This exactly is what drew in my late father, who was a scientist (not climate, obviously!) with raw intelligence several standard deviations above average. "They" were using climate change as a stalking horse for communism / woke-ism / whatever other "big government" thing he thought was counter to the interests of people like him.

He wasn't always like that. Maybe he wouldn't have described himself as such at the time, but in his twenties and early thirties he was a Liberal. He was a Peace Corps volunteer, attended Civil Rights marches, advocated on behalf of gay people, argued for gender equality, strongly opposed the Vietnam War, and was appalled by Watergate.

Fast-forward to the last decade of his life, in which my father donated to all three Trump presidential campaigns, displayed a Gadsden flag on his mantle, rejected his trans-gender grandchild, and made (at the very least) replacement-theory adjacent noises. Oh, and preferred Ivermectin over covid vaccination, of course.

What I think happened was that he was culturally out of step with most people who otherwise shared his politics in the 1970s - he was religious, so viscerally disgusted by drug use and "extra-marital" sex - and got captured by the propaganda machine that others in this thread have described. I believe the biggest turning point was 9/11: it terrified him, even if he couldn't quite admit that to himself, and he lived the rest of his life in a state of inchoate fear - stoked, naturally, by Fox News and other right-wing media.

So, that was the (white) American Baby Boomer Experience, writ small. He did materially well, but I think was a better and wiser person in his twenties than he became later on.

Rejecting climate change ("anthropogenic climate change", my father would point out, which let him off any evidentiary hook) is only a small part of an entire ideological project, which demands to be swallowed whole.

Jesus. Yeah, that explains a lot.

By the way, his notion that introspection is an "invention of the 1920s" is historical bullshit. I think he's taking potshots at psychotherapy? Whatever, man, but then do that. It's not like a Freudian concept of the self is beyond criticism - far, far from it - but using that to interdict "introspection" is just sloppy thinking.

Anyway, leaving aside anything else to be said on the topic, the idea that "great men of history don't introspect" is utter bullshit. I'll see you Abraham Lincoln, and raise you Marcus fucking Aurelius.

So, if what you really want to say is that "most 'great men of history' were sociopaths" then, well, yeah: you're probably onto something. If your next thought is "and I want to be like them", then that's 1) a pretty damning confession, and 2) also evidence that you, sir, aren't actually a sociopathic "great man" at all, just an insecure nerd who got lucky a few times, and now are getting high on your own farts.

You would probably consider me to your right, but I'm right there with you. Prison should be protective: we lock up people from whom the rest of us will not be safe unless they are segregated. Ideally it is also rehabilitatative, and once (if!) prisoners will be safe and productive members of society there is no point to keeping them locked up.

If there are other methods short of prison that can render law-breakers harmless - such as restrictions on certain activities and occupations - then those should be pursued first.

The ghost of this philosophy, however attenuated, can be seen in systems of pardon and parole.

I acknowledge that a desire for retribution - to punish the evil-doer; make them suffer for what they've done - is a strong impulse (I feel it myself!), deeply imbedded in our tribal psyches, but it should be fought, not indulged.

This seems to me to be the only moral basis for a system of justice and incarceration, though I have no idea how to nudge a society towards this model. Some northern European countries approach it.

(In fact, I may well be nearer to your position than my description implies. I use the term "leftist" because I hate the way the term is applied to anyone who isn't a Republican. My beliefs, in the Clinton/Obama range, are "leftist" only if one is dumb enough to believe what one hears on Fox News.)

Heh. I sometimes describe myself as "basically a communist" for the exact same reason. Actually, I lived in Europe long enough to be maybe a little left of you, but still Clinton / Obama center-right, in world historical sense. I expect we'd get along. :-)

Mazda has historically been very good at designing for repairability. My (latest) Mazda is ten years old, so I cannot verify any model later than that, but it's one reason I've been brand-loyal for decades. The 2015 CX-5 puts the oil filter right next to the drain plug, slightly recessed (for protection, I assume), but with ample clearance around it for tool and finger access. It's the best thought-out oil filter location I've ever seen; I cannot think of any possible improvement. The advantage of that, over Subaru's choice, is that the oil in the filter can only ever spill into your drain pan (or I guess the ground, if you're a numpty), never into your engine compartment.

You're right. More specifically it's Cockney (east end of London) rhyming slang. Basic rule: find a phrase that rhymes with the word you mean, substitute the phrase, but leave out the rhyming word. So "butcher's" = "butcher's hook" = "look". So "take a butcher's" means "take a look".

I had a Cockney father-in-law, once upon a time, so a few phrases crept into my lexicon. I still use "don't chicken about it" = "chicken curry" = "worry", and a couple more.

You don't always leave out a word. Some of the more famous ones, that most English people have heard, are "trouble and strife" = "wife", and "apples and pears" = "stairs" - though I never heard anyone use those particular examples in regular speech, they're often given as examples / stereotypes / satires of the style.

I play vintage baseball. It's baseball using rules and equipment from the 19th century. There's nothing else in my life that connects me to my eight-year old self, but the feeling I get running out onto the field or going up to bat is exactly what it was back in Little League. It's also a really fun community of passionate baseball nerds, and a good motivation to stay fit.

Is there a breakdown of this to read? Sounds fun!

I don't know of a good one, sadly. Run a search for "vintage baseball" and you'll get various amateur sites for various local leagues, with explanations of varying quality. If you're truly interested, swing by a game local to you and watch - and, ideally, follow the players to the pub after. It's all very analog, which is another reason I enjoy it.

Early in the Bush administration, at least, there was continuing approchement. Bush was mocked for saying something like "I looked into his [Putin's] eyes, and I trust him". I don't remember enough about the early GWOT days to pinpoint the particulars of the falling out, but I do remember thinking that there were areas of cooperation not being pursued. Like, could Russia have been brought along into Afghanistan? I thought that at the time, though I'm not sure how it looks 25 years later. Like you, however, I doubt that Russia's eventual (and justified, mind you!) current stance and status was written into stone.

> Like, could Russia have been brought along into Afghanistan?

It pretty much was. Afghanistan was a UN-sanctioned war, and Russia did not object to it from its position on the UNSC - and provided support for the invasion.

Iraq (Three permanent UNSC members voted against it), on the other hand, was a clear indication that the rules-based world is a sham and a scam... And that the only rule that matters is 'Fuck you, make me.'

You know how Trump is criticized for pursuing idiotic short-term gains that torpedo long-term trust and legitimacy? That was also the real, lasting legacy of Bush II's first term. Anyone playing by the rules is a fool.

You're always free to stop at the level of abstraction at which you find a certain answer to be satisfying, but you can also keep digging. Why are flat shoes better? Well, it's to do with my gait. Ok, but why is my gait like that? Something-something musculoskeletal. Why is my body that way? Something-something genetic. OK, but why is that? And so on.

Pursued far enough, any line of thought will reach something non-deterministic - or, simply, That's The Way It Is - however unsatisfying that is to those of us who crave straightforward answers. Like it or not, our ground truth as human beings ultimately rests on intuition. (Feel free to say, "No, it's physics", or "No, it's maths", but I'll ask you if you're doing those calculations in your head as you run!)

We're talking past each other, and mixing up some concepts, most of which is my fault for not writing particularly clearly.

Yeah, "God did it" is the first of those answer layers at which some people stop interrogating the world around them, just like "that's just the way I am" is where some people stop developing their self-understanding. Neither of those answers advance civilization / ourselves any further than the status quo. They're terrible answers! Everyone should be digging deeper.

However, I would not use the word "understanding" in opposition to "intuition". Someone who can generate a ballistics chart understands trajectories, but so does someone who can reliably put a basketball through a hoop or a bullet on target. I would set "analysis" against "intuition" (or "instinct", if you prefer), but they're not in opposition: instead, they reinforce each other. We're all familiar with the scientists and mathematicians who ride a hunch to a ground-breaking discovery, which is then validated by exhaustive analysis. From the other direction, athletes and musicians analyze their technique in minute detail, and practice incessantly, in order to ingrain analytical insights into instinct. (Or, if you prefer a less physical example, programmers study algorithms so that they can intuit which to apply to a particular problem.)

My point - badly expressed in my earlier comment - is that as humans we exist moment-by-moment, and as such react, in each moment, by intuition. As important as analysis is, we cannot live in analytical mode: it lags too much! Furthermore, approximately none of us will ever make a groundbreaking discovery in any field, far less in all of the areas to which we can (and should!) direct our analytical energy. At some point we have to stop (even if we are a groundbreaking genius in one area, we'll have to in all of the others), and accept the answer that satisfys our purpose or exhausts our motivation.

Isn't that example pretty reductive, in that you have a directly-measurable output? I mean, the joint is either 45° (well, 90°) or it's not. Zoom out a bit, and the skill-set becomes much less definable: are my cabinets good - for some intersection of well-proportioned, elegantly-finished, and fit for purpose, with well-chosen wood and appropriate hardware.

Mind you, I don't think the process of improvement in those dimensions is fundamentally different, just much less direct and not easily (or perhaps even at all) articulable.

> the more a job pays, the harder it is to get hired

That's not axiomatically true, like, at all.

The odds of being hired vary according to the supply of qualified applicants vs available positions. Tech companies with large profit margins will be able to offer higher wages than businesses with lower margins - and do so because they're competing with other tech companies, and (for the most part) not companies in other sectors - so assuming pay is a differentiator across domains can't be assumed. Over the long term, pay differential within a sector will motivate more people to become qualified for jobs within it, but at any particular moment cross-sector compensation isn't really relevant to the question.

This isn't to say the original assertion is true, as they don't offer any evidence, but it wouldn't be shocking to find out that a publishing company has more qualified applicants per job posting than any particular tech company.