JTarrou
1d ago
Not unique, just cruder methods. The chinese, once they got rich enough with capitalism to be able to afford state of the art censorship, no longer have to use concentration camps very much. Neither does Russia, for the same reasons.
The US can afford the very best, an entire ecosystem of disinformation funded by dead rich people's estates being directed by the current fashionable elites from the best schools. CIA cutouts, partisan outlets, VOA penetration. And because it is so sophisticated and decentralized, there is no need for camps, or even to do much int eh way of directing things. The system does its own targeting, see the SPLC.
JTarrou
1d ago
It's funny how history goes. Nixon goes down for Watergate, but Obama wiretapped Trump's campaign and then used the intelligence agencies to launder Hillary's oppo research to blame Trump for being in league with the Russians that Clinton was paying to try to honeytrap the Trump campaign.
McCarthy goes down as the dumbest prosecutor in history for being right only 99.5% of the time.
JTarrou
1d ago
Trump honestly believing in clean elections and that he won in 2020, and being willing to enforce it even against his own party also fits your facts. I don't think Puerto Rico is a central example of "MAGA", and if it is, that's a whole separate interesting thing.
JTarrou
1d ago
And you think the whole dirty alliance is going to fold up because one of their tentacles got stung? There are thousands of groups doing exactly what the SPLC is doing in every western country. The SPLC is just one of the more egregious examples, but that hole has already been filled and Amazon/FBI/All FDIC banks are now taking their orders from a different communist NGO funded by capitalist robber barons. We should be finding out which one and what it's called in a few decades, and it will be thrown to the wolves someday, maybe even before we die of old age.
JTarrou
1d ago
At an evolutionary level, females being able to control which males procreate is generally done after the fact, rather than before. Both men and women can be ruthless about whose genes get passed on.
Every year, six hundred thousand dudes get culled from the gene pool after they got their swimmers in.
JTarrou
2d ago
What proportion of this is just wildly inflated end-of-life medical care? Seems to me the real trap is that families spend four times the accumulated total lifetime medical costs up to that point in the last few months or years of their loved ones' life. That money isn't going to old people really, it's going to insurance companies, nursing homes, palliative care, home nursing etc. For the most part, it doesn't buy anything except a longer death.
The demand for medical care is, for all practical purposes, infinite.
JTarrou
3d ago
I think you've gotten comfortable in an atheistic space being specifically bigoted against a group you have virtually no experience with. You have fantasies of what bad people they must be. Conspiracy theories. Imagined hatreds and evil intents.
But it's all just you.
JTarrou
4d ago
This some ignorance right here. Just straight up ignorant bigotry.
My folks are super conservative, super religious. They were missionaries for years, my dad has been a lay preacher for longer than I've been alive, and was at Jan 6. Mom's best friend is gay, has been since before she met dad. He stayed in our home for a year or so back in the day getting back on his feet.
My dad thinks old guy is going to hell, so does mom for that matter. Doesn't make him not her best friend. You're projecting your own hatred onto people you don't know.
JTarrou
4d ago
When was the last really contested Democratic nomination? They've all been coronations since '08, and that one was close. No nomination in '12, in '16 they pay off the previous tiara-snatch from Hillary by making her the nominee. Then it's Obama's VP's turn, then his VP's turn. The past three Democratic nominees have been downstream of Obama upsetting the '08 coronation of Hillary, then co-opting it.
I think it's most likely the Dems turn the page and try to hold a contested primary. But that has not been how they've done things for the past twenty years or more. Many of those people are still in power, and you can never count inertia out of the game. In many ways, the next real, competitive DNC primary for president will shape the next several elections and set the tone for our new political divide. If they ever hold it.
JTarrou
4d ago
As a politician to the voters, yes absolutely. But that's not how you get the DNC nomination. Not saying Harris is a strong candidate, but she's much stronger in the party than she is with democratic voters, much less general election voters. And the party chooses the nominee, not the voters.
JTarrou
4d ago
The important part is that your personal beliefs don't have anything to do with the religion you belong to. You belong to a cultural identity associated with a religion, whether you believe in it or not.
JTarrou
4d ago
Religion has always been a part of political identity. Atheists have a hard time with the concept. I recall Hitchens telling an irish joke, the punchline of which was "Protestant atheist or catholic atheist?" He then waxed eloquent as only Hitchens could about what a ridiculous mental construct that was. But it never made any practical sense. The Irish don't hate Protestants, they hate the Scots-Irish. They don't like catholic or agnostic Scots-Irish any more than protestant ones. Religion isn't an a la carte thing, it's part of a cultural and often ethnic identity. Whatever your personal metaphysical beliefs are does not really move the needle for anyone but you.
JTarrou
4d ago
Not in the least! I would say that Iran can only hope the outcomes for their country are as mild as the US got away with.
JTarrou
5d ago
If you're going to fish in the shallow end of the gene pool, the catch may have tumors.
JTarrou
5d ago
This. You can date someone from the other political party if you both have a different religion. You can't date someone whose politics is religion, and is opposed to yours.
JTarrou
5d ago
My guess is that given a choice between an e-mail job in a climate controlled office and housewife, women take hte job. When given a choice between twelve-hour days hauling garbage and housewife, they take housewife. Times get hard, war, famine, economic collapse, and all feminism will wink out of existence until things improve.
JTarrou
6d ago
Possibly the white woman with the last name "Hajdini" didn't think of herself as white. I wonder what she put on her college application.
JTarrou
6d ago
If Iranian military capabilities are so feeble, why isn't the US winning the war?
The US is winning, and it's barely a war. The idea that the people missing half their government and their entire military are in some sense winning is bonkers.
Why are US strategic goals not achieved?
Neither of us knows what the actual strategic goals are, we're guessing. And sometimes wars take longer than a month or two?
Iran's already achieved their strategic goal, securing control of the straits of Hormuz.
Wat. Laying a few mines and boarding a couple merchant ships isn't "securing control", they don't "control" a single square inch of the Strait. Their navy has no ships left, nothing but speedboats. Their interdiction operations are basically the same as Somali pirates. They haven't done anything yet except spook the maritime insurance companies. This whole game is still in the first half, if not the first quarter.
Remember when Venezuela was going to chew up the Marine expeditionary units and we'd be in WW3 in the mountains of South America? And then that didn't happen?
JTarrou
6d ago
Gaza will fade soon enough. Go back in the flag Rolodex. In five years, you'll see a social media account with Ukraine and Palestinian flags and remember.....
JTarrou
6d ago
Any number of reasons, many of which will affect all your other areas of conversation too. This subject is likely to breed conflict with your partner in a relationship and in my opinion should generally be avoided. There's no reason you need to be discussing the dirty details of how the sexes differ in pursuit of the other in a context that makes gender conflict almost unavoidable.
Talking about "SMV" or whatever is what the internet is for, not your date.
Gamergate did not involve "the right". There might have been a minority of gamers with right-of-center political views, but this was always an inter-left fight, with some of the defeated later drifting right having found some safe harbor there/having grown a decade older.
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