MaximumCuddles
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User ID: 58
MaximumCuddles
6d ago
I generally find Babylon bee funny but that one’s a bit of a stinker fr
MaximumCuddles
7d ago
r/neoliberal on suicide watch rn.
I know, reddit. But they are so confident that she’s a Russian agent. What’s the deal with that? Is it just normal radlib demoralized Russia hysteria? It seems deeper than that.
On a related note; I’ve been on Reddit a lot in the last week, mostly out of morbid curiosity. I had stayed away for probably 12-18 months, and it’s terrible. A much worse echo chamber than I remember, and it was incredibly bad before. Good god.
MaximumCuddles
7d ago
I think the whole idea, and I’m sort of on the fence about how true this is, was that you didn’t have to give Bagram back and we could just have kept it as essentially imperial property, like Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Apparently it would have been extremely easy to defend basically indefinitely with minimal manpower. Bagram is (was) absolutely a huge airbase and was a massive strategic asset to the US & Allies in the region.
This isn’t as strange as it might first appear, this was a live issue in the whole “counterinsurgency vs counterterrorism” debate on the fate of Afghanistan. The counterterrorism camp basically said sod the afghans internal politics, they were unimportant and not worth any nation building effort, and that they should just use Bagram as an operational base to hunt Al Qaeda.
They do see kind of right in retrospect.
MaximumCuddles
8d ago
and even a bit insufferable.
I am relieved.
MaximumCuddles
9d ago
I’m not sure if this was your intention but it legit made me laugh.
So here’s the departure for me; while I don’t find the idea around reforming libel laws necessarily objectionable, I don’t actually agree that this is the best strategy.
Trump tends to take the most extreme opening love as a bargaining chip, which is a common business tactic and something he outlined as part of his preferred strategy in “The Art of the Deal”.
I think legacy media alternatives like long form podcasts, Twitter/X and Substack are completely eating the legacy media’s lunch, and the worst actors are suffering the necessary consequences of tanking their reputation after so many years of blatant lies and manipulation.
I’m personally quite optimistic that the necessary change is already well on its way through pure consumer choice and the breaking of the hard wall of censorship & collusion. The preference cascade is already here, political capital is better spent elsewhere.
I don’t know enough specifics about current libel law to spell out which particular things are actionable, but I do hope that the trump organization litigates to the maximum extent possible through current law without trying to force a square peg through a round hole.
As for the uniquely dishonest treatment of Trump by the media, that’s eight plus years in the making with too many example to name.
The Russia Hoax is the obvious big one, but I distinctly remember the first small example I saw myself that made my radar go off just a tad; it was his during his first trip to Japan, the whole fish food row with Shinzo Abe. This footage starts exactly a few seconds after Abe overturns his box of fish food over, but is cut where it was to make Trump maximally look like an oaf when he was just following Abe’s lead.
That stupid footage was like a whole news cycle, super early in his presidency. And it just got progressively worse after that. After the tenth incident like that I simply started to assume I was being lied to when someone said something negative about him, and I tended to be right much more often than not.
MaximumCuddles
9d ago
Unrelated to the actual science or lack thereof in this subject, I think thinking on the extreme measures that Kurzweil is taking to extend his life I find his clear lack of success as a very stark reminder that one of the most important things in life is learning to accept gracefully the inevitable and inescapable quality of death.
While I’m not keen to die and in no hurry, it can’t be mentally or physically healthy spending this much time and energy trying to extend your life. I think there’s a kind of hilarious irony in that.
Not quite as revealing as you might think; laws are made for man, not men for the law.
If a law or set of laws are not working as intended or being enforced unevenly, you change the law. The point of a law is what it does. The point of Libel / slander / defamation laws is to prevent large public actors from egregiously publicly lying on purpose in order to damage or destroy someone.
There’s nothing inconsistent in thinking that those laws exist for a reason, and seeing the Trump case as a good example of why those laws exist, noting that they clearly aren’t having the desired deterrent effect, and then saying we need to do something about that.
We’ve completely sacralized massive media companies, to their benefit. But they can be shamelessly bad actors too in the same way that companies that make chemicals, arms, cars, etc are.
I’m not necessarily agreeing that “opening up” libel laws in the right move, but there’s nothing inherently incoherent or pernicious about it.
This problem still existed under Obama it was just camouflaged by a sycophantic relationship between big media and power.
MaximumCuddles
10d ago
I don’t see any good reason the current broadcast arrangement can’t be torn up, it no longer serves the same public purpose it had back before cable news and the internet.
It’s basically just a structural subsidy to a cartel at this point.
Obama had a media environment an order of magnitude more friendly to him and his goals, there is simply no comparison between the simpering star struck media under Obama and the vast open collusion between the great majority of the media & academic landscape to take every opportunity to blatantly attack, lie and mislead about Trump.
MaximumCuddles
12d ago
I’d imagine you could file that under “still worth it.”
MaximumCuddles
12d ago
“Never interrupt your opponent while they are making a mistake.” Taken to its absolute logical conclusion, I guess. Many such cases.
MaximumCuddles
12d ago
Probably? For now? It does seem that capability is sprinting ahead as we speak.
Fair. I had planned just to stay silent and move on, but I was angry at his annoying responses. And I am legitimately annoyed at myself for spending so much time and energy on something inconsequential.
Won’t happen again. I will say formatting his response in such a way as “I demand you respond to me, if you don’t you don’t belong here.” Is way, way more obnoxious than what I wrote.
Also, I’ll also say that stating a culture eats cats is not inflammatory per se. I don’t think pointing out that some European cultures eat horse or certain East Asian cultures eat dog is inflammatory. Or that some cultures eat bugs.
I eat guinea pig and rabbit, for example. Lots of people think of them as pets and think of me as a bit monstrous for eating them.
There’s a tremendous amount of diversity in the world in regards to diet. It’s not inflammatory at all to point that out, and it’s certainly not inflammatory to point out recent arrivals from other countries being their habits with them.
Is it the combination of the two that is automatically inflammatory?
MaximumCuddles
12d ago
If you’ll notice my posting history it comes in little bursts. I basically never write very long entries. There’s a reason for it.
That’s because outside of this cute rarefied forum, I don’t have a silly little email job that allows me to get large amount of screen time and pop in here and write big theses with multiple citations. I have a real job in which I work insane hours and it that requires my full attention, and a family with young children.
So I found myself parked on the side of the road trying to find a source in an old x thread that would pass muster to make some random person believe that fresh off the boat immigrants from one of the most backwards countries on earth immediately change their entire way of life and diet the second they pop off the plane due to ‘magic culture’ and ‘magic laws’ which are basically unenforced. And that people in different countries eat different meat, including bushmeat. The absurdity of the situation sank in, and I resumed the important task I had at hand.
Even now at the ass crack of dawn as I write this on my phone, my daughter points to this as she climbs on me over and over again and exclaims “wow! That’s a lot of words!”.
Very politely, I’ll recommend you do a google search. Specifically about cat eating as a cultural practice. If you do it “raw” you’ll be greeted by a tidal wave of screeds of legacy media screaming “hoax” at the top of their lungs you. There’s also a handful of reels & tiktoks from people, some Haitian, saying this is true.
But if you know a bit about search, and can pull articles from say ten years or older, you might be surprised at what you see. The thread on X that I was looking for but unable to find even included a bbc article about which cultures ate cats, but I’m certain the Haitian portion of it was scrubbed after the controversy. They tend to do that.
Anyways, I’ve wasted enough time on this. Good luck in your search to find out that not everywhere is like the USA, I guess.
MaximumCuddles
12d ago
You know when you’re watching a movie and a line of dialogue includes the title of the movie?
Same energy as this comment.
MaximumCuddles
14d ago
Multiple, unrelated people at different times all complaining about a well documented and common cultural practice by a foreign group that suddenly emerged in one area in very great numbers?
Yeah, a normal reaction to that is to think there’s probably at least a bit of validity to the claim.
Automatically discounting that as false is evidence of liberal brainworms or motivated reasoning. You think magic dirt is enough to transform the cultural practices of literal hordes of foreign peasants in an instant upon arrival?
How on earth can you believe that? It strikes me as intensely autistic.
MaximumCuddles
14d ago
Common cultural practice over many years isn’t evidence of something?
If I told you that I saw a group of afghans in my town and one of them was wearing a burkha, you would automatically assume I’m lying for clout?
That’s very interesting.
Stray cats and dogs are common bushmeat in Haiti. Haitians in Miami in the 80s were nicknamed “the cat eaters” for that very reason. Furthermore, the sacrifice of small animals for voodoo rituals, endemic to Haiti and very common, is well documented.
Why on earth is it strange to think that recent immigrants of little to no education would continue their cultural practices of their homeland until they are properly acculturated?
As far as I’m concerned the burden of proof is on the people saying it’s not happening.
MaximumCuddles
14d ago
Latinos are also generally more socially conservative and much more entrepreneurial.
So none of this should have been a surprise. They react poorly to attempted longhousing because of patriarchal culture.
MaximumCuddles
15d ago
Wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve known a lot of drunks, she’d fit right in.
Still all those other factors would make her alcohol tolerance naturally lower. Even if she was a raging alcoholic she could definitely get a good buzz on a full strength bottle of red wine.
MaximumCuddles
15d ago
I drink wine extremely frequently, you can absolutely get tipsy on one bottle of wine.
Especially if you are; female, older, petite, lacking in muscle mass, under enormous stress, Asian, and not white. All things which have been shown to lower your base alcohol tolerance. Especially if you drink infrequently and in binges.
I can’t get drunk on a single bottle of wine, but I’m literally the opposite of Kamala Harris; young(ish), fit, muscular, relaxed, male, big, (mostly) European, no Asian admixture, and I drink modestly literally every day.
MaximumCuddles
15d ago
Jews are disproportionately rich and PMC. Trump support is déclassé. A lot of people severely underestimated how stigmatized being a Trump supporter still is after eight years.
I honestly think that’s most of it. Call it my tribal theory of the cocktail party.
There are some notable defectors and early adopters who paid a high social cost for supporting Trump. Each subsequent person is less likely to pay a cost.
MaximumCuddles
15d ago
When was the last time they were in such a precarious position, losing every branch of government and being at an absolute nadir of lack of trust in their favored institutions? The 19th century?
I’m not being smart, I’m genuinely asking. From my understanding of history they just got absolutely walloped on a scale not seen since before the 20th century. Am I wrong?
Same. I wouldn’t be surprised if a large percentage of men of a certain age first encountered it there.
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