FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
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User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
I have been repeatedly told by people arguing for support of Ukraine that our policy is and should be to drag the war out as long as possible to maximize harm to Russia. The fact that this also maximizes harm to Ukraine is waved off as Ukraine is volunteering for the honor. The fact that Ukraine is volunteering for the honor based on their belief that we will help them win, when in fact we have no intention of doing that is likewise dismissed.
And of course, actually providing them the resources needed to win, presuming those resources actually exist, risks escalating into direct warfare with a nuclear power.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
What is reality?
That which does not go away when you stop believing in it.
Who decides that exactly?
No one decides it. It happens regardless. If you do a bad job planting your crops, people starve. If you do a bad job enforcing the law, chaos and violence reigns. If you do a bad job protecting your borders, foreign armies victimize your populace.
How can you decide whether an institution , whether that is the police or whoever , did their job correctly?
For the police, you derive a general understanding of what their job is by examining the laws they're supposed to enforce, and their actual enforcement of those laws, measure it versus the costs of maintaining them and the general realities that add friction to the system.
Are you capable or even interested in judging each and every move they make ?
Random sampling and statistics help a great deal here.
Do you just use your judgement ( whether right or wrong) to fuel hatred and distrust? Because you are probably not using it to make a a practical change.
That is certainly a thing people can do. For example, the BLM movement spun out of a coordinated attempt by Blue Tribe to generate hatred and distrust by pushing misinformation about the actual performance of law enforcement, resulting in a very large and quite partisan disconnect between public perception of police misconduct and actual rates of misconduct. And the result is that tens of thousands of additional black Americans are now dead, and hundreds of thousands of additional Black Americans have been victimized by serious crimes. That was a practical change of the sort you are describing.
So what is it? What is the goal? The cornerstone of society is trust. Trust has to be blind up to a logical point.
Alternatively, one can do one's best to verify that trust, and to withdraw it when one perceives that it has been repeatedly violated. It is always possible that one has been deceived, though, so it's best to keep an open mind to new evidence when it arises.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
Apparently she's already been the president, for a little over an hour when Biden was under for surgery.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
If democrats were forced to pick a 2028 candidate right now, would you advise them to pick her, or someone else?
Out of curiosity, have the election results changed your view on the general political situation in the US? Would you be less inclined to push the button, after a demonstration of the limits of Blue power?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
Three reasons.
First, DIY tech is constantly improving, and it's already well past the point where guns can in fact be controlled. Gun control is a dead letter simply from a practical perspective. Crime is a major political concern and likely will be for some time, and in that time the Gun Culture will continue killing it on outreach to the youth.
Second, the Gun Culture will not accept new legislation, will not comply with it if passed, and is actively and aggressively eroding the existing laws. The AR15 has been thoroughly normalized. SBRs are completely normalized. Automatic weapons are effectively normalized, both in legal and illegal versions; I'm given to understand that you can 3d-print glock switches for example. What you're going to see is the legal full auto giving cover to the illegal, until outright defiance is completely normalized and any enforcement effort becomes a moot point. I'm hopeful similar things will happen with more significant weapons as well.
Third, technological developments are almost certainly going to moot the whole question within the decade. What people will be worrying about won't be guns.
Let me highlight the relevant part then: who his bodyguards studiously ignored until after he'd fired eight or so times.
Trump being alive right now is a low-probability event, and a significant part of the reason it is a low-probability event is conspicuous, inexplicable and extremely suspicious inaction on the part of federal agents in the face of a deadly threat. The events in Butler have not been remotely adequately explained, and one of the obvious potential explanations is that the deep state made a good try at having him killed.
(This being said, I also am waiting for the blackpill crew to update based on this new information.)
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
Gun control is donzo. There will never be meaningful, effective gun control legislation ever again, and what controls exist are probably going away over the next decade or so.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
I've been arguing against the blackpill crowd for years now, but this is your reminder that Trump missed having his brainstem clipped by a sniper who his bodyguards studiously ignored until after he'd fired eight or so times.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
Yup, repeating what I saw last night. Apologies for the confusion.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
Red Pill and Blue pill originally derive from the matrix films. Red pill means accepting reality, blue pill means lying to yourself. People adapted this to other contexts, one of the prominent ones being the general anti-feminist backlash in the mid-2010s, with an additional resonance from "Red" being the conservative color and "Blue" being the Progressive color post-2000.
As the culture war heated up post 2014, and a lot of people perceived the world to be more or less falling apart around them, the "Black Pill" rose to prominence: Black in this case meaning despair, an acceptance of defeat, the belief that things can't get better, only worse. "Black Pilled" means you're despairing of the present situation and have little to no hope for the future. "White pilled" means the opposite.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
The Powers That Be, an old term for entrenched systems of power and the agents imbedded in them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
If there was an SJW consensus prior to Elon, all the same mechanisms and all the same incentives exist to create an equally false right-wing consensus.
Okay. Show the high-engagement Progressive accounts being banned from X through arbitrary application of platform rules. That's the mechanism that dominated prior to Elon, so according to you it should be the mechanism dominating under Elon.
Likewise, community notes didn't exist prior to Elon, and are a significant improvement to the function of the platform.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
This is of course completely ridiculous and an appalling misuse of scripture, but...
The dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on its horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. 2 The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority. 3 One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was filled with wonder and followed the beast. 4 People worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, “Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?”
5 The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise its authority for forty-two months.
Hrrrm.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
I'm fairly certain that Vance would replace them with something I dislike just as much.
Like what? Do you have a specific policy in mind, or is it more of a vibes thing?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d 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.
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.
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?
He's the first politician I've listened to who could bring up interesting data-points I hadn't heard of before. I'm looking forward to his presidential bid. His "convenient origin story" happens to be his actual life, born to drug addicts and working his way up to the vice-presidency of the united states. Certainly his story looks considerably better than Kamala's.
8 years ago you were sitting here writing that Clinton was a historically unpopular candidate, manipulative, stupid, whatever.
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. 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 think if Trump could beat her he could likely beat most of the other Democrat contenders. I think she's a very bad, very corrupt politician, but that doesn't make her bad at securing power or an unserious candidate in the way Kamala was.
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.
And he was, in fact, actually suffering from dementia, a problem that only got worse throughout his term. 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. His dementia actually was real, actually cost him the race, and after more than a decade of Progressive claims that Republican presidents were senile (a common accusation against both W and Trump), they collectively missed their own candidate actually going senile right in front of them. 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'm not on your side. I'm opposed to your candidates, because I disagree strongly with their policies and values. But I, at least as an individual, am actually trying to speak honestly here: 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.
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.
I am pretty sure it is in my direct interest for Progressives to see things the way you do.
Kamala was a candidate who, so far as anyone could tell, had a 50% chance of becoming president yesterday.
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. As recently as two years ago, IIRC, Democrats were still directly funding Trumpian candidates in Republican primaries, hoping that public revulsion for him and his supporters would make them unelectable in the general. 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.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
Womens' sports leagues are an explicitly political creation, so their policies are a political issue.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
Trump's had two solid assassination attempts, and the Secret Service pretty clearly ain't what they used to be. Blues are all-in that this is a fascist takeover. In 175 million Americans, it would be pretty amazing if there weren't a few more willing to have a go to save the nation, capable of planning better, and coherent enough to make a go of it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
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.
I hope you're wrong too, but eh, I think skepticism is healthy. We're at the point where con-men are all we've got left, and the forlorn hope that some of them have a heart of gold somewhere in there.
Can you name a woman worth running?
Anyone tried cloning Margaret Thatcher yet?
Hell, can you name a man worth running?
Vance is looking real, real good to me right now.
...But those aside, Harris was, legitimately, an absolutely terrible choice, and I am pretty sure she was chosen because the better candidates, male and female, saw the writing on the wall and didn't want to tank their future prospects trying to salvage an election that Joe Biden's dementia had already pretty clearly lost.
The legacy media gave her every possible advantage they could, at considerable cost to their own dwindling credibility. She couldn't do interviews. She couldn't field basic questions on policy or on her record. So they let her hide in a closet and spun their guts out trying to astroturf contentless, mean-girls-style social consensus ex nihlio, while claiming all possible policy positions to the point of obvious self-contradiction. She claimed she'd protect the Second Amendment from Trump, man.
In her prime, I can't imagine Nancy Pelosi would have been this bad. Clinton wasn't anywhere near this bad. I'm pretty sure AOC wouldn't be this bad. I can't imagine Oprah or Michelle Obama being this bad if they threw their hats in. I would strongly oppose all of those women if they ran because I disagree with their values and their preferred policies. But Kamala is all that and a bag of rancid chips. Oprah is a billionaire businesswoman, an expert on public relations and communication. She boot-strapped herself into a commanding position as one of the richest and most influential women in America. Kamala sleazed her way into a position under one of the most corrupt politicians of the modern era, made a career for herself personifying the worst stereotypes of a "tough on crime" caricature, was massively unpopular as a presidential candidate, was tapped for VP explicitly on the basis of identity-politics checkboxes, and has now lost an election to Donald Trump. She outperformed Joe Biden in zero counties in the entire nation. [EDIT] - This is false; I missed the clarification on CNN last night. Apparently she outperformed Biden in by at least 3% in 58 of 3144 counties, and presumably by less than 3% in more.
Blues need to take the L and ask themselves some serious questions about the long sequence of bad decisions that brought them to this moment.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
People say stuff like this every election. They still have the support of half the country and all the institutions. I'm pretty sure the institutions will have to go before the party does.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
have you re-evaluated Elon, given these developments? Still confident he's a grifter?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
That just causes the leftist to stop listening to me.
Maybe you should try cutting a deal with the Right instead?
Progressivism lost its mind in 2014, and their excesses have done significant damage to our nation and its institutions. Maybe it's time to cut the crazier fringes loose, rather than bankrolling them at every turn. And if you can't do that, why should we on the Right consider you distinct from them?
and yet when people say that we shouldn't be doing it, the argument is that we've got to protect the poor Ukrainians. There's this maddening bullshit arbitrage between "protect the Ukrainians from the evil Russian Orcs", and "We should harm the Russians as much as possible, who cares what it costs the Ukranians."
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