ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
I don't get the impression that they want to return to the good old days of pre-woke liberalism like I do.
Well, that certainly describes me accurately, but as a counterpoint I'd say I'm probably a lot more open to "I'll leave you alone, if you leave me alone"* type deals, more than the typical leftist.
*) Which, to be clear, means "go do your thing in California, or somewhere, and don't impose your rules on other jurisdictions".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
Conditional on Trump forcing a truce, my modal scenario is actually that in a year's time a stronger Ukraine steamrolls a weaker Russia,
I'm not seeing it. If there's a truce, especially an uneasy one, I'm betting all the young to middle-aged men who are currently stuck will immediately bail out. Though I suppose they can try and keep the war-time decree, that forbids them from leaving, in effect.
Unless you want society to treat men and women exactly the same, then yes, it does.
No, sir. It doesn't matter whether we live under TradCath divinely ordained gender-complementarity, uno-reverso Amazonian matriarchy, or full-blown egalitarianism, my definition of "man" and "woman" stays exactly the same. My views on what their rights and duties are may vary, but a man is a man under TradCathism, matriarchy, or egalitarianism, and a woman is a woman under all 3 as well.
But it's clear that you haven't been meeting them where they are, by the very fact that you're conceiving of this as a duel between opposing political establishments. There's a wide variety of underlying views about sex, gender, and culture which people negotiate in different ways.
I don't see how my conception of this exchange means I'm not meeting them where they are. Even the most unpopular policies from your list are currently in place and active all throughout the west, which means where the liberals currently are has little relevance on the rules imposed on us. That is determined by their political establishment, not by them. What's more, once they realize their views don't conform to their establishments, like I said, they will either drop off from the conversation, or turn on a dime, and endorse the establishment view.
- I was using "leftist" and "liberal" as a shorthand for this, though I admit the groups don't all map onto each other.
Which is quite a bit of an issue. I rate my chances of having a reasonable (though not necessarily productive) conversation with a liberal, far higher than I do with a leftist (unless it's one of those old-school /r/stupidpol types)
My model for how Elon's companies work is something like:
- Create hype for
$thing - Investors get hyped and shower Elon with money
- Deliver
$thing - Thing does not bring enough profit to justify investment
- Create hype for
$new_thing - ...
This worked well enough until now, but there are signs things are starting to break. I don't think they'll be able to repeat the same thing past Starship, so to answer your question - if Starship becomes their workhorse, or they'll bin the program, but it won't end the company*, I'll concede.
*) Modulo the shady stuff he can potentially do with a direct line to Trump, but I don't know how to explicitly factor that into my prediction.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
An independent audit would be nice. Also, just time, I guess - at some point it will start looking awfully silly if they keep doing their thing, and I keep insisting it's price dumping.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
I'm pretty sure I recall that it was both, with a marked change in how hamfisted it was the moment Biden got into office.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
What is the steelman for why I shouldn't take Biden's anomalously high vote count in 2020 as evidence of fraud?
I don't know if it's a steelman, but here's an alternative explanation: they ran out of mana. You can literally see when the tank ran dry.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
It's Barron that's getting hyped.
Man, I'm usually the jerk that yells at your anti-SpaceX nonsense
Half of the reason I post my nonsense is to get that exact kind of pushback so I can gauge if I missed anything, so I don't consider anyone a jerk, and I appreciate the yelling.
I think Elon's estimate was still 50/50. A third of of the SpaceX formula is the "hardware-rich" design process where they start testing prototypes as soon as they expect useful data rather than as soon as they're sure everything will work.
Funnily enough what kept me quiet was the thought "surely, they're not going to try to land this thing on a coin toss?", while you're saying the exact opposite. I guess they really do things differently there.
one of those metrics was misconfigured, and it was literally 1 second away from deciding to crash instead
I wouldn't have held it against them if that's what happened. Better a false-positive-driven crash into the ocean, than a false-negative-driven crash into the spaceport.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
Well... in other countries we rely for an official electoral bodies to call the results. But if it works for you...
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
I will never wrap my head around the American electoral system. Why in Jesus' name do statements from press associations carry weight on this issue?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
What I don't get is that you brought it up as an issue that prevents you from cutting a deal with the right. By your admission it's identity politics either way, and you don't seem to be as averse to cutting deals with the left, so why does the other shade of idpol prevent you from cutting a deal?
Not even Trump could build a machine that produces Trumps;
Some people are hyping up his kid, so it might turn out he literally is that machine himself.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
have you seen orbital launch graphs?
Yes, most of them are for themselves. If Starlink doesn't cover their costs, and there's not data to show that either way, this number doesn't mean anything. Though there's a wildcard here, where the whole Starlink thing might turn out to be a front for some Pentagon and/or CIA black-op, which would money is not an issue, but there's no way to tell with publicly available information.
launch cost graphs?
I straight-up don't believe them.
reducing costs with reusable rockets was a joke before spaceX
I think it still is.
There's things like college sports where a women's divisions were established by a supposedly-liberal state decree in the first place (Title IX, I think). What's illiberal about enforcing that they remain women's divisions?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
The most egregious cancellation of all time imho (James Damore) happened under Trump.
Man, we need some Catalogue of Cancellations, because I've lost track of what happened to who, and when. In any case I'd say the Twitter Files and Zucks confession of the government putting pressure to censor dissidents is probably more egregious.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
Sure, you can have a liberal "my body, my choice" based argument on transgenderism, but it's about adults making their own decisions about their own bodies, not about abolishing sex-segregation in sports and all other spaces. Somehow liberals managed to go on a couple centuries without arguing for that, until like 5 minutes ago.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
Trump held up a rainbow flag, and now in 2024 his campaign is at least 25% about how transgenderism is destroying womens' sports.
In what way is that against liberalism?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
I'm mostly sticking to my guns. There are things that are causing me to adjust - I kept my mouth shut, but internally I was expecting a giant fireball at Boca Chica, not a successful booster catch. But I don't think that's enough to change my appraisal on him running his companies mostly on hype. Also if you check my big anti-Elon post, I ranked his companies from best to worst, and I rated Twitter at the top. If it wasn't for the advertiser boycott - which I consider a political affair, rather than anything market-driven - he'd be making bank off of it, and taking it to profitability, I think for the first time ever.
I'm actually somewhat worried he'll tank the whole MAGA thing by using his connections to Trump to try to save himself. But if it helps - I hope I'll be proven embarrassingly wrong, and y'all will get to shit on me for being a retard for all of eternity.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
Well from my point of view, things did dramatically de-escalate with Biden.
Was it anything specific that gave you that impression? As far as I can tell to the extent things got better, it was a result of Reds escalating, not Blues de-escalating - Elon buying Twitter, the Bud Light boycott, Red states banning gender affirming care for minors...
But I think what I'm trying to say is that it's easier to critique idpol leftism when idpol leftism is explicitly in power.
I'm not interested in critique that doesn't result in anything.
Hell, how much of this was made possible by Elon buying Twitter?
All of it. Pre-Elon it was a regular occurrence for me to go "oooh, there goes another one" as another mildly interesting, not even very spicy, account gets the ban hammer. If it was still under old management, they'd probably be cracking down on Peanut the squirrel memes. That's without mentioning the impact of things like Community Notes.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
Back in 2020 some people here tried to say a Biden win will the blue tribe to de-escalate, only for all the things you're warning about here to happen anyway. They'll keep on clamping down on dissent no matter what, they're doing it even in countries with no Trump. The idea they'd go easy on us if we let them win is hard to take seriously at this point.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
Is there any chance people are being hasty on this, or are the numbers such that it's impossible for the end result to change?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
8d ago
That's not an axiomatic belief, it's a derived belief based on your definitions of "man" and "woman," which in turn descend from your beliefs about the duties and privileges a society should afford to members of each sex,
This is false. My definition of "man" and "woman" has nothing to do with duties and privileges a society should afford to members of each sex, and believing that it does already effectively means believing that men can be women relative to my definitions.
you could actually have a productive discussion with leftists about
To the extent you could have a reasonable exchange of ideas with a person like that, those ideas would not be representative of what is actually being pushed by their political establishment. This person would not acknowledge what the establishment is actually doing, instead they would constantly sane-wash it into something palatable. If you provide evidence that the sane-washed version ins't what's being pushed, and the version you're objecting to is, two things might happen depending on the temperament of the person: conversion ends, or they'll the thing they just swore isn't happening is actually good. I don't think that's a productive conversation.
You're assuming people here are siloed off in an echo-chamber. Please consider the possibility that we've been having these conversations for a long time, and what you claim simply does not fit our experience.
discussion with leftists
I doubt you'd change your mind, or the liberal's mind
Why are you conflating liberals with leftists?
On the contrary, definitions shouldn't be put the in service of a particular goal, they're basic building-blocks of sense-making. I can have different personal and/or social ends, and a constant definition makes it a lot easier to reason about which ones are more desiderable for me. It's the fluid definition that's useless.
Also, I think this pretty much vindicates my earlier prediction that your definition effectively means you think men can be women.
No, I don't. Their actions regarding policies are just a verification mechanism for whether or not I met them where they are.
First of all, do you have any idea how evasive progressives are about this question? There's literally a movie about it
Secondly, actually according to your approach to definitions, trying to decouple definitions from personal and social ends (i.e.: "object-level policy preferences") is pointless, because definitions are put them in order to reach a particular end to begin with. You literally say that in the following sentence.
Sorry, but you're not meeting me where I am. That's not how I approach these conversations at all. I can argue for my position even after tabooing all those words, like you originally suggested.
That's perfectly fine though, but if it's the case, is it too much for them to just say that?
By the way, you seem pretty convinced that you understand mine, and the hypothetical progressive's approach very well. What would the world have to look like for you to change your mind, and end up believing that my description of how progressives think is more accurate?
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