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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 8h

What makes it really hard for people to swallow is that, frequently, the technical problems are the easier ones to solve.

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 8h

A lot of this is bias towards/rewarding short-term thinking. Additionally, too many people chase easier problems

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 11h

Which is why I think we're seeing a much more hesitant response from people who may have rhetorically advocated for it in the past

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 11h

I feel like part of the issue is that public execution has been a cultural touchstone along a lot of axes in American life for quite a while. On the one hand, a big part of it is just hyperbolic and referencing cultural output (mostly westerns), but a portion of it is serious

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Related from restaurants: the guy trying to order top-shelf pretty much never actually wants the top shelf

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

This comes up everytime dating/flirting discourse goes around and I think of how consistently my single male friends cite that assumption as why they didn't like their date

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

It's a good example in that it changes "it's okay to choose to adopt some risk" into "this means I'm not actually making a choice".

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

*on the former, it's just derp not worth engaging with, though if you walk into a bookstore right now you'll see a plethora of titles the author pines for. And if you really want to engage, I'd hazard the phenomenon he's talking about is more video games vs books than anything else

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Not on account of Big Men Doing Big Man Things being secretly unpopular or not resonating or whatever. Just on the idea there's some innate caveman inside me that's my real self

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

There's a lot of more nuanced stuff to be said about this but: 1. The whole article is anti-diveristy pantomime of representation 2. Is honestly pretty offensive to me as a man

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Yeah, especially given that the argument is a pretty common anti-diversity perversion of "representation"

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

What gets me about BtWH and I'm assuming this is that so much of this has just permeated the zeitgeist

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

100% recommend, really gives you a shape of the movement that I think is generally not taken account of. I know she's working on another book I'm looking forward to

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Maybe, but I think not having a way back into the mainstream leads to other attacks that can't be ignored

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Somewhat aside, there is a meaningful alt-history where 9/11 never happens and the ur-villian in turn of the century media are white supremacists

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Especially with the latter, it's much harder to make her sympathetic, which is, frankly, where the expectations for this kind of story are at right now

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

You're right, and part of the difficulty discussing adaptation is having to navigate how the touchstones of mass violence and religious extremism have changed since the novel and the movies came out

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Most people experience authority as powe and that's not particularly true in politics or public service

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Slightly orthogonal, but that's why I think there needs to be an "everyone needs to experience being in a position of non-hierarchical authority" addition to "everyone should experience working retail"

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Re : calculator. Essentially you end up teaching kids to use a calculator, not math. So you get kids who can't do basic arithmetic but can pass by knowing how to input into a calculator

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I will say that I'm noticing learning *habits* that aren't helpful from younger coworkers who are very consistent with use. And anecdotally from a math teacher friend I know that there's a similar issue to relying heavily on calculators too early

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I think a huge issue every time this whole thing comes up is that "when" is an important part of the framing. And stuff like this tries to elide that to get a result they want

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I think this is a place where the '24 "open primary" stuff has been simmering in the background in the ways that will be relevant

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I think if she doesn't run she still is essentially the kingmaker

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

So apparently we now have a "guy who drives absurdly loud car around at 2am" a la Seattle

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I think it's insecurity about having to justify not liking things that have merit. You don't have to, you can just not like it!

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

*I think there are a bunch of orthoginal trends going on

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

There are alot of angles to come at this statement

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

A really common vignette: "Do you really want us to do something official about guy-who-hugs-like-that? Then we'd have to fire him"

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I think it's why we see a higher tolerance for sexual harassment/violence than other behaviors. Asserting the punishment needs to be maximal leads to avoiding punitive action in the first instance

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Don't forget repeated shutdowns, everyone loves multiple obvious economic downturns a few times a year

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

*probably have to view the whole affair so narrowly that it doesn't count, but for pure vibes it's up there

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Lower hanging fruit, but making them non-official campus orgs would be an even easier start.

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Also, the "maybe" about leftovers is load bearing

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

To be fair, they're just lying. Or just arbitrarily trying to use the most expensive products possible.

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Tbh, a lot of this has the same shape as the early MeToo conversation around "should what you do outside the workplace effect your employment?"

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

It's a two-step, where the latter needs to be conduct consequences having more teeth. Right now, non-academic/off-campus conduct has pretty limited policing

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Like, congrats, you hung out in multiple places that actively promote and protect horrible stuff?

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Seeing whataboutisms about other student orgs and violence on campus and boy, I don't know

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

A good thought experiment that highlights how absurd the current system is: What things could you do that are not illegal or directly harmful to another person that would get you bounced from the university faster than a Title IX complaint?

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Another part is that there's a intentional push to make "college life" and "Greek life" equivalent in a way that's not accurate on the ground

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Part of the culture is that it's one of the few "boys will be boys" hanger-ons we have left. There's an ingrained taboo on dealing with it except in extreme cases that you have the obvious dichotomy with how other standards are enforced.

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Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here @ohdeerthermos.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I think it's right when we tend to treat it as so exceptional as to only be acted on in more extreme cases. And a lot of anger at universities is that they seem like places you go to buy that exception

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Reposted by Oh Deer the Dark Place is Here

bryan newbold @bnewbold.net · 07/10/2026

ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton. she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

old photos of a woman (Margaret Hamilton) standing next to a tall stack of books (printouts of Apollo space mission software source code)

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