curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
This is just politics as pro wrestling, meaningless simulacra level 3 stuff. He's posting galaxy-brained dumb justifications for things his audience believed anyway because it gets him likes. Threats of assassination are not a meaningful incentive in US politics right now, if anything it's lower than ever when you compare the rate of ambient political violence a mere 40-80 years ago to now. If they were, the stakes would be a lot higher than 'have a VP that's slightly worse than trump'. Assassinating a sitting President Trump would both be a huge escalation against 'process' and 'democracy', which the deep state loves, and extremely stupid because it'd backfire horribly in terms of support for Trump, people love martyrs.
Sticking with the theme, let's look at the quote tweets. From one of the DR people, Peachy Keenan: A very experienced criminal psychiatrist who once testified in the Bobby Kennedy assassination case told me TODAY that he is convinced with absolute certainty that assassination is the only path left for the Democrats. Chilling.. Chilling, yes. Candace Owens: Was literally saying this 48 hours ago. Trump should obviously choose Vivek or someone like @RepThomasMassie for this reason. He chooses Tim Scott or Nikki Haley, and we are in trouble. Needs to be someone the establishment cannot control. Very reasonable.
curious_straight_ca
21hr ago
Remember how many times progressives on social media were wrong about Russia, and about Trump's legal woes in general? I think you're doing the same thing in reverse here. What the government's alleged to have done is very minor, but a lot of the words look like the words you'd use in a major situation, so it's blown up into a big deal.
curious_straight_ca
21hr ago
The DOJ’s clever wordsmithing, however, did not accurately describe the origin of the cover sheets. In what must be considered not only an act of doctoring evidence but willfully misleading the American people into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security, agents involved in the raid attached the cover sheets to at least seven files to stage the photo.
This is a tendentious presentation imo. Politico presents this as:
Smith’s team revealed in the filing that FBI agents carried printed “classified cover sheets” during the Aug. 8, 2022, search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and used them to replace any classified documents they discovered in cardboard Bankers Boxes that littered the former president’s residence.
“The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose, until the FBI ran out because there were so many classified documents, at which point the team began using blank sheets with handwritten notes indicating the classification level of the document(s) seized,” the prosecutors wrote.
“Any handwritten sheets that currently remain in the boxes do not represent additional classified documents — they were just not removed when the classified cover sheets with the index code were added,” Smith’s team wrote. “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet.”
I think it's reasonable to put cover sheets on the classified documents, given they are classified. The documents would have already had classification markings, so I don't see how this is "willfully misleading" the public "into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security".
It turns out that when the government alleged that Trump had classified documents he was not supposed to have, the government itself did not accurately know which documents Trump had, or which documents Trump was even supposed to have. Actually, worse than that, it turns out they fabricated some or all of the accusations
"Some or all", here, seems unjustified - I don't think anyone (other than perhaps Trump on Twitter) is claiming the accusations are all fake - that's a much stronger claim than "the documents aren't in the same order that they were when we scanned them". Your sources imply this is like "tampering" with evidence, and it may (not sure) be a procedural issue, but things like "adding cover sheets" and "reordering documents" don't undermine the claim that Trump committed a crime.
curious_straight_ca
21hr ago
This again? If Biden wanted to cut down on illegal immigration, he could do it now, without any additional Congressional authority
... Okay? Ben's not arguing Biden is blameless here, just that Trump is blameworthy. Yes, Biden and the Dems aren't doing this out of sincere care for immigration, they're trading a better chance at getting elected for a concession to the public's policy priorities. Trump should, by the values of his own voters, take the deal and reduce his chance of winning because this would hugely reduce illegal immigration.
curious_straight_ca
2d ago
I suppose it is stupid that they don't just post the email's contents. Like when there's an article about something happening in a lawsuit without a link to a pdf.
curious_straight_ca
3d ago
I don't think there's anything wrong with an email as a source, if you email MIT's comms office and they respond with a clear claim? They could be wrong, or lying, but they could lie to the NYT too.
curious_straight_ca
4d ago
These are important barriers on a timescale of a few years, but on the scale of decades, the march of biotech and basic research will overcome imo.
curious_straight_ca
4d ago
Hmmm I spend time around both, more around wokes / progressives and I really don't see it.
When I think about the thoughts that motivate someone who leans progressive, I think things like George Floyd, the idea of someone not being able to pay off medical debt and foregoing care as a result, black kids who can't get good jobs because of racism, imagining a kid who died in a school shooting because we don't have gun control, someone who's mocked for being gay, etc. And also the strong social taboos, and internally confusing the social taboo with justifiably taking offense at words that harm people. I'm having trouble of thinking of an interaction where it felt like people were really, genuinely, afraid that history would judge them. They feel much more afraid that their current social group will judge them.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
My take:
Look I love rolling in shit as much of the next guy, but I think it has to be interesting. Yeah, critical theory gay pedo, I remember watching that video four years ago or whatever, but you can't just say the line for the thousandth time, try to do something new with it.
If jannies had the balls to moderate on QUALITY, and just say "yeah you're irredeemably r-slurred have fun on .win", jannies would be seen as sigma monarch chads and not whining virgins.
This place as a whole doesn't want any of that toxic stuff anyway. I'd say run back to rdrama, but rdrama comments in 2024 are so dull I sympathize with coming here. Try twitter, idk.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
Not the kind of comment we're looking for here tbh
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
I also vaguely remember something like that happening? It might (or might not) have been this. https://time.com/collection-post/6140206/cultivated-meat-passes-the-taste-test/
Again keep in mind that I'm comparing this to shitty meat. I don't even like shitty meat.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
I'm not overselling the relevance of critical theory to the western academic tradition as a whole, the critical theorists really do have hundreds of thousands of citations, and one of them is in the top 10 of all cited academics in any field (habermas), also you'd probably include Foucault who is the #1 most cited. I'm not claiming he has a lot of mainstream cultural relevance, but given the crossover between the 'elite' and academia it is not weird for him to be interested in critical theory.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
What do you mean "you can't, though"? I am really quite confident that I could get lab-grown meat that passed a blind test for something like tens of thousands of dollars per pound if I for whatever reason really wanted to. It's not that difficult of an engineering problem, we know how to create the relevant tastes and textures, the problem is getting costs down to what nature's gotten very good at over a billion years.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
I think sometimes the learned behavior of trying to make arguments that make outgroup look dumb overrides your attempts to actually understand the world around you. This is one of those cases. Historically religious people actually believe in their religions, as physical facts about reality, as much as they do anything else. People have mental breakdowns about heaven and hell! Whereas being on the 'right side of history' is, in its entirety, a rhetorical device to refer to social pressures or empathy for oppressed people who exist today. Nobody who says that is actually imagining dozens of people looking back on them from a century after and being disappointed. They are not at all comparable.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
The way you say it you'd think Critical Theory was an esoteric subversive cult and not a very popular and influential historical school of thought, whose notable figures rank among the most cited individuals in all of published research everywhere.
OP reads like it's criticizing the substance of therapy, as opposed to the standards of the self-regulating body. It might be a problem, but it doesn't fit into OP's narrative claim well. Anyway this is uninformed speculation, but therapists self-regulating to that extent seems much harder than medical doctors. Medicine exists in an institutional context, there are clear guidelines, obvious standards of harm, clear records of symptoms and treatments, and institutions that can keep those records and have processes for reviewing potential misconduct. Whereas a therapist individually meets with their clients one on one, interactions are private, and any investigation of misconduct would finely depend on the facts of personal relationships. Who would even start the process in this case, when the client and therapist are both happy?
</speculation>, Looking at official procedures reddit threads, it looks like therapists sometimes do lose their licenses, but the attitude in the thread seems to be that the process isn't great and many who lost their licenses for good reasons seem to earn them back, and the offenses are generally significantly worse than providing bad advice, mostly crimes or having sex with clients.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
I mean, everything is a norm. The command structure of a military at wartime is a norm. The security of your home is a norm. Adherence to contracts is a norm. That police arrest you for breaking the laws passed by the legislature, as opposed to the laws the police chief makes up, is a norm. Yet, we don't expect any of those norms to fall apart.
Yes, any of those norms could change. But they'd need good reasons to. Corporations are very familiar with what happens when they blatantly break federal regulations - it goes poorly - and they maintain close relationships with regulators. Texas just doesn't have much leverage, as one state of many, and the biggest and most economically productive states are blue anyway. Yes, sufficient disruption could break this norm - if the regulators started demanding war communism, your hypotheticals would stop being hypothetical. But they aren't, and nobody involved has enough dissident energy to do anything.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
It seems pretty clear that they have in fact derived a very significant and irreversible political advantage from this tactic
Progressivism is currently winning against conservatism/reaction because it won over the elite, not because of illegal immigrants. Fewer hispanics would move the median voter slightly to the right, and thus R and D policies slightly to the right, and that'd still be way to the left of what you want.
Anyway, I don't think any such decentralization will happen, economic systems are deeply intertwined with regulation and the law and that'll make a true decoupling too painful to countenance. And if it was attempted anyway, it'd just be a "man corners dog, dog bites man, man shoots dog" scenario, the state would lose hard.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
Gatekeeping and openness aren't exactly the same, you can be "open" and also high-quality if you're swift, brutal, and arbitrary with moderation, which is the best place to be imo.
That theory is almost certainly not true. There is minimal commercial value to Reddit accounts
... How sure are you of that? I'd buy a few hundred reddit accounts with 10k karma each if they sold at 10c a pop right now (they're easier to have sister-site style fun with), but alas based on both my memory and checking of sites for buying and selling reddit accounts, aged accounts with good karma can sell for tens or hundreds of dollars (and several of the $10-100+ accounts are sold out). There's great breadth and depth in the online advertising market, and there are plenty of ways to use reddit accounts with enough karma and history to get past various automated filters. You don't even necessarily need to sell the accounts if you spam with them yourself.
And bots reposting the exact same content from a year ago is not something exclusive to political subreddits, I see the same thing on every other subreddit very frequently.
I can also say from personal experience that reddit does actively fight vote manipulation with account suspension and removing the involved upvotes.
You'd have to be pretty simple to think that most of the political stuff you read on Reddit or Hacker News isn't deeply manipulated. It doesn't take many votes to sway things in one direction or another. All it takes is a few downvotes to keep dissenting voices from even appearing in front of real users. On the other hand, with a few upvotes, your own content will be featured front and center. It's comically easy to achieve.
So, I don't really think this is true. Certainly there's a lot of attempted manipulation, and some of it works, but mostly I think that good content gets popular and bad content doesn't. Up until reddit directly banned all the wrongthink, it was quite popular, you'd think the hypothesized manipulation would've stopped that.
I don't think there's a difference between a 'sincere' statement and 'signaling' statement - the words emerge from the same processes, the same process that generates 'abortion is a FUNDAMENTAL right', and the same process that 'everyone is beautiful in their own unique way <3'. I wish the average person had a clean separation between signaling beliefs and sincere ones, everything would be so much nicer.
And, of course, if teleported 10 m from a bear with saliva dripping from its canines and 10 m away from a random male, the same woman would run away towards the man, that's a deep instinct one can't deny.
The interesting question here, if any, is whether norms encouraging such long-winded and massive pranks are acceptable or a sign of dysfunction
I think the above belief is closer to just a 'stupid popular belief' than a long-winded prank, and as such is just a universal human phenomena. But long-winded games of social deception are also human universals, small-scale human societies are no more honest and harmonious than we are, and intelligence and self-interest combined necessarily leads to such games.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
The DA is generally considered to be much more competent. The Western Cape has been doing the least badly of all the provinces. The DA is fairly centrist, economically, and opposes affirmative action and the radical redistribution programs suggested by more extreme elements within South African politics. Unfortunately, it also has something of a reputation of being the "white people's party." Its base is certainly not entirely white, as it has been getting around 20% of the vote, of late, which is more than double the entire white population, but that is not entirely unfounded.
If you're a bayesian reasoner, you might have a hypothesis - "white people have a higher average IQ than black people for genetic reasons, and this is a large contributor to political stability and economic success". You might have other hypotheses with other explanations for poor political and economic conditions in Africa. And, reasoning about history is hard, there's a lot of contingency and it's hard to determine causation, but if you add up all the small updates it the probability for the first hypothesis seems to steadily move up. So, as a genuine question from someone who isn't confident either way - what are some pieces of evidence against that hypothesis? Not about IQ and genes, that's been done to death , but specifically it as a contributor to political and economic stability. Similar anecdotes to the quote are fine.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
If I wanted to eliminate lab-grown meat, I'd target the organizations that create it. Open investigations into the researchers and funders looking for political extremism. Target the patentability and profitability of the technologies involved. ("You can't patent chicken!") Publicize the process that creates these products. Labeling doesn't go far enough, you want to associate the components of lab-grown with dangerous chemicals and bad health outcomes. (I think when you look into the science of what they're currently doing, and not the glowing press releases, this is basically the truth.) Banning lab-grown just makes it exotic, and does nothing to stop its development in other localities.
What political extremism? "You can't patent chicken" isn't going to work as a slogan when 1) you can, in fact, patent literal breeds of actual chickens and 2) none of the things being patented remotely resemble chickens.
Taste is just an engineering problem, though. We understand enough about how cells grow and divide to intervene in the process, and understand the chemicals that cause things to taste like so pretty well. I think you could get lab grown meat that's reasonably indistinguishable in taste from (average store bought, with implied caveats about taste and nutrition) real meat right now if you were willing to pay absurd prices (edit: like, tens of thousands of dollars per pound).
Anyone can make a toplevel post, there've always been a few of these.
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