Either he knowingly put someone "weak on security" in charge of counterterrorism efforts, or he's a lying bullshitter who just makes shit up about you if you ever upset him.
Isn't this what Trump and Trump supporters actually want you to think though – that Trump is a lying bullshitter who will dunk on you if you upset him, regardless of the truth/falsity/merits of the case? That way he can build a coalition that maintains loyalty and enables him to use his bully pulpit to ram things through in a way others could not, because they are afraid to oppose him. That is how his whole operation works. If he didn't lie and bullshit, it would be possible for his opponents to use reason and evidence to combat his insults, which would defang them significantly. They have to be regarded as insult theatre, not grounded in reality, to act as effective in/out-group markers.
I would have thought that MAGA supporters would at least tacitly accept this characterisation, though I confess they sometimes surprise me.
Rosencrantz2
17hr ago
This is a bit confusing. If sex is labour, isn't rape more akin to forcing someone to labour against their will, which is likely to involve committing a serious crime, not just an instance of robbery?
Rosencrantz2
4d ago
It's a list written to sound specific but it's incredibly open ended. "Permanently denying Iran nuclear weapons" sounds like it must entail either regime change or a permabombing campaign that goes on forever. If they do a lot of damage to Iran's military structures but entrench its regime and cement its determination to get nuclear weapons, what's permanent about that?
Rosencrantz2
5d ago
Does focusing one's campaigning on one's own government, instead of others, really count as an isolated demand for rigour?
Rosencrantz2
11d ago
I agree that the books are surely making fun of progressives, though Murderbot also finds the crew members to be cute, and wants to protect their foolish existences. The overall worldview of the books reads to me as sympathetic towards progressives, while also recognising that the capitalists, while unpleasant, better understand the brute realities of the world.
This paradox is what makes the story interesting.
Rosencrantz2
12d ago
Unfortunately not, just my own sense that dynamic rising entrepreneurs are bringing more innovation and open mindedness and that old ones are more focused on preservation, and that often the main impulses they are left with once their excitement and love have died down are grudges, which for most of us are thankless, but which they are able to indulge on a continuing basis. You may say I am going with a folk morality view of the wealthy here but I think there is at least a core of truth about the phases of billionaire founders' lives that is inevitable, in a Greek theatre sort of way, given the positions they find themselves in. I also think it is healthier to eat the rich in the knowledge they are similar to us, than to do it because they are fundamentally different (even if they are different along certain dimensions).
Rosencrantz2
13d ago
These people genuinely are *better" than you and me. Smarter, more driven, more ambitious, and more willing to take risks. All men are categorically not made equal.
Don't they start 'better' (in this specific sense) and then become 'worse' – more callous, more capricious, less able to understand others – as a direct result of their money?
Rosencrantz2
14d ago
I don't believe in rubber ducking. It has to be a real duck.
Rosencrantz2
14d ago
I have found that when you read aloud to an audience, you notice even more. You can even do live edits on the fly, knowing with certainty what is going to land with them and what is not, even though you were sure it was all necessary and correct when you were reading it to yourself five minutes earlier. It's a very weird phenomenon. The brain (mine anyway) needs high stakes situations to do its best work.
As you say tonnes of these things for both men seem pretty neutral, so not sure if this exercise establishes bias very clearly. (Who's to say that 'deportation of migrants' is a criticism – surely Trump wouldn't regard it as one. To take just one example.)
I also think a lot of the differences are a function of Wikipedia being by westerners for westerners, in the main. No, the summary doesn't mention Khomeini's trade policies whereas it does mention Trump's, but it would be bizarre not to make the latter prominent and I don't think that Khomeini's trade policies were among the most remarkable things about his life (?).
I guess you could have a more standardised biographical format where every leader gets a section on trade policy, etc, so as not to allow biased differences of emphasis, which might be a good ideal but a tad unworkable. The standardised side bars and overall headline structure of political biography pages are a good gesture towards this – perhaps they could go a little further but ultimately it's an encyclopaedia meant to be read, not a database.
Rosencrantz2
16d ago
I don't disagree but 'vastly kinder' led me to expect a much starker contrast.
From your description I was expecting far worse. Both entries are freely critical in terms of the facts selected for high level inclusion and neither are complimentary.
E.g. Khomeini's entry ends: "Khamenei's critics viewed him as a repressive despot responsible for repression, mass murders and other acts of injustice."
Trump's entry ends: "Trump's actions have been described by researchers as authoritarian and contributing to democratic backsliding. After his first term, scholars and historians ranked him as one of the worst presidents in American history."
Rosencrantz2
17d ago
On the contrary, deciding which side is 'the worse side' is basically a side issue when forming an opinion about a military situation.
Rosencrantz2
18d ago
Well it's a mixture. Women's tennis often has more varied and exciting rallies because it's less serve dominated, for example, and see 07mk's view on ultimate frisbee.
Rosencrantz2
19d ago
I'd go further and say that women's sports are often better than men's sports because they can be more fun to watch. No pretending required: I sincerely don't care if the men could beat the women any more than I care that gorillas are stronger than weightlifters. When it comes to sports I'm exclusively interested in whether they are entertaining.
Rosencrantz2
20d ago
My ex once burst into tears in the middle of a restaurant because, after several days of sending me Instagram reels about female emotional labour (and me managing to discuss them as dispassionate sport), I sent her one reel back about how male weaponised incompetence (“babe, where do we keep the paper towels”) gets wives incandescent with rage but female weaponised incompetence (“what’s this light on the car dashboard mean”) is treated with amused paternalism by husbands. “Why would you defend being a useless husband who doesn’t know where the paper towels are?!?!” she wailed, over the wagyu beef I paid for.
I don't love the sound of your ex but this is surely a lot about areas where partners are proud to have knowledge. A lot of men are proud to know a bit about cars, compared to women being proud to know about cleaning kitchens.
Weaponised incompetence by women can be as legitimately annoying as by men, in household finances for example, but I definitely don't find it hard to understand why 'Where are the paper towels?' wrt one's own household would annoy someone, anyone, everyone outside of a household setup so traditional as to be anachronistic.
Rosencrantz2
20d ago
Do you have any evidence to think that UMC women were especially bothered by this? I didn't notice. For sure his low class taste is another way to mock Bezos in a world where a lot of people want to mock him (for reasons good and bad). I'm not sure I saw UMC women taking advantage of this opportunity more than the UMC in general though.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
The general argument form you've sketched, apart from the word 'environmental', is the core of a vast range of positions in politics. I agree we should be sceptical of all such arguments but there is simply no avoiding them, or it will be difficult for anyone to raise concerns about things unless they are personally unaffected.
My own view on the overpopulation question is that a flatlining population is necessarily good at some level of population/technology/culture, otherwise our species will be courting disaster. Whether we have got close to this point yet is an empirical matter.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
One question I find myself asking is: should we try to keep expanding the population up to the point where we see mass deaths due to resource shortages?
Or stop earlier?
There seems to be a similarity between AI and woke thinking in the workplace.
Right now in many businesses the expectations have flipped so that rather than being ashamed of using AI, one has to either use AI, pretend that you use it to your superiors, or keep quiet about the subject and hope it goes away. If you say out loud you don't use it, you are a drag, a buzzkill and a dinosaur (maybe a young dinosaur as I don't think intensity of AI use or AI boosterism corresponds with age).
Many people are even under pressure to use AI in cases where no one even pretends it is adding anything, so long as it gives them bragging rights to tell their bosses 'we used AI for this'.
It is/was pretty similar with woke thinking. There was a pressure to believe, pretend or keep quiet.
Both AI and things labelled woke can often get good results though.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
He changed his name so he could launch a 'political' career without people realising he had a conviction for assaulting a police officer. It worked for years.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
It isn't bad to be annoyed by stupid shit. If someone who is your ideological foe says stupid shit for malign reasons you probably get irritated too, whether they're trolling or not, especially if they are very powerful. Be honest with yourself.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
If true it makes a difference but not that much of one. It's a divisive strategy that is contemptuous of democracy and makes him an enemy of democracy.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
I don't agree with this myself, but I suppose another steelman position would say that prior to transgenderism, terms like "women" and "men", "fathers" and "mothers" etc were not highly resolved, just like most natural language terms. We had not had cause to decide whether they refer to outward signs of feminity/masculinity, internal states such as genetics and gamete size, or psychological ones such as the sense one is a man. All these things were usually clustered together. Once edge cases appear, though, it's in our gift to further specify how we'll use the words in future.
Under this reading, sure, it is a language change or precisification to stipulate that we have always really been talking about e.g. psychological identity, but it would equally be one to say we have always been talking about gamete type. Examination of the previous usage of terms may not give a 100% clear answer.
(I guess this is basically Kripke/Putnam/Wittgenstein applied to gender, so no doubt there is a philosopher somewhere who has publicly adopted this position.)
Quite obviously Trump is a total asshole though so he is hardly going to respond in the way that you or I would prefer. It's not unreasonable to criticise him on these grounds, but to criticise him for lying, bullying, being an asshole, believing in conspiracy theory, not being long-term, etc etc is simply going to be water off a duck's back to his supporters because those traits are his entire thing.`
The only way to get through is to show that he is weak.
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