DelendaEst
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User ID: 1199
DelendaEst
8d ago
If you are in favor of ideals then Republican immigration policy sounds like it would be a better fit for you. In order for American Ideals to continue to be American Ideals we need to assimilate immigrants into them, and that means taking in a manageable flow, and preferably from all sorts of places. Too large a flow and the existing culture and ideals get diluted too quickly. Too much from a single source means they form enclaves which makes assimilation harder (I am especially thinking of the majority muslim areas of Michigan here). Republican policy preferences are the ones that will meet this goal the best.
DelendaEst
19d ago
I'd kinda hope not. If you do 100 polls you will get roughly that is a 1% outlier, and those have wacky results. By itself it is damning, but aggregated with everything else it comes out in the wash. If people are constantly second guessing their polls to guess if its real or outlier and only releasing the "real" ones then not only is the data untrustworthy but what is the point of the statistical confidence levels in the first place?
DelendaEst
22d ago
I think there is a very real chance that he knew very well who wrote the article but he didn't mention the name on purpose so as to not bring unwanted focus on Scott who he knew wouldn't want it.
DelendaEst
28d ago
Hard agree. Everytime my liberal friends get annoyed at me for being less anti-Trump than they are I remind them that as a Republican I have votes against him more than they have. I voted third party in 2016 and held my nose and votes for Biden in 2020. But this time I might vote Trump, mostly because I actually kinda like JD Vance and I think Trump is sufficiently uninterested in actually governing that Vance will get to drive a lot of the actual agenda, and I think there is about a 50/50 chance that Trump drops dead in office and Vance becomes President anyway. If I could vote for any of the four of Trump, Vance, Harris, or Walz it would be Vance by far so that factor might decide the "who is less shitty" contest for me. But how sad is that....
DelendaEst
30d ago
This is the good and the bad of AI art all wrapped up in one short post.
The Good: Low stakes things like rpg character art is now free to get quickly and at a pretty decent level of quality. Most people would never have paid for this and their having access to it is good. Even those who did pay for it before now get it cheaper, and with the ability to refine the prompts are more likely to get exactly what they want.
The Bad: Some people were paying for this, and it cuts the legs out from under those artists. I'd have more sympathy, but tons of people have gotten screwed by technological change or cheaper markets and this is special pleading. But at the same time, this is also the kind of thing people do when they are just getting into art. The first step to being good at something is being bad at it, and easy replacements which are superior to the Bad At It stage seem likely to demoralize/discourage people from working through this step cause why bother.
I also think this is why normies who are not artists and have only to gain from this change are still so rabidly anti-AI. Cause art is fun, and rewarding, and gives us a sense of accomplishment and helpfulness to the group even if its just a picture of our characters storming the castle. We always imagined the robots as mine labor, or housemaids, etc. because we wanted them to do the drudgery so we could all do art. Not have them take over all the art and leave us to do the manual labor.
Artists are engaged in special pleading, and they didn't care other people's ox got gored. But the reason people empathize more with them is that no one dreams of being a factory worker so who cares if the robots take those jobs. But if the robots take all the artist, novelist, musician, and philosopher jobs then what is there left for the post scarcity world except sitting on your ass watching netflix like those jerks in Wall-E?
DelendaEst
1mo ago
I am pro-life, but I think its a good thing. It means Republicans are looking at what is feasible to do and trying to do that. Few things are as irritating as my side making the perfect the enemy of the good. Compromising too much is abandonment of principle, but standing on principle so firmly that you cede winnable ground to the enemy sort of is too. And now that abortion is not a constitutional matter it is always open to further changes so I'd rather take what I can get now and then keep working towards more later.
DelendaEst
1mo ago
I saw some reporting a few days ago that speculated that part of the movement of black men towards the right (they will still vote Kamala at 80+% but still movement) was driven my crypto concerns. I'm not sure I buy that, but I'm guessing whomever wrote this press release did.
DelendaEst
1mo ago
Nate Silver has written about how the Red Wave that never manifested was in fact never well supported by the polling data and instead was a result of just such an overcorrection so there is at least some evidence in that direction.
DelendaEst
1mo ago
Changing the rules so that the reactors can be build much quicker is possible and I'd like to see much more effort put into that, but the main issue is that elections still happen. A nuclear plant is a huge investment that will take decades to pay off, and at any point a Democrat who wants to make the green lobby happy (or just one who views nuclear as a Red issue and wants to stick it to their enemies) can come along and pass new regulations and mess everything up. You cannot build the reactors without investment, and you cannot get the investment if the whole thing can be wrecked next election. Even if they somehow got everything fast tracked instead of needlessly slowed down and you could go from zero to operational in 4 years (meaning you could get it done before the next election) changes to operating regulations would still be a major risk.
You'd need to get bipartisan support and I just don't see any path to getting Democrats on board. You'd think "nuclear is the only realistic way to replace carbon" would be a winning pitch, but the left never wants to compromise from its preferred vision, and its vision is solar and wind.
DelendaEst
2mo ago
If people are engaging in fraud what makes us think that they will be willing to steal an election but balk at back dating their fraudulent ballots?
DelendaEst
2mo ago
The only reason the left doesn't call the right NPCs is because the NPC meme is right coded and everyone knows it so left wingers find the idea of using it icky.
Instead every comment that goes against the left wing hive mind is a bot. Same idea, different terminology. Kind of like how Red Pilled and Woke mean exactly the same thing (awake to realities that normies don't or won't see) but everyone who uses one hates the other.
DelendaEst
3mo ago
I think there are also areas that are rural enough and mostly vacant and abandoned where you can form a homeless camp without anybody noticing easily, so there's less pressure to set up in populated areas.
I think this is probably a lot of it. Having a release valve to give people an option of doing something other than the most disruptive possible thing seems very helpful. If nothing else it means when the cops hassle them they have an option of a place to go where they won't be hassled and of course won't be bothering other people. If there are literally no options available which don't involve bothering normal productive people, then why not set up shop in downtown and shit directly onto the sidewalk. The cops having a middle option of "roust them out of here and into the out of the way encampment not bothering anyone" also means there is something for them to since all of the more serious remedies have been denied them.
DelendaEst
3mo ago
We are from the same place, I saw that on the local reddit as well. Glad my kid is old enough that we don't go there on a regular basis anymore, but I just cannot fathom how the entire community losing something of value for the sake of letting crazy druggies roam around being a problem is just accepted. "Whelp, nothing to be done about it other than just accept things suck now." But there are quite a few things that can be done about it, and it makes me feel like I am taking crazy pills to see people insist otherwise.
DelendaEst
3mo ago
Still, I think it is a more valuable signal than abstaining. I constantly see people who just assume non-voters would break heavily Dem if forced to choose a side, but it is really hard to say for sure what would happen. But votes for 3rd party show up in a countable way, and reduce the total votes of the winner. Reducing them to below 50% even in victory is a good way to send a signal that they didn't win, the other guy just lost.
DelendaEst
3mo ago
It doesn't work that way. You cannot have your VP candidate call his opponents weird and creepy and engage in a coordinated campaign to label the opponent as weird and expect that to have zero effect on the valence of that word, especially on normies who don't get that you mean "people I don't like are weird which is gross, but actually weird people who are fine," a statement which doesn't even make sense on the face of it. And it definitely lights the entire concept of trying to fight bullying against weird kids on fire because impressionable youth won't hear anything except "weird is bad, the Vice President told me so."
I think you are just an asshole who is willing to burn the commons if it means you get to piss off your outgroup. As they say, the cruelty is point.
DelendaEst
3mo ago
But dems made up the couch thing completely out of whole cloth, so the thing they lie about him having done makes him weird. Rs haven't made up anything about Walz yet, and the media wouldn't signal boost it if they had, so he is normal.
DelendaEst
3mo ago
I usually see accusations of that phenomenon phrased as "it's (D)ifferent"
DelendaEst
3mo ago
W got 2 nominees in 2 terms, but notably both were in his second term. So his first had zero.
DelendaEst
3mo ago
I wanted Haley, and I like JD Vance just fine (much better than I like Trump) FWIW.
DelendaEst
3mo ago
I am very happy to see 1 and 2, and very unhappy about number 3.
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I don't have strong feelings about the substance of this either way, but it is very nice to see someone responding to a SC ruling they don't like the way they are supposed to - passing a new law. The court says the law currently doesn't work the way you want it to, so change the law don't just fight about the court. I'd hope this succeeds this even though I don't care about the merits just because I want everyone to respond to SC rulings in this productive manner.
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I think this is good and I have been advocating this plan for years. Every President gets exactly 2 picks, they happen regularly every 2 years. This lowers the luck factor in the court both high and low, makes terms a little shorter which is probably good, and should as a result hopefully lower the tensions around Presidential elections on this front.
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WTF is this supposed to be. Impeachment is the answer to this, just like it is for Presidents and other electeds. This just seems like an attempt to get a set of seemingly neutral rules which can be wielded in an decidedly unneutral manner in order to be able to force the other side's justices out even though you don't have the votes to impeach.
DelendaEst
3mo ago
FWIW I don't like Trump, and I have no idea who I will vote for since it will be a contest of which bag of shit smells least.
But I would vote for Kodos before I voted for Kamala.
Lefties hate Trump for Jan 6, which I cannot gin up enough outrage to really care about. It was one riot in a year full of them, notable only for the fact that it was righties instead of lefties, and they vandalized government buildings instead of destroying the lives of randos. Did Trump encourage them? Hard to say if he meant to, or they colluded, or they overinterpreted him, but either way it was a bad look.
But Kamala set up a bail fund for rioters. In the middle of destructive riots. The ones that did more damage than a Cat 2 hurricane and fucked up random business owners to no purpose whatsoever. Riots which ROUTINELY had been going for multi-night stretches in each location before petering out. But the idea of a single arsonist being forced to miss out on the second night of terror just because he'd been caught in the first night was so hateful to her that she organized a bail fund to make sure they didn't have to miss a single moment of terrorizing the people of the nation she was running to be VP of. Lefties think Trump is a traitor, I think Kamala is. Trump maybe encouraged a riot that didn't even do much. Kamala funded a terrorist insurgency.
DelendaEst
4mo ago
Exactly. The department heads running their departments is completely normal and acceptable and not even worth comment. The only unusual thing is that they are doing so without oversight from their boss. But even in a normal situation where the president is vital and fully engaged I'm not sure how much oversight those department heads are really getting, so this may very well be only a nominal difference.
DelendaEst
4mo ago
Some, but not at the top line. I still think SCJ are more likely to be assassinated than Trump, though I would put it a LOT closer than I did before. This is because part of the reason I had them much more likely to be killed is that they get vastly less security protection. However, if Trump's security protection is going to be incompetent then that lowers its value (though its still worth a lot more than what SCJ get).
DelendaEst
4mo ago
I think it might be a little more difficult than you think for some edge cases, but I broadly agree. I was also pretty obviously talking about policy though, which means doing it "at scale in a way that is legally/bureaucratically acceptable".
I will happily concede that the punisher walking around talking to homeless people and smoking the problematic ones would have a very high rate of success though if that's what you'd like to talk about instead.
I am much more hostile to trans than I am to gay, and more than I used to be. I wouldn't say I don't care if someone is trans or not, I will judge them and wouldn't want to hang out, but I am not here to police every dumb thing people do. So then I should be in favor of trans people being left alone right? I guess, but only if they will agree to leave me alone, and they certainly have not.
Demanding that society redefine gender to suit them even though it flies in the face of objective reality, trying to get men into women's only spaces, and otherwise trying to force everyone else to join them in their delusions is a hostile act, and I return it with hostility. If they want to be left alone and treated with anything other than hostility I say they can go first.
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