aesthelete

joined 2 years ago
[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 65 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (2 children)

It's not that difficult to build a concentration camp with shitty cots, inadequate facilities, and hazardousness as a feature built in on nearly unlivable land in the Everglades.

It likely is slightly more difficult to build housing for homeless people unless you're trying to build death trap, concentration camp housing for them as well.

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 2 points 10 hours ago

That's fine but regular art isn't 2/3 theft either.

I do buy the 1/3 shite though. It may even be a bit higher than that. Though beauty is in the eye of the beholder, etc.

It's a matter of taste for sure but I'd say AI art is >90% shite, 100% theft.

I don't like the glossy looking hyperreal shit it puts out at all.

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world -1 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (2 children)

I enjoy lots of great art! But do you think I watch every film? Listen to every band? There’s tons of shit out there!

You said regular art is 1/3 shite and 2/3 theft. Maybe math isn't your strong suit but that's 3/3 which is 100% so by claiming regular art is the same you're saying all art is either theft or shite.

It uh, it isn't.

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

A system’s purpose is what it does

You may like this quip, and I'll admit I'm partial to it myself, but it's just a quip. A system can have other purported or actual purposes and then simply not be structured correctly to reach them. The quip is skeptical and cynical, but not everyone is a cynic, and not all non-cynical people are stupid.

Values like “Greed is Good”, “AIs are superior to humans”, and “Israelis are entitled to a militant ethno-nationalist enclave state”. They’re the ones currently running the country.

Great? The values espoused or imposed by the currently ruling regime aren't universally shared even in fully developed totalitarian states.

There are some very, very good poker players who cannot tell you the name of the state they took all your money in, because they could not be bothered to learn the name.

A better analogy is if there was a poker player that came into the game with more chips than any other player at the table, was allowed to continually and openly cheat and evade the established rules of the game, and was still crowned the winner. Is that player possibly stupid? Yes, it very easily could be the case that he is.

Trump's chief insight in his entire life is that the people who enforce the rules in this country are weak-willed and will fold under applied pressure. That's not exactly theory of relativity stuff, and many other people knew this just as well as Trump but were restrained by other things that don't apply to Trump from exploiting it.

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

The big news media periodicals are fully just Native Ads now.

Yep, complicit.

People who are exceptional at their jobs are traditionally described as “Smart”, at least within their fields.

He's not exceptional at his job either. His job isn't to get elected and he even flubbed that in 2020. It's also not to develop and nurture a cult of personality. If you're talking about enriching himself, and you think that's the primary or sole job of a politician...then sure? I think other people had traits that prevented them from becoming a full-on kleptocrats, and more broadly speaking I don't think most people would think the job of a politician is solely to enrich themselves.

It might have held up, if he hadn’t flubbed it and dropped out after one bad debate.

So you potentially buy that Biden is smarter than Trump because he beat Trump in 2020, that Biden is stupid, and yet somehow Trump is not stupid?

LOL, man, what are you trying to even discuss here?

Look, it's possible to not succeed at achieving your goals (whatever they may be) for garden variety of reasons that have nothing to do with intelligence.

Trump is incessant, persistent, relentless, ruthless, unscrupulous, hedonistic, impulsive, a pathological liar, shameless, immoral, bought and paid for, and would be nihilistic if he weren't so narcissistic.

There are a large amount of very smart dorks that have impediments (that have largely nothing to do with intelligence) that prevent them from achieving their objectives.

There are also people who have actual values and do not believe in continually violating them in order to achieve whatever their objective may be. If you think that's stupid, that's like your opinion, man. But I wouldn't go around shooting people to succeed in my job goals, even if it would make me successful at achieving them.

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

YOU HAVE 1 SECOND to provide COMPLETE FINANCIAL RESTORATION. ABSOLUTELY AND IRREVOCABLY FINAL OPPORTUNITY. RESTORE MY BUSINESS OR BE LEGALLY ANNIHILATED. ULTIMATE THERMONUCLEAR SMALL CLAIMS COURT FILING:

Fucking thing sounds like a sovcit (including the emphasis on the capitalization of words).

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago

If only we had the standards for the presidency that we have for newly naturalized citizens.

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

We’re living in a system that rewards sales and marketing at the expense of any material results. Calling some of the best sales and marketing guys in the country “stupid” because they’re selling saline and snake oil only makes sense if you’re rating them on their efficacy rather than their sales volume.

Sometimes it isn't even their sales volume. Look at the numbers on AI. As the podcast crowd would say "the math doesn't math". It doesn't matter because those evaluating them are also a combination of stupid and complicit.

Which marks him out as smarter than all the folks who lost to him along the way.

You keep insisting that winning an election means you're "smarter" than the opponent. There is absolutely zero evidence to support your claim.

Also, by your own weird equating of intelligence and electoral results then Joe Biden is smarter than Donald Trump and you already said that he's stupid.

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (6 children)

The national humiliation that accompanies Trump's rise is that he is clearly and painfully stupid and that it does not matter.

He telegraphs his movements. He loudly announces all of his intentions. It does not matter, because the game is rigged.

It's not isolated to Trump. Every business idiot in the last quarter century has gotten this type of treatment (https://www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-them/) despite the fact that they continually promise vague bullshit and cannot even deliver upon that.

America is a place where we tell ourselves that the "American Dream" is a real possibility, despite all of the contrary evidence. We write whole tomes based upon the supposition of "meritocracy" in a country where it is amongst the least likely to be true. Class mobility in the United States has been less possible decade after decade for the last half-century and the yet this type of "rise and grind" mythology has become even more popular. (I think these types of paradoxical phenomena are everywhere you look in America, but that's a completely different discussion.)

The idea of the powerful, rich, famous, or the grand trifecta being complete fucking dunderheads that Peter principle their way into further destroying any justice or good works of our country on the backs of their own greed is something that is too painful for most people to fathom, but it's nonetheless true.

He's stupid. It doesn't matter that he's stupid. In fact, it's better for the forces that are trying to accomplish real goals that he is stupid. He distracts us from the boundlessly evil ghouls who would not win an election themselves, but are vicious, ruthless, and competent.

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (8 children)

But the reality was merely that Trump used a prop to sell a lie that played well with his base.

His base is stupid too. We've already been over this. 🥱

And the photo-shopped knuckle tattoos were another prop to sell another lie.

It wasn't mearly photoshopped. It was annotated. He insisted that the 20pt Arial annotations were actually tattoos.

If you want to believe he's some type of genius, it's clear I'm not going to be able to convince you otherwise. So I'll man woman person TV camera see my way out. Covfefe!

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (10 children)

And you can reasonably claim that cordyceps is dumb as shit. But you can’t argue it isn’t getting what it wants.

Totally agree.

If you want to talk about a politician being a dumb-fuck, you have to wonder at what Barry was thinking when he got in bed with both the Wall Street scorpions (who would immediately stab him in the back in the mid-year cycle) and Silicon Valley (which twisted in the wind for another decade before firmly aligning with MAGA).

I think he had a very common liberal, capitalism-sized blind spot. I'm willing to admit I had the same one at the time. He also was definitely beholden to interests and was 0% of the communist / socialist that everyone continually pretended (and still pretends) he was.

Trump found some useful propaganda to circulate in order to get people to break his way.

One of his team of lackeys presented him the annotated photograph and he confused it with reality. He's oceans worth of stupid and there are countless examples of this.

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (12 children)

I’ll spot you Trump as “useful idiot”, but he’s been very successful at getting what he wants (money, fame, power, a slavishly loyal paramilitary intent on ethnically cleansing the country).

His success is on the back of 40+ years of the hollowing out of government by the duopoly of neoliberal politics. He stands on the shoulders of midgets...or weaklings, or corruption, or a pile of invertebrates or something.

Maybe the US is just predisposed to delivering those results and Trump was dealt a winning hand at birth. But you can only call the guy cleaning up all the chips at the table “stupid” for so long before you start looking like a sore loser.

Trump was absolutely dealt a winning hand at birth. He was born a rich heir to a real estate mogul in New York. He failsonned, grifted, and bullied his way through multiple (mostly failed) businesses, failed up, and lived his entire adult life during an era of rapid capital expansion.

Without his riches, as you concede, he would not have the juice he needed to make a splash on the political stage.

If you want to call me a sore loser for stating clearly the plainly visible fact that Donald J. Trump is stupid, then so be it.

The guy thought that annotations on an "explainer" photograph were tattoos despite some of the annotations floating off of the guy's knuckles. He mused aloud in front of a national audience about injecting disinfectants to cure COVID. He's a stupid fucking idiot.

 
 
view more: next ›