Disqus - Latest Comments for ikostar

Re: 'White Supremacy Equals Violence': Richard Spencer Protested in Michigan

Nick Taylor — Tue, 06 Mar 2018 00:25:57 -0000

But white educated middle classed people aren't "at war" with "black labouring-class"...

... and your theories about "hate" are utter rubbish. England is not that rich, Ireland not that poor, and they don't hate each other. Brexit was voted for by poor white people. The educated middle-class were the ones who wanted to stay part of the union.

You're one of these "bots" aren't you?

You can kindof tell by your spelling of "predigest". You're just trying to stir up as much hate as you possibly can. Why don't you go get a life? You should be ashamed of yourself.

Re: Guns, Toxic Masculinity, and the Alt-Right

Nick Taylor — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 04:06:53 -0000

Sorry, I don't have 40 minutes to spend on this - what does it say?

Re: Guns, Toxic Masculinity, and the Alt-Right

Nick Taylor — Sun, 18 Feb 2018 00:08:21 -0000

Sorry that's bollocks - the term "toxic masculinity" refers to men using their positions in dominance hierarchies to abuse and disenfranchise people in weaker positions.

This it arguably worse in non-US/EU countries (take a look at India, Saudi Arabia etc).... and (like #metoo) it is a response to to divisiveness and hate... not something that is "designed" to create more of it.

It's only divisive to "men" who are to weak/insecure to admit that there's a problem.

But you're from the past. This is a tectonic demographic shift - which you can thank capitalism for weirdly enough. Women were forced to join the workforce, and now have a degree of independence that they haven't had... possibly ever. They went out to work, but were still expected to do the housework and raise the kids.

It's mainly women that divorce men (like, 70%)... and are far less likely to fall into the trap of marrying again. What you're seeing is women escaping the hierarchy at home... only to find themselves in abusive situations at work - and #metoo is a reaction against that. Toxic-Masculinity is a pretty good word for that they're no longer willing to put up with.

Oh yea - and histories of domestic abuse is the best predictor we have for these mass-shootings. It's men with "traditional family values" who's sense of entitlement spills out into physical violence. Toxic-masculinity in other words.

Re: Guns, Toxic Masculinity, and the Alt-Right

Nick Taylor — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 23:53:36 -0000

Yea. But why aren't they though?

Re: Guns, Toxic Masculinity, and the Alt-Right

Nick Taylor — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 15:17:08 -0000

Yea - but your previous posts make you sound like a bit of a white-supremacist. Like Joseph Goebbels.

You aren't "debunking" anything. You're just making a fool of yourself.

Re: Guns, Toxic Masculinity, and the Alt-Right

Nick Taylor — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 15:15:49 -0000

Only morons believe this. There is no link between homosexuality and pedophilia.

Re: Guns, Toxic Masculinity, and the Alt-Right

Nick Taylor — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 15:14:41 -0000

It's about power-imbalances.

The reason there isn't a "toxic" version of any of those things (although I'm sure you'll make one up), is that they're on the low-end of a power gradient where they're systematically on the receiving end of centuries of injustice and abuse...

... from "masculinity", which when it strays into this kind of abuse, is rightly referred to as being toxic. Nobody is vilifying masculinity... just those behaviours when weak men try to lord it over others.

re: "You've gotta be a feminist." - well, no - I'm a white, 53 year old male who runs a small manufacturing/engineering business in a small town.

You on the other hand have showed your hand. Beta-Male-Sexist much?

Maybe the reason you don't have any female friends, isn't a problem with them, but a problem with you. Maybe you come across as being a bit angry and a bit creepy.

Re: Guns, Toxic Masculinity, and the Alt-Right

Nick Taylor — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 03:02:44 -0000

Hard to say - but I suspect he might be quite proud of you Durango.

Re: Guns, Toxic Masculinity, and the Alt-Right

Nick Taylor — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 03:00:03 -0000

re "I defy anyone to define 'toxic masculinity"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

See? Not hard is it.

re: "- as it implies there is something wrong with masculinity i.e being male"

No it doesn't.

The best predictor we have with these mass-shootings isn't "Mental illness", it's a history of domestic abuse/violence - ie: insecure men who try to turn their own families into primate dominance hierarchies. Weirdly enough, women don't really go for this.

Re: Florida Shooter Trained with Neo-Nazi Militia and Wore MAGA Hats

Nick Taylor — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 20:58:31 -0000

Yep - bullshit.

It's not up to me to provide citations for other people's "facts".... but as you're so keen on literacy and research, why don't YOU give us a cite for:

"95% of violence in USA is inflicted upon the uneducated lower-half of society by the
educated and privileged upper-half."

You won't, because you can't, because this "fact" is a total lie, and you know it.

Re: Florida Shooter Trained with Neo-Nazi Militia and Wore MAGA Hats

Nick Taylor — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 20:16:17 -0000

Bullshit

Re: We Can’t Wait for an Invisible Hand. It’s Time to Rewrite the Rules of the Economy

Nick Taylor — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 17:28:30 -0000

The only way capitalism is going to survive automation is if the people doing the work, own the means of production. We're due (via numerous studies, in numerous countries) to lose about 45% of jobs to automation in the next 15 years. There is an outside chance for a generations's grace via green Keynsianism, but sooner or later, the jobs are going... and you can't run an economy on that.

A UBI seems like a good idea - but if it's purpose is just so people can pay rentier capitalists... and they are the only ones making enough money to pay the tax for a UBI (and they ain't paying tax now in any case), then that isn't going to work.

...

If you work for a company, and are replaced by a machine - you lose your job. You're not even part of the conversation about what happens to you.

If you co-own the company and are replaced by a machine, you get a say in what happens next - you could (for example) make the same money, but be freed from the labour.

I think what we need to do is pass a law such that whenever a company changes hands, the people that actually work there get first right of refusal to buy it and run it themselves, backed by a govt loan with the same interest rates as we gave the banks in 2008.

This will provide a gentle transition. Alternatively you can just let money-lenders take all the money, while our technorati create the machines that lose 1/2 of us our jobs, and we get no say in what happens to us.

That is not a gentle transition... and hey, take a look around. The fallout has already started.

Re: Change the Incentives, Change the World

Nick Taylor — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 18:42:23 -0000

Cheers - will do.

Re: Change the Incentives, Change the World

Nick Taylor — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 18:42:09 -0000

I've got the basics working... I'm a geek though, so I'd like to learn how to program the thing :)

Re: Change the Incentives, Change the World

Nick Taylor — Sat, 17 Jun 2017 19:04:00 -0000

Another possible reason why these types of applications haven't been developed yet, is that (in my experience) Ethereum is incredibly difficult to get working.

After several weeks of trying to download the blockchain using Geth, in the end I switched to Parity... which took several days. I'm now attempting to work through the tutorial - and keep hitting brick walls... right now I'm stuck on page 3 with a message that simple says "undefined" with no clue as to why... I asked about it on the forums 3 days ago. Asked again last night. This is the really basic "hello world" stuff.

Maybe I'm too dumb for this. Maybe I'm getting old. I've been programming web-stuff for 20 years now. Maybe I'm just out of date. Maybe it's still a fledgling system.

What I'm not seeing though, is anything remotely as democratic as the claims being made for it. The idea that "anyone can check it; anyone can program it"... well yea... anyone except me -
and if I can't get it to go, then virtually nobody I know outside the geekosphere can either.

From where I'm sitting, we're simply going to be replacing one set of technocrats with another... it's not a trustless system if it is completely opaque to everyone but those programmers that can understand it. We're just forced to trust a different set of people.

Re: What do you do when you realize your government has blocked you for Wrongthink?

Nick Taylor — Sun, 21 May 2017 14:04:17 -0000

Out of curiosity, what in this context characterises "far left" to you?

What do these people actually want that characterises them as extremists?

Re: What do you do when you realize your government has blocked you for Wrongthink?

Nick Taylor — Sun, 21 May 2017 13:34:31 -0000

a) False equivalence.

"Far left" is increasingly a label applied to somewhere near what the centre used to be. "Progressive" is only a balance to "fascist" in the minds of fascists.

Forget this "balance" idea. This is not a debate between two legitimate "sides". Last time people with these ideas showed up in Europe, they murdered millions upon millions of their own people.

b) What would you do about bots?

If your twiitter feed is turning into a spam-magnet for thousands of racists, what do you do?

Assuming you don't personally find the racism acceptable of course.

Re: What do you do when you realize your government has blocked you for Wrongthink?

Nick Taylor — Sat, 20 May 2017 17:05:45 -0000

Fair enough.

What would you do about bots?

Re: What do you do when you realize your government has blocked you for Wrongthink?

Nick Taylor — Fri, 19 May 2017 18:34:30 -0000

15000 seems like a big number for one person (or even a few people) to have blocked to me. I would be interested to hear their side of the story.

This number rings a bell with me because of an article I read recently - from a Pro Hillary supporter who was getting a load of sexual harassment on twitter from Bernie fans... rape threats, death threats, general abuse etc... and she said she blocked thousands of them, and then the day after the election the accounts had been deleted. They were bots.

So maybe they were responding to that? I don't have the information, but in a country the size of Sweden, 15000 seems like a lot of people to need to block. Maybe they were trying to block bots?

Anyway - I would (I think) regard this as a single-individual staffing-mistake made worse by govt arse-covering (or whatever), rather than a deliberately implemented policy...

... and unfortunately, what you' are doing by making it sound like this, with particular emphasis on the "far-left" part, is feeding into the Nazi narrative that inciting racial hatred is a freedom of speech issue.

And "far-left" is hardly ever that - it's basically where the middle used to be before Nazism became acceptable again somehow, and created a new fake centre. Sorry for the use of that word, but have you seen what these people actually say? It fits.

https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

This article that you have written will (most likely) wind up being utilised by the Nazi memosphere.

You might want to be careful about doing that.

Re: Donald Trump on Obamacare – ‘Repeal it and Replace it with Government Funded Universal Healthcare’

Nick Taylor — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 16:23:49 -0000

This is a great idea - the government run healthcare systems in the rest of the developed world provide far greater value for money than any privatised system - especially the catastrophic American system.

People in other countries pay far far far less than Americans, and get the same, if not a better service - but on top of that. the freedom... the peace of mind that you get from never ever having to pay for health-insurance... it's incalculable.

This idea that "ooh, tax is bad" is a total red-herring. Corporations and the money-hoarders need to pay their share - there's 21 trillion dollars sitting in tax havens - that's money taken out of circulation, and taken out of your tax revenues - they're the reason your taxes are as high as they are.

Tax the rich properly - close the loop-holes, increase the rates on the corporations, and not only can your taxes go down, but you can enjoy the benefits that everyone else in the world takes for granted, eg: non-dickensian health-care.

Re: Apple Just Patented a Full Color 3D Printer Concept

Nick Taylor — Sat, 05 Dec 2015 22:02:27 -0000

So... if you've got enough money, you can "have an idea" (which in this case is bleedin obvious), and then pay some money, so no one else is allowed to have the same idea.

How is that benefiting society? (you know... us. They people who's taxes are used to enforce / police "IP").

Abolish all patents. They're a farce.

Re: Interactive: Patent Power 2015

Nick Taylor — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 03:38:54 -0000

This is a map of corporate stupidity - every patent represents a branch of a tree that has been cut off, and tarred over.

We need to abolish "Intellectual Property".

Re: Right-Wing Reactionaries Try to Take Over the Future Through Science Fiction

Nick Taylor — Tue, 18 Aug 2015 19:00:19 -0000

Good science fiction is always a critique of the present... unless you get into space-opera territory (which is more fantasy than sci-fi), that is kindof what it's for I think.

And for the last x-decades we've been utterly immersed in a kind of radical, out-of-control capitalism that has been justified by a creepy, radical conservatism. The result has been a catastrophic mess that is breaking down everywhere you look, and which we (as a species let alone as a society) will be lucky to survive. The whole thing has become so bizarre that reality is continually outflanking satire. That's why (apparently) they stopped making The Thick Of It... they comedians couldn't keep up with the politicians in terms of ludicrousness.

But anyway - the socio-political/media backdrop has been out-of-control radical capitalism, justified by radical conservatism. Old Men having zero limits on the size of the bribes they can pay to politicians for example. The brothels they frequent being filled with middle-classed girls trying to pay off debt. The whole thing is deeply creepy.

So any good sci-fi will most likely need to be a critique of this. If we were immersed in some sort of goey uber-liberal suffocating utopia, then maybe "conservative" critique would be justified, but we're not, so it isn't.

Re: Autonomous Robotic Weapons Could Reduce Civilian Casualties, So Calling for a Ban Right Now Is Premature

Nick Taylor — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 02:57:15 -0000

"Warfighting Robots Could Reduce Civilian Casualties"

Christ that's naive.

Mind you, anyone who uses the word "Warfighting" is absolutely part of the problem.

Re: FAA Unveils Drone Rules: Autonomy Is In, Drone Delivery Is Out

Nick Taylor — Sat, 21 Feb 2015 02:34:05 -0000

Right - so basically it's ok to fly a drone, but only if someone with a red flag walks along in front of it?