MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
What I remember on that was the absolute insanity of people with no idea about anything to do with Ukraine suddenly deciding that it was not only important, but it was a one sided affair with huge stakes for us. Looking into it, none of the things said in defense of us being involved make sense. No Putin is not going to invade NATO, he doesn’t have the military strength to do that. No, Ukraine isn’t an important ally of geopolitical importance— it’s basically Kansas or Nebraska, farmland. No we cannot indefinitely send trillions of dollars to Ukraine alongside depleting our weapons stock. Yes, we can make more, but it takes time.
But throw in a sob story, and people were putty in the hands of the Ukrainians. It was mind blowing. Zelensky talking like a Marvel movie character, and some guy on a military base telling the Russians to “go fuck themselves” is enough for millions of people to spend blood and treasure, impoverish Europe with high energy prices, and risk nuclear war. It wasn’t even good propaganda, looking back. We’re just that stupid and gullible. Of course we’re also rather stupid on Gaza. It’s not our fight, but the ease with which millions of people suddenly decided that Israel was absolutely wrong is astounding. No idea of the decades long fruitless attempts to get any sort of real peace in the region, no idea of just who Hamas is, just bad images on TV is enough to get idiots to support anything.
Which I’ll admit has blackpilled me on democracy. Most people are too stupid to be allowed to vote. Even me, I’ll admit to that. People have no ability to rule themselves and while I think an autocracy is bad as well, at least our war decisions will be made on the basis of facts instead of who can sound most like the Avengers. And maybe economic decisions should be made by people who understand economics rather than by people who think government money is free.
I go back and forth on who to vote for simply because I don’t like either one. And tbh, I’m fairly confident that at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter that much because we’re basically an oligarchy anyway. I’m a serf on a very large American plantation and so I’ll vote, but I don’t expect that the country is going to change based on who wins. The big things on the horizon are the wars (which I’m expecting to go hot by the end of 2025 and us to be actively fighting by the same time period. We’re careening toward WW3, possibly nuclear. I’m expecting inflation to continue in everything except wages much like now and I’m reevaluating my expenses in light of that. I’m expecting more deep state incompetence and more disasters made worse by that.
Civilization in America is collapsing. If you read into the problems of the late Roman Empire, we hit them pretty close. I’m not sure that with as many deep problems as we actually have, anyone can fix it.
How could it not matter? You have the head of the government and the Democratic Party literally calling Trump supporters garbage. I mean if I wanted to get any base riled up, I’d call them garbage.
Does it have to be Arab? I mean the British were in Palestine for decades. And so if anyone could take on the challenge, why not King Charles?
So the towns that got bulldozed to make room for the Jews? The ones Hamas has been shelling daily? I can’t imagine a universe where this works.
It’s news. The value to the average news consumer is that the news is accurate. If I’m reading about the election, the best source is the one that’s accurate and thus allows me to guess at the future. One thing that will help with respectability is that the news source in question is at least pretending to be fair to all sides. Of course as a mainstream news outlet it’s not going to actually endorse Trump because that’s too jarring a change from Narrative. Everyone knows that real news endorses democrats.
I’m less optimistic of this as long as the legitimacy of the regime rests upon people voting for “good things” there’s no way to reverse course here. You cannot allow people who disagree with you free access to the cultural memeplex as it might mean losing the election and thus power. If I’m a Globalist, the idea of Nationalism isn’t just a different opinion, it’s an infection in the body politic and must be cured. After all, the Nationalists not only get to vote, but can infect other people with Nationalism. Or the same with communist vs capitalist ideas. If the people are infected with “bad ideas” they can spread and eventually the plebs end up going full capitalist.
Legitimacy leads to power, and power is the end goal of any movement. And the big secret of the Westphalia treaty was that it removed the church leadership from the state. Kings were no longer Kings because the One True Church anointed him with holy oil. So it no longer mattered which church anyone went to. The government didn’t care because it no longer mattered. The legitimacy of the government didn’t rest on all the people supporting the church that anointed him.
And put them where exactly? Again, this is a very small densely populated country with only deserts in between cities. And given that Israel doesn’t trust them to not try to attack their citizens when removed (unless we’re talking camps, which is probably not going to work) there’s not much to do with Gazans.
And why should they leave their homes with no guarantees that they’d ever see them again? Trust is gone here. Even before the bombings started, the dominant idea is that Israel will take their land. Even if given an order to leave, who’s leaving? Who’s going to leave Gaza and expect to take Israel at their word that once Hamas and the tunnels are gone, the Gazans will be allowed to return home?
I think that’s a bit unrealistic given the size of the area in question. Israel as a whole is the size of New Jersey, so any armed action in that limited space is going to be pretty brutal simply because of the population density and the fact that everything is with missile range. There aren’t even good natural boundaries. Ireland was separated from Britain by a sea, and most of the British and Irish for that matter were well outside the zones where the fighting was happening.
I think one thing not talked about enough is keeping a good chain of custody. It absolutely boggles my mind that there’s no talk about simply using the same supply chain logistical tracking that FedEx and Amazon and UPS use to track a package from the seller to the buyer through multiple warehouses often in various states. And it seems like it would eliminate fraud at the counting sites — if a ballot gets counted, but isn’t recorded as cast at a polling place or retrieved from a drop box, it’s going to be obvious. And you could likely figure out where these ballots are coming from. Scanning the unique barcode on each ballot as it’s fed into the machine would make it obvious if someone is counting the same ballot more than once.
And while it does a lot to prevent fraud, having a ballot logistical system tracking ballots would make forensic investigations possible, and would enable recounts as needed. All the raw data is there and can be looked at. Add in the need to badge in and out of the areas where ballots are held or counted provides the possibility of finding out who might be messing with the ballots.
Not evangelicals, necessarily, but there are others to convince. Moderate and liberal Christians and Jews might be turned off by a strong anti-Israel sentiment. There’s also the conservatives who are leaning against Trump, who are probably pretty easy to alienate since they’re already holding their nose to even consider a Kamala vote. She’s kinda in a hard spot. Going left will break off the conservatives who don’t like Trump. Going too far right means her left wing either stays home or votes Jill Stein. Hence the nonsense answers.
But what you’re talking about sounds a bit more like Napoleon or maybe Caesar or something of that sort. The point of a Hitler comparison is the negative bits — the camps and the invasion of other countries. At worst I’d call Trump a potential Putin or Orbán, and at best a Napoleon. I definitely expect him to make a bit of noise
Aren’t the pigeons keeping the trash down?
I understand the fear, though I’m not sure exactly which end of it is worse. Trying to scaremonger Jews about a potential Hitler for political points is extremely dangerous. I can’t imagine anything scarier to a Jew than invoking the Holocaust in relation to a candidate for president. Whether or not it’s true, and especially if it’s not, this is like telling a rape victim that the guy down the hall is a rapist. You’re bringing back all the trauma of what the original event means. I mean obviously if it’s actually true, then a warning is warrented, but if it’s not, it’s extremely cruel and terrorizing millions of New York Jews who now believe that they need to prepare to flee because Hitler is coming back.
It’s always seemed very much that the idea is less the rape part and much more a fantasy of being able to have sex and not be responsible for it. That’s the thing they show in the scenes women like tend to show the woman having sex with a powerful and wealthy man, while not exactly her idea, she enjoys it. And of course since we’re talking rape the woman isn’t responsible for the choice. He raped her, after all.
Now I would consider this the female version of the male fantasy of having hot women hit on him and all but jump on him. The fantasy is different different from the male simply because women aren’t going to fight off most men.
Any such speculation is pointless unless and until we know who did this. It could be a GOP member worried about ballot stuffers. It could also be a democrat burning republicans ballots. It could be the government trying to cast doubts on a potential Trump win. It could be a teenager doing the equivalent of stuffing a firecracker in the mailbox because fire is cool. Trying to guess why it happened with no evidence of who did it is just going to end up with all sides accusing all others of trying to manipulate the outcome of the election. We have no idea.
How do you figure that? I would suggest that due to immigration and the exportation of manufacturing to other countries, there’s an extremely hard ceiling on what the productive blue collar workers can hope to make — which is exactly the wages at which it becomes cheaper to either replace them with imported domestic workers (immigrants) or outsource the work to some other country. The ceiling seems to be around $16-18 for work that doesn’t require either apprenticeships or college. And this is despite any changes to COL. even in construction in the USA, you’re going to be seeing a lot of Mexicans putting on roofs and laying floors because they work dirt cheap.
I don’t think they fear Trump. I don’t see him deciding that LA Times needs to be burned down because they ran an editorial. I think it might well be that they want to be less political. The pressure on everyone in media to get in lockstep is very strong, and I think the owners are trying to ratchet things down a bit.
It’s meant as a thought terminator. What they mean is that Trump is evil and therefore if you even consider voting Trump, you’re evil too. Nazi has never really had a definitive definition, nor has fascism, or racist, sexist, bigotry, and words that end in -phobic. They’re not supposed to. That’s not what those words are for. Orbán is fascist, Trump is, Hitler is, Mussolini is, so is Putin. What specifically do they all share in common? Name 3-5 policy positions that all 5 men and the movements around them have in common that aren’t shared by neo-liberal politicians. What are we talking about? But since there’s no set of positions that could be declared as defining fascism, it’s basically a sneer meant to stop all thought. You don’t have to think about what he wants to do, or what Kamala wants to do — he’s a fascist, so she has to get your vote unless you’re a fascist. Your grocery bills don’t matter. Building things in America doesn’t matter. You must accept the premise, and then act on it.
I disagree re Musk. The man has run several companies and has managed to build all of them to be successful, he’s created new technologies that weren’t even on the table before he showed up. Nobody in 2010 thought that you could reuse the launch phase of a rocket. Musk figured that out and can actually have one caught in midair at this point. He’s dreaming the future, except that when Musk says he wants to see it, it stands an above average chance of happening. You don’t think that if (when) a guy steps out of a SpaceX vehicle on friggin’ Mars that he’s not going to resonate with average people who will be seeing him as “commanding authority?” I can’t think of anything that would get blue collar voters in line like “when NASA was busy booking trips on Russian rockets, Musk went to Mars.” They like doers, big thinkers, and bold adventures.
I tend to suspect that she’s doing word salads because she’s afraid to simply say what she actually thinks. Probably her handlers are worried that her actual opinions will turn off a part of the electorate. If she says anything substantial about Israel, she’s either going to lose the woke left (who are so pro-Palestine that a good number seem okay with Hamas) or she says something pro-Palestine and loses most of the evangelical vote (because to a good lot of them even mild criticism of Israel is blasphemy in the sense that they think God backs Israel). So in that case you don’t want to forthrightly answer the question. Now a good politician would say something like:
”We support a peace with strength in the region and we’re working with both Israel and our Allies in the region to secure that peace. Until then we are working with international partners to supply humanitarian aid to the people displaced by the conflict.”
This is, quite clearly, a nonanswer. There’s not much in the statement that can be construed as supporting either side. It’s simply a wish for a strong and lasting peace and support for displaced civilians.
Her word salads seem like they’re trying to do the same thing. She’s trying to come up with a statement that sounds convincing but doesn’t give any substantial, tangible information that can be used against her. Her problem is that she’s not particularly good at it. Probably because she’s actually spent most of her political career in state politics that didn’t need that skill as much. Her opinions would be pretty standard in big city California, so she could just say what she thinks without too much difficulty. Very few in California are pro-Israel or anti-abortion, so she can just give an opinion.
My views is that maybe 5-10% of converts are sincere, about 90% are LARPING, but much of the growth is births. There’s just too much talk about the trappings to be realistic. I’ve more of less come around to believing in high church Protestant Christianity as the genuine belief, but I don’t look for things like aesthetics of the building or service so much as genuine belief and that the general idea actually makes sense.
I’ve honestly never understood the appeal. I’m seeing all kinds of Twitter stuff from tradcaths and orthodox and it’s like they’re playing a game. Like they’re arguing about very odd theological beliefs— things that honestly have little to do with the lived experience of a religion. And they’re constantly calling other people— often priests and bishops heretical. I think at least half of the tradcaths who pride themselves on attending a Latin Catholic Church they can’t understand are also convinced that pope is a heretic. It seems almost LARP to me, a love for the medieval church and a world of European Christian culture.
I can understand the sentiment of wanting to go back to a simpler life. There’s some part of me that would very much like to live in a 19th century log cabin or something or maybe the Amish. I just don’t see why you’d choose religion based on aesthetics.
Well, first of all, I think it works like all restrictions— it makes it hard to just eat anything without thinking about it, reading labels, etc. This is important because America is stuffed full of convenience foods and they’re available just about everywhere you go. If you can’t eat processed foods, or seed oils, then you’re not going to be able to buy chips at the gas station, go through the drive through, get a pizza at the grocery store, etc.
Second I think there is something to hyper-palatable foods being a reasonable hypothesis as most processed foods have more intense flavors than anything in nature. The cheesyist natural cheese is not as intense as something like Cheetos. The sweetest fruits pale in flavor intensity compared to fruit flavored candies.
Third, processed foods often remove the things that allow your systems to feel full for example engineering mouthfeel (https://agrilifetoday.tamu.edu/2023/11/07/mouthfeel-of-food-determines-whether-people-go-back-for-seconds/) to induce purchases. Now the article was about hamburgers, but mouthfeel is just one aspect of the engineering of food to induce people to eat it. Now, once your diet reaches a certain point with foods engineered both to induce eating, and to perhaps keep you from feeling full, becoming at least overweight is pretty much a done deal.
I mean yes. Prediction markets avoid the two biggest problems of polling. One one side, it avoids the issue of shame and embarrassment entirely. If I’m in favor of something that is unpopular, I might not tell someone especially if I’m in a situation where other people might hear it. And second, they avoid falling for zealots. If the price for Kamala gets too high, people will sell Kamala and take the cash now before the election proves them wrong.
It increases the likelihood of the right voting. It’s motivation to get your butt to the polls to vote against a regime that calls you garbage.
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