: "So what are the benefits for companies and insurance firms? Fitbit Health Solutions (FHS) provides a platform that offers insights and guidance to make employees healthier. But the benefits go beyond health. The FHS platform can improve productivity, reduce on-job stress and accidents, detect causes of absenteeism, and improve job participation.

The company has already released a premium membership subscription for enterprises and customers, especially since the release of its Versa 2 watch."

https://www.medgadget.com/2020/02/fitbit-health-solutions-in...

mudil··on Justice Department to propose limiting internet firms’ Section 230 protections
When social media firms ban conservative voices, they need to be sued for interference with interstate commerce. Because that's what it is.
mudil··on Zero Stroke
"Besides a compulsion to write endless strings of zeros, individuals that suffered from this condition would reportedly become confused when referring to numbers and would state that they were ten billion years old or had forty trillion children."
mudil··on YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy
According to your philosophy, we should already have a competitor to Boeing cranking up new airplanes.
mudil··on The Biases of Wikipedia and Moderators Today
Why is this flagged?!
mudil··on A synthetic control causal analysis of Musk's tweet on Tesla stock price
Elon downgrades the stock and market agrees with him. That's my analysis.
mudil··on A Covid-infected attendee emerges from CES in January
I came back from CES to home in Eugene, OR, and fell ill. I missed 10 days of work. I am an anesthesiologist, and I knew that I have a viral illness (high fever, myalgias, SOB, etc). At the time I tested negative for influenza. Interestingly, I've been in a quarantine for a month. And I wore N95 for two weeks prior to the quarantine, because of my super paranoid wife. So if I can get tested for antibodies, it will be almost certainly CES, if I am positive.
mudil··on Li Wenliang
This is how Medicare For All looks like.
mudil··on Li Wenliang
Well, Soviet Union was pure socialism.
mudil··on Li Wenliang
As someone who came from the Soviet Union, I can attest that this is how socialism with the government in charge looks like.
mudil··on The Disturbing Power of Information Pollution
Not true. That vantage point shows entire Mall, all the way to Washington Memorial. Furthermore, given the rain, the crowd size is variable depending on timing. In 3D CNN photo, I see crowds all the way.
mudil··on The Disturbing Power of Information Pollution
There is still a question about crowd size of Trump inauguration. Just because media, and in this case MIT Press, repeats something doesn't necessarily make it true.

Here's a 3D from CNN, of all places, where crowd size could be seen by yourself:

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/01/politics/trump-inaug...

mudil··on The Future Is Grim
"Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world."

mudil··on The Future Is Grim
That's flimsy considerations, if you ask me. Japan does well with little land. Agriculture nowadays uses way less land than it used to.
mudil··on The Future Is Grim
Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us (2004) (theguardian.com)

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.t...

mudil··on The Future Is Grim
Serious questions. What is wrong with a hypothetical scenario that our children will have to move to Antarctica and northern Russia to grow corn and grapes? I mean after all, people moved all the time. Civilizations collapsed in the past from lack of water where it used to be plentiful, and other natural disasters wiped out entire civilizations. And we are still here, living well, eating organic food, drinking clean water and watching Netflix. And we are living longer and better, and in the West we have more forests than a century ago. How do we even know that these naysayers are correct while those that blamed witches and proclaimed impending apocalypses were wrong?
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