NewCharlesInCharge
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User ID: 89
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
I’m a bit more credulous of these claims given how recently animal torture was just a widespread form of entertainment.
Cats especially seemed to get marked for terrible deaths just for a laugh. Cat burnings, cat drownings. Politicians standing for election in England used to get pummeled with dead cats when the crowd turned against them.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
I think you realize that this line of argument applies to you as well should you suffer a stroke that renders you a net drain on society for the rest of your life. You might fall back on “my family would be sad if I were left to die,” but there are millions of Christians saddened by the availability of abortion and especially infants born and left to die.
Utility-based moral systems tend to have these problems.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
I didn’t even perceive it as tongue in cheek. I used to read the Bible and be incredulous that anyone would participate in child sacrifice. Seems to be absurd in so many directions: so cruel, paints the sacrificers in the worst possible light, is evolutionarily unfit.
I forgot when I read someone make the parallel with abortion, but it was a great insight. People sacrifice their children because they perceive them as burdensome and just want to have fun. Moloch is fun! Sexy parties and no annoying babies!
This maps onto nearly every abortion. We just have the technology to more or less reliably kill them ahead of being born.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
Trump’s talking points sound like they’re aimed at <85 IQ people who don’t know crap about the world
Make it <105 IQ and we’re just talking about the electorate.
A very small number of people actually know what goes on in international affairs. If we’re lucky we might get a book a decade after the thing happens, written by someone who has an interest in making themselves look good. Or a declassified documents dump, but those seem out of fashion lately.
I’m curious exactly what Kamala’s role was in speaking to Zelenskyy prior to the invasion. My guess is that Trump was right, they weren’t interested in negotiating to avoid a war, Kamala was there to tell Zelenskyy to not give an inch, America had his back, and if Russia invades he’ll secure his legacy as the Ukrainian president that defeated Russia.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
There’s certainly selection bias here. The miscreants are far less likely to bother trying to get a factory job than the Hard Workers.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
Imagine the chaos if Trump says he can smell alcohol on Kamala’s breath.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
The nature of the business environment in China makes it very likely you'll be mixing it up with government officials on a regular basis.
But yeah if those translations are faithful it's pretty clear she was working for the interests of her PRC contacts.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
Hitler is in heaven
Cooper didn't say this, he made this joke:
If you're having a bad day, just remember that the Trump shooter is currently wandering around Hell looking for Hitler while the two guys Kyle Rittenhouse dropped figure out how to break the news to him.
This is pretty ambiguous!
One interpretation is that Hitler can't be found because he's not in Hell, he's in heaven.
Another is that the shooter believes himself to be in heaven along with Hitler, but is mistaken, they're both in Hell.
Another is that the shooter is looking for "Hitler" who is actually Trump, who he mistakenly believes he sent to Hell.
Nazi Germany was infinitely preferable in virtually every way to modern France
The actual quote here is:
This may be putting it too crudely for some, but the picture on the left was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right.
Where the picture on the left is Hitler and his officers with the Eiffel Tower in the background, and the one on the right is the drag Last Supper from this year's Olympic opening ceremonies. You can see it here: https://x.com/jessesingal/status/1830983770826047711
This one is harder to defend, but I think there are two possible angles.
One, he's literally talking about the pictures. The aesthetics here do, in my opinion, favor the Nazi picture. The drag last supper is gross, it features an obese man pretending to be a woman in the role of Jesus, the colors are garish, everyone is unattractive. If you were a time traveler who didn't know what the Nazis had done, you'd have no reason to think the Nazi photo to be repellant. A person in our time objects to the Nazi photo because of what the Nazis did, not how they were dressed.
Or, two, he's comparing the totalitarian endpoints of each ideology. Communism verus fascism. I wouldn't want to live in either Hitler's Germany or Stalin's USSR, but I don't think saying one is worse than the other is all that offensive.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
Part of this discourse is equating Churchill criticism with anti-semitism.
But I think it's uncontroversial to say that what happened to the Jews in WWII was one of the worst possible outcomes for them.
Smart diplomacy could have saved almost all of them. Britain could have rescinded the 1939 White Paper that capped Jewish immigration to the Palestinian Mandate at 75,000 per year. The other countries that would later become the Allies could have also accepted more Jewish immigration.
Other European countries like France, Hungary, and Poland were considering their own Jewish deportation schemes in the late 30's. Poland even considered sending them to Madagascar, before the Nazis had their own Madagascar Plan.
A statesman who cared about the fate of the Jewish people, and could see the writing on the wall, could have lead on the issue and at least made it trivial for Jews to emigrate out as their governments became increasingly hostile to their presence. But as far as I can tell, everyone did the opposite. The best we got was the Haavara Agreement, negotiated between the Anglo-Palestine Bank and the Nazi government.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
Googling "Paige Averianna Patton" shows that she was associated with the shooting since at least the very next day, publicly talking about being messaged by Hale who said "I'm planning to die today."
I guess we didn't know of Hale's obsession, but the association was always there.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
In China the state can punish you for failing to take adequate care of your elderly parents.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
For me personally I imbibed the “pregnancy will ruin your life” message as a teen and wasn’t receptive to any counter programming for decades.
If your parents aren’t planting the seeds to make you desire a family, then the messaging you pick up elsewhere will dominate, and it’s almost all of the “pregnancy is a disaster” variety.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
All the big social media companies almost certainly employ spies that are exfiltrating data.
If I were running Chinese intelligence I'd think it smart to Br'er Rabbit the Americans about banning Tik Tok. If they actually do it then maybe they'll rest on their laurels a bit thinking they've actually accomplished something. It also provides a blow to their supposed principled stance on free speech, and the debate itself is a good distraction from my lesser known methods of collecting data.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
Machiavelli would tell you that you'll need to eliminate all the male children as well or else they'll grow up and seek vengeance.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
I mean, nobody would expect a chancellor Hoecke to try to restore the borders of the Reich in 1914, but then few people suspected that Putin would be willing to start a war of annexation in Europe to restore Russia to the Tsarist glory days.
I don’t think Putin would agree with this characterization.
He’s spoken of the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine and used this as partial justification: these borders were made up by the Soviets and didn’t matter at the time since Ukraine wasn’t independent in any real sense.
As far as I know he’s never said that he’s seeking to restore the borders of the Empire or of the USSR. Most charitably, people seem to infer this based on his starting a war and speaking of history. Less charitably it’s a deliberate distortion to make the bad man appear even more bad.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
The mics were muted last time and the pundit consensus is that this was in Trump’s favor.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
That all your traffic is to a single endpoint is a pretty big clue that you’re routing it through a VPN. For popular services the IPs are also necessarily public since the clients need that information in order to establish the connection. So, identify all the single endpoint clients, then compare against a list of known VPN IPs, and you’ve caught a lot of violaters.
Though if you’re using something like AWS to provide your VPN service I suppose it would be trivial to add a feature that allocates a new IP just for you, just for the length of your session. Heck, you could have it switched it out every few minutes to confuse the government’s tracking effort. Or establish a dozen VPN tunnels and round robin packets through them.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
Collier’s review came up in my YouTube feed a few days ago, and I’d never heard of her before. I ended up watching the whole four hours that same evening. If you’re like me, a Star Trek fan disillusioned by all the recent series, it’s a good watch.
This one has some things you won’t have seen before from channels like RLM. For example, she drops quotes from Patrick Stewart’s autobiography that give an insight into what went on in the creative process. Also some details on his personal life that make me deplore him even more than I already did.
While I’m done with Star Trek I still find Star Trek criticism fun and compelling. It’s cathartic and a verification that I’m not crazy.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
I held off from watching season three for about a year, watched the first episode, then didn’t bother with the next. They had Beverly Crusher do a murder and then setup a mystery box, and I lost all interest.
Though after watching Collier’s review I learned the mystery boxes all get resolved immediately in the next episode.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
He’s Polish and openly believes in ghosts. He’ll be back in the pews and reciting the creed soon, if he’s not already.
RLM’s media criticism is pretty traditional as it is. For a movie to work, it needs a certain narrative structure, should have setups and payoffs, etc. One of their compliments they give is “it’s a movie” where so much of what they review lacks the necessary elements to even be called a movie.
Underneath it all they’re really talking about truth, beauty, and goodness.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
That's worse than China's VPN policy. There's no carrier requirement to block VPN apps, and the fine is far lower, apparently starting at 100 yuan, roughly $15. Also I've never heard of anyone actually getting penalized, all the enforcement appears to be focused on mucking about with the packets.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
Oh I'm guessing Upper Queen Anne and Madison Park, fancy neighborhoods in Seattle proper, probably still do sport such signs. I haven't been to those neighborhoods in years, though.
The suburbs are more sane the city. We actually fund our police departments and encourage them to do their job. But the criminals they catch get handed off to a county-wide prosecutor who has a bias against prosecuting.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
In my upscale Seattle suburb neighborhood the In This House and Black Lives Matter signs are gone. Before it was about every other block where you’d see one.
No one is sporting any presidential election signs.
There’s one guy that occasionally flies a Let’s Go Brandon flag, but he’s done that since I moved here three years ago.
There are a bunch of signs for the Republican running for a state legislative position, I’ve only seen signs for his incumbent opponent on public rights of way, not homes. But the primary had all the Republicans together earning like 40%.
There are a handful of governor’s race signs on either side, and that race appears actually competitive.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
On the fake electors, I initially found this compelling, but not anymore. As far as I can tell the electors met, pledged their votes to Trump, and recorded this on paper on the appointed date. This was in anticipation that election results in their states could change, and if so there could be a problem if there were no elector votes recorded by the date specified in the Constitution.
There wasn’t a scheme to substitute these electors in place of the ones representing the state’s certified winner. On Jan 6th Trump’s ask of Pence was that he not certify the election, not that he count votes from the electors for Trump.
An alternate slate of electors also met and recorded their votes in Hawaii in 1968. Nixon was certified the winner, Kennedy’s electors met and recorded their votes anyway, and then later a recount went in Kennedy’s favor. Nixon, in his capacity as Vice President, counted the Kennedy electors from Hawaii.
You’ll damage your car if you hit a goose.
Also “don’t want to kill themself” doesn’t imply “doesn’t want anyone to kill them.”
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