Mantergeistmann
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User ID: 323
Mantergeistmann
11hr ago
I remember it being taken apart in the classic Radicalizing the Romanceless post:
It was wrong of me to say I hate poor minorities. I meant I hate Poor Minorities! Poor Minorities is a category I made up that includes only poor minorities who complain about poverty or racism.
No, wait! I can be even more charitable! A poor minority is only a Poor Minority if their compaints about poverty and racism come from a sense of entitlement. Which I get to decide after listening to them for two seconds. And If they don’t realize that they’re doing something wrong, then they’re automatically a Poor Minority.
I dedicate my blog to explaining how Poor Minorities, when they’re complaining about their difficulties with poverty or asking why some people like Paris Hilton seem to have it so easy, really just want to steal your company’s money and probably sexually molest their co-workers. And I’m not being unfair at all! Right? Because of my new definition! I know everyone I’m talking to can hear those Capital Letters. And there’s no chance whatsoever anyone will accidentally misclassify any particular poor minority as a Poor Minority. That’s crazy talk! I’m sure the “make fun of Poor Minorities” community will be diligently self-policing against that sort of thing. Because if anyone is known for their rigorous application of epistemic charity, it is the make-fun-of-Poor-Minorities community!
I’m not even sure I can dignify this with the term “motte-and-bailey fallacy”. It is a tiny Playmobil motte on a bailey the size of Russia.
Mantergeistmann
11hr ago
The Hamas side thinks that Israeli strikes mostly hit military targets and that that's bad, but sometimes tries to insinuate otherwise (without saying it outright).
From my experience, the people I know opposed to the IDF think that Israeli strikes are mostly hitting civilians. They don't even think there's a "war" going on at all any more, merely Israel occupying Gaza and occasionally bombing things. Again, let me stress that these people don't understand that Hamas is still fighting, or how they incorporate civilians/infrastructure/PR into their entire strategy. Earlier on, these were the same sorts who had no idea how urban warfare usually went, and assumed that civilian casualties could be easily avoided if one wanted to (and therefore, any civilian casualties were clearly malice, and a few instances that were malicious enough on the surface were pointed to as evidence that all were like that). Again, that's the people I know and talk to -- I know there's plenty of other opinions out there, but I rarely come into contact with them personally.
Mantergeistmann
13hr ago
Lets just posit a world where people are informed
You don't ask for much, do you? Of course, plenty of people would think that it's you that is not informed, and that your information about the war (well, a lot of people don't even think it's a "war") is incorrect, and if only you were informed and unbiased! I'm generally in agreement with you, but even I think your numbers are too high, accounting for potential error.
Not that the facts themselves care about what people think, of course.
Mantergeistmann
13hr ago
This speech is more wide-reaching, but I wouldn’t call it anti-Semitic, because he explicitly says he is not criticizing Jews or Israelis but the genocide itself (implicitly its undertakers, who don’t include every Jew or Israeli citizen).
"I'm explicitly not criticizing X group, just the bad ones" is... not generally a great defense, even though it may be very common.
Mantergeistmann
1d ago
imagine yourself in the mindset of an open-minded devout young Muslim man and read Bin Laden's Letter to the American People. Your response is probably something like, "well I am not about to fly a plane into a building, but he makes some good points."
Wasn't that a trend with young leftist women on Tiktok at one point? Which, I know, is meaningless, but still.
Mantergeistmann
2d ago
Iran’s strikes on Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab nations all focused on oil or military strikes
To be clear, you're saying power and desalination facilities are legitimate military targets?
Iran isn’t Israel, they don’t consciously try to level cities.
I assume you mean other than Israeli cities? Or are you making a distinction between "using cluster munitions indiscriminately on civilian targets" with "strikes aimed to level entire cities"? Although if you think Israel is levelling cities via bombing, you aren't making a distinction between that and "striking military (or suspected military) targets distributed throughout a city and in civilian areas".
Mantergeistmann
2d ago
Trump literally committed the worst sin by slaughtering the leader of Iran surreptitiously.
How do you feel about the assassination of Admiral Yamamoto during WWII?
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
Depends entirely on where a country's starting from. See also "screwdriver-ready" or "Iran is constantly X months/weeks/days from a bomb."
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
If there was a time to intervene, it would have been in early January when there were massive anti-government protests, not at the end of February when the government had shot everyone who was feeling inclined towards revolt. Unfortunately, at that point the Trump admin was busy with Operation Caribbean Shakedown.
Didn't the US start building up assets right after the protests? It unfortunately takes time to move things into the region... US logistics is good, but not magical.
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
Couldn't you have said the same about the Nazis and Imperial Japan?
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
And, when voting, they are going to fall somewhere between Dennis Kucinich and Mao.
Almost all recent immigrant groups have voting patterns which are far to the left of longtime populations.
Canada's different in this regard, or at least Ontario is (was?). IIRC, Indian immigrants were a big reason why Ford won again, voting for reasons that would be very legible to conservative voters.
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
I've never found that it holds on the holder. Instead, I always foolproof it by folding the edge over and taping it to itself (sticky to sticky), creating about a 1/4" 'tab' that can be used to reset the next time around. It's never failed me.
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
If you're in the UK (or maybe even just a Commonwealth?), that'd explain it. It's a fairly recent decision by the Beeb.
Mantergeistmann
4d ago
Ah, you're absolutely right. BBC's paywall gave me all of 5 seconds to glance at the image and caption, so yep, I got it wrong.
Mantergeistmann
4d ago
And even that presume the Iran war itself was meaningfully avoidable as an election spoiler.
There's also a world where "Trump is too much of a coward/hates brown people/is in bed with authoritarian regimes to do anything about Iran killing thousands of protesters" becomes a talking point.
Mantergeistmann
4d ago
If you had instead gone with "That's quhat I get", you could claim to just be an old Scotsman.
Mantergeistmann
4d ago
a black woman
She certainly doesn’t look it in the article's photo.
Mantergeistmann
5d ago
Which, if it gets the US industrial base to finally start making the damn things again and scaling up their production lines, is an odd net win.
Mantergeistmann
5d ago
Yeah, that's a bit of a sore point. The only harm a dirty bomb can do is, basically, what we allow it to do by being afraid of stupidly low levels of radiation.
Mantergeistmann
6d ago
The other argument for "why dirty bombs have never been made/deployed" is because they're useless, and a pain. The assembly (and shielding during it) is tricky, and while terrorists may not care about receiving a large radiation dose prior to detonation, they'll probably care that "it is well-documented by all our official agencies that the radioactivity in dirty bombs is unlikely to seriously hurt anyone."
Mantergeistmann
7d ago
there would be a captain who is actually in charge for the duration of the voyage, and we wouldn't vote on the captain midway through.
I mean, that can happen, but it's usually called a mutiny.
Mantergeistmann
7d ago
I know that they're working on getting robotic welders at shipyards - I think the Philly yard is one of the first to try it out. I would say it's not yet replacing the welders they've been unable to hire, but it is more progressed than just a PR stunt.
Mantergeistmann
8d ago
I would have loved to be a boxticker architect. Sadly, when I was looking at universities, they all wanted the next Frank Lloyd Wright. I walked into the admissions office, excellent SATs in hand, and before the topic came up was told, "oh, don't worry if your SATs are bad, we only really care about your portfolio!"
To which I (whose art courses had ended only slightly past stick figures) effectively responded, "Portfoli-what?"
Mantergeistmann
8d ago
Other projects I've considered is getting into game jams and light game development or actually going back and finishing one of the novels I started last decade.
I've actually just joined my first game jam, Adventures for one-page RPGs, which seemed like a good way to dip my toes in the water -- we'll see if I can actually force myself to carry through!
Turkey might be getting downgraded from "Emerging" to "Frontier" market status in some indices. I must admit, I was surprised to learn that they were in "Emerging" status to begin with... I'd always assumed they were reasonably stable, but I suppose if Korea can be classified as "Emerging" in some indices, it makes sense that Turkey would be as well (at least, to my globally financially illiterate mind).
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