Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
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User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3d ago
In conclusion, for the moderates and centrists: Your signal is jammed, and only extremism will be boosted on either twitter or bluesky.
So why use it at all? Why use any social media aside from linkedin and a facebook/whatsapp account for messaging? There seems to be a broad agreement in the rat-diaspora that social media is a plague that wrecks attention spans, leads to skyrocketing teenage mental health issues and erodes any kind of political discourse, yet people still seem to use it.
Just read books and build community in meatspace instead of using Twitter/Bluesky. Whatever benefit you derive probably isn't worth the exposure to memes and toxic ragebait.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9d ago
A number of diseases have been functionally eliminated in the USA; polio, measles, diphtheria, rubella. One person foregoing the vaccine gives them some small value with negligible cost, although who knows, maybe the value proposition is still there if you plan on traveling to the third world. Some of these things are really nasty if you get them as an adult.
The entire population foregoing vaccines would lead (eventually) to these diseases becoming endemic again. Polio alone was paralyzing 15,000 kids a year prior to the vaccine and killing a fraction of those. I suppose we could decrease the amount of vaccination to allow a little bit of endemic disease back just to improve the value proposition for individuals and please the economists. Thankfully, our forefathers knew that was Fucking Stupid as they watched kids dying of preventable diseases and made vaccines as mandatory as they could.
So, if you want to translate the above into econ-speak - where is the positive externality? And if you agree that eliminating diseases via vaccination is preferable to the alternative, how would you like to give pharma companies enough of a profit motive to make the things?
While we're on the subject, COVID notwithstanding, vaccines are horrifically underfunded for this exact reason. The USA vaccine market was 29 billion in 2024, and pre-COVID was only 17 billion. As an aside, the entire biotech ecosystem in the USA is only ~800 billion; just over half the market cap of Meta, a single tech company. The MMR vaccine costs 100$ and you get two doses over your entire life. This isn't exactly some massively profitable scheme whereby Big Pharma is fleecing hapless poors, it's just a convenient punching bag that plays well with the base.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
13d ago
To be fair, I did a gentler version of this with my now-ex and she said he was going to repeal Roe and the ACA. I told her there was no way they'd get Roe past the supreme court, and, well, we had insurance through work so the ACA wouldn't hit us. She ended up being fairly accurate...
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
13d ago
This isn’t some kind of video game where once Trump gets his brains splattered by a pink haired trans twenty-something from Brooklyn all the MAGAs shrug and go home. What you're suggesting is extremely counterproductive; it would just make a martyr of Trump and make the ascendance of turbo-Trump even more likely. The only people stupid and determined enough to do what you're describing tried already.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18d ago
For every anti-lockdowner, there was someone just as rabidly clamoring for more restrictions. We could easily be sitting here with Trump hammering Biden on killing grandma while he was the one who made the vaccine, and people here talking about how stupid Biden was for splitting his coalition on COVID. I mean, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings tried it, and it's not like that ended in a celebratory parade.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18d ago
Obama 2008 was a blowout year, 2012, 2016 and 2024 had a lot less enthusiasm, and between 2008 and 2020 the population grew by 10%. That gets you halfway there, more if that growth was skewed democratic.
Not to mention the vast majority of fraud claims would be in the thousands to tens of thousands of ballots in swing states, not literally 15 million votes across the country. How can you possibly envision fraud on that scale? Literally every dem leaning county dumping tens of thousands of fake ballots and none of the election officials turned up concrete evidence?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18d ago
No, I would say they are bad candidates. Why would you say they're not bad candidates? What positive qualities could you name? Are they great orators? Especially charasmatic? Wonkish? Great leaders? I'm really struggling to see what your argument would be here.
It's difficult to say without defining your terms. Do good presidents craft legislation, compromise and build coalitions while good candidates just win elections? I believe the majority of the electorate doesn't care about policies (and honestly, I include myself in this category - I care, but I rarely have time to educate myself properly on any given bill or proposal) and is more into vibes and public persona, so again, what is a good candidate/president? But whatever, I can answer in kind.
Biden is not a good speaker. But I do believe Biden (or his team) has a great nose for politics. He was smart enough to distance himself from the BLM riots early on when many other democrats weren't. He went through with the Afghanistan pullout despite what I bet was enormous pressure internally in DC to keep troops there, in a way that I believe was immensely net positive for the country. He pushed immigration bills (crafted in collaboration with some pretty conservative senators) in the last 6 months in an attempt to blunt Trump's attacks on that issue, when I doubt many progressives or democrats were willing to do so. His experience over decades allowed him to compromise and shepherd large bills on infrastructure (which Trump failed to do) and industrial policy through congress during historically polarized times. There are one or two other moments over the course of the campaign where I was impressed with his foresight on issues years ago that paid dividends this year.
I also liked Hillary and Obama. At the risk of undermining my own point, I was less excited about Kamala although I think she mostly inherited a bit of a mess. Most agree that she won the debate against Trump, and regardless of whether you're sour grapes about the moderators, I don't think Biden, Hillary or the entire Republican primary field in 2016 can say the same. She was disciplined with her messaging. And unfortunately, I've run out of time to continue this comment but I may revisit it.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18d ago
And yet she was evidently damn good at her job, and it seems to me that it ain't the same working class, nor the same neoliberalism, nor the same world for that matter. She fought for liberty and against bureaucracy and communism.
She was good at her job based on what, winning elections? Justin Trudeau won as many, after breaking 9 years of conservative rule, yet I doubt you think he's a particularly good candidate or Prime Minister.
As for fighting against bureaucracy and communism, these are just partisan buzzwords. 50 years ago, our ancestors were sitting in a pub bemoaning the sorry state of British politics and the terrible candidates and the country going to hell in a handbasket because the new generation was a bunch of pussies.
Not to mention it's telling that you picked a politician from 50 years ago that (I assume, based on the apparent age of your children) you were barely alive for in a country you never lived in. I'm willing to bet that 50 years from now our grandchildren will lionize the greatness of Obama and Trump without having to deal with the shitty day-to-day reality we inhabit. I'm willing to bet that very few people think [current year] politicians are particularly talented.
I'm pretty sure I wasn't. I was planning to vote for Hillary until Trump cinched the nomination, because I wanted the neoconservative wing of the Republican party destroyed forever. She was quite unpopular in much the way Trump is, but 2016 was a very close election.
Whatever - without guessing the particulars of who you have voted for, would you agree that my characterization fits a broad swathe of the at least the American public, and likely the local commentariat?
As for the 'historical unpopularity' that gets thrown around constantly - this absolutely drives me up the wall. Look at favorability polls (first figure). Insofar as Trump and Hillary were historically unpopular, they're just continuing a 70 year old trendline with vanishingly few exceptions. Do you think our politicians suddenly became retarded and unlikable in the 90s? Here's a bet for you - the next pair of candidates for both major parties will be historically unpopular (say the bottom quartile of favorability). Want to take it?
I am pretty sure that I have never agreed with the moderate talking point that Hillary was a uniquely bad candidate and the only one the Dems could have picked that would have lost to Trump.
I actually largely heard this from progressives and the right, not the center? If anyone liked Hillary it was the center. Bernie bros ain't moderates.
And Progressives sticking their fingers in their ears about it is how he was allowed to vegetate in office, which is why they had to dump him at the eleventh hour, couldn't get their actual talent to sign on, and were left with running Kamala.
Because if we had 25th'd Joe out (presumably he wasn't about to leave on his own)in the middle of the COVID and inflation shitshow and let Kamala run things for 2 years, this election just would have gone swimmingly for democrats? If you think 'the actual talent' refused to sign on this year, they 100% wouldn't have signed up in your hypothetical. Not to mention you'd be sitting here lecturing me about how stupid it was to 'allow' Joe to get elected in the primaries in the first place, or something.
And...you think progressives like Joe Biden? Is this just some Overton ploy to define Joe as a progressive such that everyone to his left is some insane fringe radical, while Trump and Vance live in the center? Public figures endorse him because they hate Trump, but Joe Biden was not the progressive candidate of choice in 2020.
And sure, I claim Biden was a bad president, because I think the record pretty clearly shows that his policies had numerous woeful effects in the real world. The exception, of course, was the Afghanistan Pullout, which I think was a masterful achievement and which I will defend against all comers.
I disagree. With the exception of inflation (and who knows whether the counterfactual recession would have been better or worse than inflation, or whether there actually was a center path that avoided both) I think he's been on point and centrist for the most part. CHIPS act and infrastructure are both great (though we'll see if either can actually be implemented in a meaningful way, there seems to be a lot of grift), the economy is doing well (just watch - the economic doomerism on the right is about to evaporate with the election alongside the voting fraud narrative), he tried to push immigration reform. The manufacturing sector is doing better under Biden than Trump. But I imagine this is an entire separate discussion.
I'm not on your side.
We're all on the same side here, brother.
Progressives have suffered multiple, severe unforced errors due to believing their own bullshit. Their control of the consensus narrative has made them lazy, and now that this control is failing, they're stuck in a position where the main effect their spin is having is to compromise their own decision-making. Biden was in fact too old, as was RGB when she tried to hang on till Hillary. They should have picked a running mate who could actually run for his VP, but they were too busy playing identity bingo, and besides, it was an article of faith that he was sharp as a tack. They did this to themselves.
And what was that mistake, not being leftist enough to inspire the workers revolution (cf Freddie De Boer, Bernie bros)? Not being centrist enough (cf Tracingwoodgrains, stupidpol, I'd guess some MSM outlets in the next few weeks) to win the suburban wine mom vote? You all agree that progressives are stupid and lazy and mistakes were made, you just completely disagree about the directionality.
Here's a different narrative - in 2020, Biden wasn't senile yet and won the primary. In 2020, the focus was on winning the election in front of you, because there's four years to worry about the next one. He governed well, although Harris got some tough assignments and the optics for both of them were bad with COVID/inflation/Ukraine/Gaza. Ending lockdowns would have enraged one section of the population as much as enacting them would another. Bombing the shit out of Gaza or taking a hard stance against Israel both would have pissed off a core constituency. Refusing to fire up the money printers may have triggered a recession that would have lost the election just as surely as inflation/idpol/whatever else actually did.
As an aside, you say identity bingo, analysts say lock down the black vote because you're an out-of-touch old white man. For all you know Biden would have lost in 2020 with a different VP pick.
I am pretty sure it is in my direct interest for Progressives to see things the way you do.
Y'know, the funny thing is Trump will probably push policies that benefit me more personally. Please cut my taxes and kill my competition from China, what do I care?
Whatever. Anyways, you think I'm an arrogant, complacent and intellectually lazy progressive who can't see the flaws in his own party. Leaving aside whether any of those are true, I just think the arguments here are lazy, superficial and mostly ignorant of the realities of governing and winning elections in America. Discussing politics is >95% hindsight bias.
I predicted a Trump win, with weak confidence, based on a lot of factors that seemed to be leaning his way. This does not appear to have been a coin-flip election; pretty much every state in the country shifted right by significant margins, with Donald Trump as the candidate.
If it wasn't a coin flip election, why did you have such weak confidence? And given your uncertainty, why would you say running Kamala was a mistake if you (and presumably the dem machine) couldn't have predicted her loss in advance?
But as I said above, I am pretty sure that Progressives doubling down further is pure advantage for my side. By all means, don't let me dissuade you.
Four years from now, conditional on the Trump faction losing the general election, will you be here saying you guys fucked up and Rs had better learn from their mistakes? Somehow, I doubt you'll take that L particularly gracefully if past experience is any indicator. I know the drill - time to reach for the fourth box, the election was rigged, America will be destroyed by a communist dictatorship.
I hope Trump is as successful as you think he will be, and that our country flourishes over the next four years.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18d ago
Thank you for the sources. To be clear, I was being facetious, although I think it's a better argument than most of the 2020 fraud ones that I've seen.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18d ago
Do you think if she ran a campaign and lost, the commentariat here (and elsewhere) would say I know she lost, but damn, she's a fine politician?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18d ago
I think I'm missing your point... are you suggesting that we can't criticise politicians
No, I think you do get my point - it's just a bit funny that you dismiss my criticism as superficial for Thatcher and Vance, but (and I make some assumptions here not knowing you) would accept my criticisms of Harris as being a historically bad candidate. Probably Clinton as well.
The point is that almost all of these 1-2 sentence comments about Harris being an unlikable whore who sucked her dick to the vice presidency is about as substantial and knowledgeable as me saying Vance is a 1%er puppet of the SV elite. I don't think these people know anything about politics, have never worked a political campaign or crafted a bill or written a political speech.
But hey, it sure is easy to wake up the morning after and rant about how the losing candidate was historically bad and the dems are a bunch of morons.
are you saying that you can't criticise the Dems for consistently running poor candidates since Obama?
I'm saying they weren't bad candidates, depending on what you mean by bad candidate. If you strictly mean they lost elections, well, I guess Biden wasn't a bad candidate? Or do you mean something else?
Isn't this pretty much true for every US election ever?
Maybe to put it differently, would you have taken 50-50 odds for Biden v. Trump in 2020? Or would you have taken 50-50 odds for Obama v. McCain?
So far as anyone could tell, it seemed like a true toss up last night. People with money and reputations on the line with access to similar information as the most of us agreed those were the odds.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18d ago
Ah, Margaret Thatcher, universally loved and respected across the political spectrum. Not to mention a bizarre choice for a Trump supporter given her antipathy for the working class, out-of-touchness robotic character and neoliberalism. This smacks more of someone you agree with rather than an objective measure of quality or intellect, no?
Vance? Silicon valley, VC 1%er Vance who happens to have a convenient origin story and connections to an ecosystem of companies weaponizing AI to surveil our citizens?
You're missing the point. 8 years ago you were sitting here writing that Clinton was a historically unpopular candidate, manipulative, stupid, whatever. 4 years ago you were sitting here writing how useless Biden is, he can't even leave his basement to campaign, dementia means he doesn't have two functional brain cells left to rub together. 4 years from now you'll be sitting here writing that Pete Buttigieg was the worst candidate in history, who tries to nominate a goddamn secretary of transportation man, at least Kamala ticked some diversity boxes and had some funny coconut memes or something.
Most criticism of politicians is hopelessly facile and ignorant (I assume, this isn't my field) of the realities on the ground or the workings of the system we've created. And most criticism in general is just people playing Monday morning quarterback to feel smart.
Kamala was a candidate who, so far as anyone could tell, had a 50% chance of becoming president yesterday. Sure, hopefully the dems learn from the experience (insofar as they really had that much control over events), but I don't believe the over-the-top criticism of Kamala and Hilldog is warranted.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18d ago
Just a bit suspicious that our polls are historically accurate within a small margin of error, then all of a sudden Trump comes along and we have three huge polling errors in a row, right?
Anyways, we're still waiting on Ukraine mea culpas three years in. At this point, I expect they'll be back in the next few years when Putin finally prevails to say I told you so. And the election blackpillers will be here in 2028 when the R's lose to say it's always been rigged and that you're wrong.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18d ago
What do you mean? Of course it's rigged. Every election Trump massively outperforms his polls; what other explanation could there be besides Republicans stuffing the ballot boxes?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18d ago
Can you name a woman worth running? Hell, can you name a man worth running? Most people here would argue every president since Jefferson has been a low iq moron, which usually makes me think they either don't understand the incentives involved or drastically underestimate our politicians.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Literally translated, they just mean mister know-it-all or Little Joe...savant? Knower-of-things? Not sure there's a good translation in English.
French in France is typically viewed as more precise, uptight and grammatically correct, whereas Quebecois is (unfairly) seen almost like a pidgin or 'lower-class' French. Like how someone with a 'cut-glass' British accent might look down on Americans from Alabama or speaking AAVE.
'Monsieur je-sais-tout' sounds very proper, whereas Ti-Joe is a contraction of petit-Joe, maybe the equivalent of saying 'mister know-it-all' versus 'lil Bob smartass.'
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Oh, I like Peter Thiel as well. I don't really know what you mean by "all I need to know".
Ah, sorry for being unclear. We're on the same page.
I just meant that people here turn a blind eye to Peter Thiel's AI panopticon empire and buggery because he hates on woke people. Zero to One and that op-ed about flying cars and twitter also fit the aesthetic/worldview of the locals.
The Alt Man, on the other hand, has none of those things. Or at least so far as I'm aware.
In neither case is the operative quality being a childless homosexual, just the perceived political valency.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
I pivot back to the Goodreads list full of great suggestions from here
Do you have a link to the list? Somehow I've never come across it.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Honestly, these histrionics about Altman being some gay supervillain make me like him more, not less...And the notion that because he's gay, he doesn't care about anything is ridiculous.
And the lack thereof for Peter Thiel should tell you all you need to know, particularly given the fact that he's specifically working on and enabling AI in the contexts of surveillance and defense.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
main-tanked a guild through BWL.
Orc or human, vanilla or classic, and did you loot-whore yourself DFT or give it to a rogue/DPS warrior?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
That's a good way to frame it, thank you.
(I still want to kill the rabbits on my property).
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
Well, apparently your neighbors will rat you out and presidential candidates will complain about immigrants like me savaging the pets and local wildlife of ($town). Especially if I'm Elmer Fudding around with a shotgun in my tiny suburban backyard, as fun as that might be.
Then there's the possibility of heavy metal contamination. I'm probably willing to risk it given that I don't like in some crazy repurposed industrial zone, but still.
Otherwise nothing wrong beyond being ostracized by my neighbors.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
Meanwhile, what radicalizes a guy to try shooting Trump? It doesn't happen in a vacuum. It comes on ten years of media calling Trump a threat to democracy, a traitor selling the country to Russia, a violent fascist thug who needs to be executed, take him out and beat him, put his severed bloody head on TV, talk about blowing up the White House -- what, I apologized, and Trump deserved it for all his violent rhetoric, I can't believe Republicans would try shooting him like this.
In that case, do you think that Trump and/or the conservative media ecosystem are responsible for the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the El Paso walmart shooting or the Buffalo shooting in 2022?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
But shouldn’t we have rules regarding how the animal control is done?
Why does castle doctrine only apply to people, when my property is invaded by rabbits on a daily basis?
More seriously, sure. At the risk of having been silent in the first round of discussions and popping up now to defend a second set of goalposts, I just don't see the outrage over people eating local rabbits/geese/deer. Obviously pets are a different story.
This kinda mirrors the immigration debate as a whole. Whatever you want the level of immigration to be, we should have a system. It shouldn’t just be a free for all like it has been under Biden.
Republicans seem to have won this debate, as they largely seem to have won the debate on China. One way or another, some kind of immigration bill is likely to pass after the election.
The daily podcast yesterday laid out what they expected would have happened. Senate democrats would have asked Gaetz if he had ever paid women for sex (illegal in Florida and most of the US), whereupon he could have:
Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but I'm surprised democrats wouldn't hold onto this until Gaetz had been confirmed so they could use it as a cudgel against the Trump administration. Maybe they genuinely think he'll wreck the DoJ in a way that his substitute may not.
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