BahRamYou
11d ago
yeah. funnily enough, this scenario has kinda happened to me in real life. I'm not planning to vote because (a) don't live in a swing state and (b) don't have a strong preference either way. But when I say that to single ladies they hate it. they demand that I vote. I wonder what would happen if I was like "ok, i'll go vote for trump then..." maybe they would like that better?
BahRamYou
11d ago
One thing that helps Trump is that he's lazy. He just wouldnl't bother to experiment with weird ads like that, and wouldn't hire the sort of campaign mananagers that would either.
BahRamYou
12d ago
The very best recent results for Mark Robinson have him down by ten points after the Nude Africa, "I'm a black Nazi," "I write erotica about my sister in law pissing on me" scandal.
...Say what?
Man, one of the things I hate about American presidential politics is how it sucks up so much attention that lose track of other, more interesting political stories. This is the first time I'm hearing about this! He sounds like uncle ruckus
BahRamYou
12d ago
I think that as an "outsider" candidate (yes he was president, but he's still very much outside normal political machinery), Trump benefited a lot from recent anti-incumbent trends. Covid, inflation, war, and general unhappiness has led to a lot of countries voting against their incumbents, which goes against normal trends where incumbents normally have an advantage. I doubt that will still be true in 2028, and even if it does the Republicans can probably find someone else by then who can harness it better than the guy who's been doing the same political schtick for 10+ years.
BahRamYou
16d ago
I feel like Brazil has some odd similarities to the US that go underrated. Both are very large nations, by far the largest (in population) in our respective continents. Both rather spread out, with large chunks of wilderness. And we are both former slave-owning, plantation socities, which imported huge amounts of slaves and had a weird legal code for hundreds of years regarding race. That kind of thing leaves an impact. I feel like Brazilian politics are more similar to the US than Canada is.
BahRamYou
16d ago
You need to think about this more deeply, not just reduce it to a single number like a highschool physics problem.
Why are small tactical nukes banned by treaty, while large strategic nukes are allowed? Why is a 1kT nuke more dangerous than a megaton? Because the smaller ones would get used. At least with the larger ones, we have a chance at achieving a balance of terror and never using them. But it's a dangerous, slippery slope to start messing around with the bottom edge of that scale. And like you mentioned "ground-penetrating rather than an airburst" so it's a lot more dangerous than a nuke of the same yield would be.
Think about this from the Russian perspective.
"Marshall, we have a big problem."
"What is it, comrade?"
"Radar shows a huge incoming wave of American missiles coming from outer space! They'll arrive in 10 minutes!"
"What!? Are they nuking us?"
"There's no way to tell! It looks like ICBMs! But they Americans say it's just a conventional weapon."
"Where are they headed?"
"It appears to be targeting all of our underground missile silos."
"Fuck. That's a first strike. ... How long do we have remaining?"
"Five minutes."
"fuck fuck fuck. um. launch."
BahRamYou
17d ago
It's hard to say. I was skeptical that falcon rockets would work, but they did, and now Space-X is totally dominating the market for unmanned satellites. Starship could potentially increase that, but how far can it go? At a certain point, just don't see the use case in being able to lift vast chunks of mass into orbit with current technology. Maybe increase the growth of Starlink, but they're already doing that.
I'm deeply skeptical that they'll ever go to mars, at least not for more than just sending a few rovers. I'm... concerned that the real use case for this is military, particularly something like the rods from god which are dangerously close to being a tactical nuke.
BahRamYou
20d ago
But he did all of that in the 80's. He did basically nothing during his time as president. I mean, he did annoy the hell out of libs on social media. But he didn't actually build anything.
BahRamYou
23d ago
Man, screw you. This started with you posting something you had just read and apparently you've devoted a huge chunk of your life to reading this nonsense. I admitted in good faith that it was hard to understand, as I think any normal person would, and you just look down on me with this obvious snobbishness. That's exactly the same feeling I get from Mercuse and all of his ilk. Go enjoy immersing yourself in Freudian pseudoscience, I'm sure that will get you a tenured humanities position.
BahRamYou
23d ago
if your social circle is full of people still discussing 100-year old pseudoscience as if it's something to take for granted, you might wante to reconsider your life choices.
BahRamYou
23d ago
yeah, it's a whole different ball game between local and national office, and then president is a whole other level. With the lower levels, a lot of the race is just name recognition, getting voters to know and care about who you are. Journalists there have a lot of power, since they gatekeep the shows that can make the politicians famous. But Harris and Trump are already the most famous people on earth, there's really nothing that a journalist has to offer them except bootlicking.
BahRamYou
23d ago
you really can't "play hardball" with a presidential candidate, because everyone they're the belle of the ball right now. everyone wants to interview them, so they can pick and choose their venues. There's zero incentive for them to go on a hostile interview, or even a less-than-friendly interview. Especially for Democrats, since so much of the mainstream media is sympathetic to them.
BahRamYou
23d ago
Phrases like "desublimated higher culture", "the pleasure principle," "the institution of the reality principle," or "demonstration against the herd instinct" are not part of my normal vocabulary. Maybe they're common in marxist/freudian writings, and maybe people who have spent enough time reading that stuff know exactly what he means. But for me, I have to guess, and I'm never quite sure if I really know what he's talking about.
But yeah, fell you 100% about going to a modern day big-budget "punk" concert. It's still fun but it's weird. I assume the band is in on the joke though and it's all kayfabe.
BahRamYou
23d ago
thats why i specified live. very different to perform in front of your local peer group, with a whole party atmosphere, vs uploading a video for random strangers. most kids just passively watch videos that already have millions of views.
BahRamYou
23d ago
I feel like more and more malls/stores have removed those benches/couches. I guess to deter loiterers? But it sucks, there's just no chance to rest. Makes me want to leave instantly.
BahRamYou
23d ago
Well, I'm happy that at long last she's finally being forced to answer some substantive questions, even if they're being lobbed to her from the most friendly possible journalist. her answers... are about what I expected, given what I remember of her from the 2020 primary. She just has no understanding, at all, of policy issues. Her word salad is her realizing she doesn't know what to say and frantically trying to dodge the question and move on.
To be fair those are pretty difficult issues. No matter what she said, she'd be guaranteed to piss off a lot of people. So I understand why a pro politician would want to avoid talking about them as much as possible. Trump has also been highly evasive on the issues of Ukraine and Israel, other than his usual "I'll make a deal" vague nonsense.
There seems to be this huge blindspot in American politics, where no one can admit or even notice that, despite all the US aid and influence, it's currently failing to achieve its goals. Ukraine is getting steadily pushed back, the violence around Israel rages on, and the US can do nothing but give away money to corrupt military-industrial contractors. I give Biden a lot of credit for being the one to finally admit that the situation in Afghanistan was bad and taking the political hit to withdraw. I wish he'd do the same and take the fall for those other bad situations.
BahRamYou
23d ago
I think it's suffered from the same sort of Baumol's cost disease and general bureaucratic incompetance that have plagued all large infrastructure projects. So while it's tempting to say "we made a bunch of nuclear plants back in the 70s, we should be able to keep making them now" that might actually not be true. For the same reason that it's now impossible to build bullet trains, subways, or skyscrapers in western countries, at least not without spending absolutely absurd amounts of money. Even then, that might not be enough- California has spent $33 billion so far and not laid a single piece of rail. I imagine them trying to build a new nuclear plant these days would go similarly. Hell, even large solar installations get protested to death and cost overruns.
BahRamYou
23d ago
Mercuse is such a fascinating figure to me. I can never tell whether he's so brilliant that I can't understand him, or deliberately obfuscating with his crazy word choices and meandering sentences. It's like every sentence from him is some sort of motte and bailey.
Still, even though he frustrates me, I do often get a feeling from his words that I find myself agreeing with. In this case I think he's onto something. It's sort of like going to a "punk rock" concert, where the band is all middle-aged millionaires, performing in a stadium with corporate sponsors, and the audience is also middle-aged begging to hear the same songs they've heard their entire lives. Or a "school of rock" where adults teach teenagers exactly how to pose, dress, and perform. Technically there's nothing with these things, and people seem to enjoy them, but still you get the sense that something ineffable has been lost. The traditional music scenes where young people made up stuff themselves and performed live in front of other youth with no rules seems to be disappearing.
Maybe an analogy would be a "soft" martial art, like Judo. As I understand it, Judo works by trying to redirect the opponents force, instead of directly opposing it. So while an old-school oppressive society would say "don't have sex outside of marriage! sex is bad and evil and illegal!" and that leads to young people directly opposing it, with crazy chaotic energy. A modern liberal society says "yes, have sex, it's perfectly fine, we won't stop you. But here are the recommended, socially-approved ways to do it." it channels you into just a few specific venues and styles, which have long sense been mined out of any sort of new ideas. "Go on tinder, then go to get coffee, then go for a walk in a public park, then get affirmative consent, then engage in at least 1 hour of female-centric foreplay, then wash and use a condom, then discuss what happened." It turns sex into some sort of bizarre job-hunting process, and manages to make sex unsexy.
Meanwhile internet porn just gets wilder and wilder, because it's one of the few places left that's explicitly outside the control of mainstream American media, and young people feel free to do and ask for whatever they want. I wonder how much longer that will last.
BahRamYou
26d ago
i've never seen it, but it doesn't sound that good. It sounds like a bog-standard shonen battle-anime, power fantasy. An orphan boy gains superpowers to defeat the evil monsters and save the world. Along the way there are many fight scenes, against a progression of increasingly strong yet easily-defeated opponents. woo. Never saw that one before... What about that is "well-rounded"?
BahRamYou
27d ago
They’re not particularly good ones; still, I see freshmen in the corner of the events, drinking until they pass out. Despite the safety rhetoric, the new atomized campus culture isn’t even safer.
That makes perfect sense to me. My memory of freshman year at a school that had a big Greek system, but I wasn't in it, was a lot of really crappy "parties" like that. The students wanted to socialize, meet people, and have fun, but no one really knew how to do it. Partly because they were all 18 and didn't have money or a proper space for it, but also because they just literally didn't know how to throw a good party. So you ended up with these shitty "parties" that were just kids sitting around drinking, hoping that if they got drunk enough it would magically start becoming fun. Also way too crowded and hot, so the drinking was a way to handle social anxiety.
BahRamYou
27d ago
For what it's worth, I appreciate the long effort post response and all the links. Though I do feel a bit um.. Gish-galloped/Eulered. I don't really know what to say in response to all this. I feel like I would have to do a very long deep dive into 1970s psi research to really respond properly, and I'm not prepared to do all that right now. But still, thanks.
BahRamYou
27d ago
To be clear, I wasn't talking about someone where "money was no object." I was trying to focus specifically on the upper middle class. My understanding is that, at that time, it was pretty normal for anyone in the middle class to have a servant, or at least a part-time housekeeper. It wasn't really an upper-class thing, it was just a not-being-poor thing.
And yeah, no super fast travel, but the travel they did have was more comfortable than today. I don't think doctors in 1910 were all that bad, they did at least know about washing their hands and keeping things clean.
West End shows are a lot cheaper. Nosebleed seats start at £25 and top price tickets are generally around £100.
Ah really? That's awesome. But I was thinking of me, as a regular American, where I would first have to book a flight to New York to see a show. Or wait several years for the off-broadway production to come around, and I get one chance to see it or miss it forever. There's just not a lot of live theater here in most places.
BahRamYou
27d ago
Didn't the Edwardians also have a lot of weird crimes that wouldn't be considered crimes today? Most infamously "sodomy" was illegal. But I'm really not an expert on Edwardian crimes.
I do agree that crime was way worse around 1990 than it is now. That said, there's a lot of minor property crime now that probably never gets reported.
Im pretty sure that if i said that, they'd instantly guess that im voting republican (or some weird libertaruan 3rd party)
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