BahRamYou
6d ago
I feel like buying it for your 4 young kids is a bit different from buying it for yourself as a 40-yr-old though...
BahRamYou
6d ago
Seems like a recipe to massively increasing the deficit even further. Everyone loves spending, nobody likes taxes. That's the one thing both parties agree on.
At this point I just feel horrified for the Ukrainians. They're stuck in a war they can't win, led by a "president" with no elections, and a universal draft that just keeps getting lower and lower in age. Their men are not allowed to leave the country since they're all property of the state. People talk about how this war is a pyrric victory for Russia, but I think the early success was also a pyrric victory for Ukraine, since it tricked them into thinking that if they just stay committed enough they'd be able to win. Now Zelensky and the generals feel like they can't possibly give up any land for peace, so they'll fight to the bitter end.
BahRamYou
6d ago
How do people track all this stuff? Are there anonymous polls of cardinals? I thought it was supposed to be secret
BahRamYou
6d ago
I think on redit and similar sites, people look to ttans as a gender and political identity. On 4chan, people are just into it as a weird sex fetish. And 4channers are very tolerant of weird sex fetishes. (Arguably too tolerant)
BahRamYou
6d ago
I want to chime in and say that, while you're not wrong for some people, that's not always the problem. For me in my 20s, living in a midsize American city, I felt plenty safe riding public transit. The real problem was it was just so damn inconvenient. Riding a bike was faster, especially if i needed a transfer. And of course it totally shut down at night.
But i do appreciate how bad the safety is in some places.
BahRamYou
6d ago
If anything, its better! I've never heard Walz be this willing to tell it straight.
BahRamYou
7d ago
It seems like a lot of your criticism is just that it has a lot of old people? Which, yeah, not nearly as many young people as it once did. In part because the birth rate dropped, but also in part because they just live a long time. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
SEA and Africa is where the "youth" energy is at these days. Especially Africa... I've never been there though.
Does the parents/self-esteem thing work for women too? I feel like it works for men, since men are so heirarchical and fighting for dominance. But I feel like women are more accepting that their daughter/mother is of different status. I dunno, that's my lazy pop psychology.
RE: Japan- most of the things you criticize are things I like about it! I feel like most of the rest of the world is accelerating into the same generic slop: apps for everything, no unique culture, bad english, generic "world" food, etc. Japan is a country that figured out a great way to live in the 80s/90s and just kinda stuck with it. It's like the shire at the end of Lord of the Rings reacted to Saruman and just said "Nope! We don't care about your high-tech economy, we'll just stick with our happy traditional life, thanks."
Also, for what its worth, I found them extremely stylish in fashion/food/music many other ways. I sometimes feel embarassed of how poorly dressed my fellow white people are in Tokyo.
BahRamYou
8d ago
Yeah, I'd agree with all of this. In general the larger boards are faster and more meme-ey, while the smaller boards are slower and more thoughtful. Don't expect long essays, but you can still get some thoughtful responses. Find a subject you like, find a thread you like (popular subjects have a regular thread that gets re-created over and over, with the same people and culture). Find one person you like and just talk to them. It's like a big, crazy party where everyone is talking at once, but that doesn't mean all the people there are the same.
BahRamYou
8d ago
4chan is back up! I'm so happy!
I... feel like that says something bad about me, that 4chan is basically the only place left on the internet where I feel at home. (this place is also good, but I do feel a bit out of place here). So many places these days are either enforced, toxic positivity (reddit) or worshipping a single influencer (most other social media). 4chan lets me speak my mind, and I feel like the people there actually get me. I'm a depressed, aging, alcoholic weeb so 4chan is very much "my people." But I can't help but feel like the people there are, weirdly, smarter than a lot of internet sites these days.
BahRamYou
9d ago
so I see that the liberals got the most seats, but not enough to make a majority, with conservatives in a close second. Does that mean they automatically win? Or do they both have to negotiate with the BQ and NDP to see which party actually forms the government?
BahRamYou
10d ago
It's probably because I've had my brain rotted by the internet and videogames, but I prefer writing that it's simple and clear. Straight to the point, with minimal fluff. I know that there's a place for the more flowery, poetic writing but I just can't enjoy it anymore, and I find it gets in the way of communicating complex ideas.
I do appreciate advanced vocabulary though. Like the standard writing advice is to not use adverbs, just find a better verb/noun instead. "don't say she was very sad, say she was morose." That sort of thing. Not only does it sound better, it also helps clarify just exactly what's going on.
BahRamYou
12d ago
Many of the Epstein victims admit they did it voluntarily for money, but you can't say that because it gets in the way of the narrative of helpless proles victimized by evil sex-trafficking finance guys.*
Por que no los dos? It's true that most of the victims were offered money to step on a plane, not forcibly kidnapped. But they were also psychologically manipulated and placed in a strange circumstance way outside anything the expected or had ever experienced. Being teenagers, maybe they thought they could handle it but then the reality was very different than they expected.
BahRamYou
14d ago
I don't look at it in terms of certainties, but in probabilities. It's not like a videogame where war is automatically declared when you declare on an ally- it's always subject to the whims of politicians and public sentiment.
So yes, this time, NATO countries chose to stay out of it, although they did provide massive amounts of material aid. I note the steady escalation as we went from financial and medical aid, to obsolete weapons, to eventually sending top-shelf military equipment. There's also been a divide in our politics, with Trump and the republicans being much more isolationist, while the Democrats want to get more involved. I could see a future where there's a cease-fire for a bit, a Democrat in the veign of LBJ gets elected, and the Republics flagrantly violate the cease-fire in a way that really pisses off the American public, like the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Or it could go the other way. I have no idea! I don't think Putin does either. Just saying that he'd be a fool to completely ignore the US and assume he has carte-blanche to conquer all of non-affiliated Europe just because Biden and Trump chose not to get involved in this specific instance.
Of course, what I would really like to see is a massive build up of our munititions stockpiles, so that even if we don't get directly involved, we could just send enough shells and missiles to stop the invasion. it's embarrassing how badly we're getting outgunned by 50-year-old Soviet tech.
BahRamYou
15d ago
It's worked out reasonably well. Ukraine got a ton of aid to keep their country going, while NATO was able to avoid a direct fight with Russia. Not ideal, but i can imagine a lot of ways it could have gone worse.
BahRamYou
15d ago
I wouldn't completely discount the idea of a vague security guarantee as "useless." That's more or less what we have with Taiwan, and that's managed to keep the peace for over 50 years so far. Obviously Ukraine would want something more explicit, while Russia would prefer an explicit guarantee of independance/non-interference. But sometimes the only political viable compromise is a vague muddle.
BahRamYou
16d ago
The funny thing is, in my experience blue-collar construction workers tend to be big fans of cigarettes. So maybe the two things aren't even all that disconnected!
There's also a weird tension. We celebrate the engineers who make better machines, because it makes our lives better. But there's a limit on how far that can go, eventually we run out of things to automate and create so much industrial abundance that it just becomes harder to get a regular job. EG, I'm worried that industrial fishing has become too efficient and without strict regulation it's just going to make more and more fish go extinct. Meanwhile, a normal traditional fisherman can no longer make a living.
BahRamYou
16d ago
"Build something. Do something."
Does it make any difference to you what we do, or is it enough just to have a job? Is the guy selling cigarettes at the same worth as someone making buildings?
BahRamYou
25d ago
If it was just a brief little loop of one specific memory, like the photos in Harry Potter, then I guess that would be OK. But it's not going to stay there, is it? It will develop persistent memory and learn over time, so it's basically an afterlife. And every single member of the family will want their own version, so now there's 10 copies of grandmas that have all evolved over time. that sounds horrible.
BahRamYou
30d ago
Increased PGM strikes and naval bombardments until they've destroyed all of the anti-ship missiles that the Houthis got from Iran. It doesn't need to be a genocide or an extended occupation. It's just the sort of thing that having more mass of conventional weapons in your military helps a lot with, which is why I support this sort of budget increase.
BahRamYou
30d ago
We could it at least give it a shot, before we give up on it entirely. Right now the US is just tickling them with small amounts of precision tomahawk missile strikes. This isn't like Vietnam or Afghanistan, where we're trying to pacify an entire large country. We just want to stop a thin strip of land near the sea from launching missiles at ships.
Why is that for people like you and @Rov_Scam, every single war is WW2? There isn't a single other war in history that we could take lessons from?
I would argue that WW2 was actually highly unusual. Very few wars have a fully militarized society bent on large-scale invasion and genocide. A more normal outcome is to fight for a short while, then give up a small slice of land while glaring at each other until their desendants forget about it after a few hundred years.
I'd argue that the better analogy here is the breakup of the Soviet Union. Russia had been fighting the cold for for decades, mostly "just" through mass conscription and spending, but occasionally going hot also. At the start it was sort of even, but by the end they were obviously, massively outmatched by NATO. Meanwhile their economy was in freefall. Gorbachev saw the writing on the wall and thankfully ended it, mostly peacefully. But hardliners like Putin and wanted to keep fighting forever to hold onto every last scrap of territory no matter the cost. So ironically you're thinking more like Putin.
There's also the small problem that if Ukraine somehow did win this and took back the Donbass and Crimea... those areas are mostly filled with ethnic Russians who only speak Russian and are more loyal to Russia. So Ukraine would likely have to do some ethnic cleansing to actually take control of those regions.
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