People were protesting and demanding ceasefires almost immediately after October 7. I assume this was because they expected destruction.
At least on the left some personalities like Cenk Uygur - whose geopolitical acumen I don't value particularly highly - were explicitly condemning Hamas because they thought Israel would just absolutely wreck Gaza in response. (This bit faded as Oct. 7 became more distant and now it's mostly Israel criticism)
A lot of these people overestimated the damage (they assumed much heavier starvation much earlier on) they didn't downplay it.
Maybe the most moralistic version. But even the most detached and amoral babysitter has reason to keep their most deranged wards away from the knives.
In MMA News: Jon Jones finally retired, now that his attempts to hold on to the belt without fighting the interim champ Aspinall failed. Apparently he asked for a ridiculous payday, got it (which is a miracle in and of itself) and then promptly changed his mind. In the perfect capper for anyone who knows anything about Jon Jones, he had another hit and run right before announcing retirement. In terms of objectively successful prospects who nevertheless blew it by being incapable of staying out of trouble he's up there.
Good news: the division can finally move and Aspinall can actually have a career as champ. Bad news: the UFC is now functionally boxing with its own Joshua/Wilder HW mess despite not having any rival promotions and apparently Jon Jones is trapped in a time loop.
Hope they book Aspinall's next fight ASAP.
The US claims to have an interest in non-proliferation and international order. If Iran gets one, Saudi Arabia gets one. Israel already has one.
So now, instead of one independent-minded nuclear power, you have three in a region of the world a huge amount of oil and trade passes through. Lots of chances for drama. (Also, harder for the US to threaten a nuclear nation)
Maybe nothing happens. But it'd just be better to not deal with this.
Yeah, the lesson from this whole thing is not so much "have nukes at all costs" as "if you're gonna fight a war uncoordinated vassal swarm is a bad tactic because the AI will get defeated in detail". The second lesson for those who object is "swinging on someone a few times to save face is consenting to a war, prepare accordingly".
Iran simply miscalculated the strength and wisdom of its proxies. If anything, this is an argument for a durable conventional deterrent. North Korea probably wouldn't find itself in this situation even without nukes.
Yeah, one wonders how much of the Democrat's lack of dominance in new media is just cause the new media outlets that'd parrot the party talking points are just...the old media. So you look at a scary chart where the right is routing Democrats but it doesn't account for the people who just still trust the telly.
Left-wing new media has to spec to capture dissatisfaction with the Democratic status quo which is why there's no unanimity. Right wing media can at least be united by being against the left wing culturally.
I'm wondering, I suppose, whether there's a way we can employ shame in a truly good way as a society?
Yes. No different from prisons: early, consistent enforcement to establish a deterrent against escalating degeneracy/crime past the point of no return.
Tanista
1mo ago
It's when the "debate" went far beyond semantics and social kindness that trans people became seen as more than just troubled individuals who deserve sympathy.
One additional factor: it's when transness began to be seen as contagious. I don't know if that makes the eventually-anti-trans position look better or worse but there it is.
Tanista
1mo ago
I was trying to help B against C, but accidentally helped A against B instead" (with A=cis women, B=trans women, C=conservatives) is an easy mistake to make, even if your distinction between A and B is solely based on who is the target of C's enmity?
But they don't just help against "conservatives". The movement against maximal trans rights in Britain didn't run through conservatives but apostates who were themselves lesbians and former feminists in good standing.
I'm not OP, I do think in this situation things likely just dissolve. But if transwomen were making some sort of demand that made them distinct from women (the male version would be being forced to tolerate Sam Smith's ridiculous name shenanigans), without a clear indication of who wins on the stack, you'd at least think sometimes the bulk of the movement would sometimes just side with the women who don't want to deal with it. Especially since they couldn't appeal to the alleged suicide epidemic.
(Are you in fact trying to make a serious argument there, or are you just attached to the snappy sound of this line of polemic for your side?)
Yes.
Tanista
1mo ago
If transwomen and women were identical you'd imagine that progressives would at least be accidentally on the side of women a few times.
We did it the opposite way. You just didn't fight women. It was made clear that you were a bitch for even attempting it (let alone attempting it and losing). Do it enough and some men would step in. The implicit message was clear.
Then again, we hadn't ceded our entire teaching apparatus (if it even counted as one) to feminists and bureaucrats. There may be advantages to backwardness
Tanista
1mo ago
Newsom is the last person I expect to put himself in legal jeopardy because he got carried away defending left-wing sacred values.
How do you teach them to actually understand the difference?
The same way it was managed before the revolution: you tell people the truth that men and women differ , and then you impose social costs on the males who can't behave appropriately . No focus on sympathetically explaining this, no "uplifting as Simone Biles demands even as she calls for transmen to be exiled to their own league. That implies ambivalence and people can sniff it out.
Start with unbelieving denial - of course you're not a woman, don't be ridiculous. Then mockery, contempt, maybe informal punishment from their fellow men when they step out of line by doing things like demanding to enter female washrooms (when administrations turn a blind eye men can rectify even the most stubborn)
I'm not convinced that most people are legitimately as clueless as they claim, I think many are just entitled and coddled (hand-wringing about how to get them to see this is,imo, part of the same coddling instinct). Jessica Yaniv knows what he's doing, he's outright malicious imo. Artemis at the very least knows that he makes women feel uncomfortable. He just knows he can get away with it.
But the lawyers are in charge of things now and you live in an age of "zero tolerance" for bullying. These sorts of men are harder to convince because they know they have the option of filing a lawsuit or complaining to some administrator or finding some advocacy group. That's most of it. It's not a matter of rational debate or education if one side can win by tattling to the teacher. It's just about power.
This is perhaps the most charitable possible reading.
I don't see what it has over the theory that two narcissistic Machiavellians who both believe they run shit clashed and the one with the guns won.
I don't believe that Musk is 100% truthful and transparent, he's uninhibited (but not so much that he doesn't know what he's doing. As someone said below, he manages to ride the line in terms of how he signals dissident right stuff which implies he knows how controversial it could be).
Even if we write off his optimistic estimates about his various products, there's still things like him calling the cave diver a pedo without much the evidence. That fits more with him just being an asshole. Assholes are always telling it like it is, in my experience.
Things he could not possibly believe
I'm not sure about this. Sam Harris' account of his bet with Elon indicated that he's way higher on his own supply than I thought.
He included a link to a page on the CDC website, indicating that Covid was not even among the top 100 causes of death in the United States. This was a patently silly point to make in the first days of a pandemic. ...Elon and I didn’t converge on a common view of epidemiology over the course of those two hours, but we hit upon a fun compromise: A wager. Elon bet me $1 million dollars (to be given to charity) against a bottle of fancy tequila ($1000) that we wouldn’t see as many as 35,000 cases of Covid in the United States (cases, not deaths).
And it also showed how that happens:
5.A few weeks later, when the CDC website finally reported 35,000 deaths from Covid in the U.S. and 600,000 cases, I sent Elon the following text:
Is (35,000 deaths + 600,000 cases) > 35,000 cases?
6.This text appears to have ended our friendship. Elon never responded, and it was not long before he began maligning me on Twitter for a variety of imaginary offenses. For my part, I eventually started complaining about the startling erosion of his integrity on my podcast, without providing any detail about what had transpired between us.
Thing is, this seems to have happened in private (at first). So it wasn't purely a matter of grandstanding for his proles.
Whatever his problems, Harris will at least tell you what he thinks. You start behaving like this with Twitter "friends" and you end up surrounded by Ian Miles Cheong types sucking your nuts and then all of the epistemic brakes are gone.
Tanista
1mo ago
Elon isn't an idiot.
He does however have a history of aiming high and then working it out if he doesn't meet his deadlines.
He gets somewhat of a pass from people (going by Tesla's share price) because it's assumed he'll eventually get to whatever he shot for but this obviously doesn't work in a time-limited, government position like DOGE.
Who are they even pillaging it for? Dems are more PMC now so they are hardly all low income
Which explains Biden's abortive attempt at college debt forgiveness.
Tanista
1mo ago
His schtick mostly seems to be begging the Democrats not to be crazy (and failing) for 1.5 years, and then spending the other 0.5 years during peak election season (midterm and presidential) sheep herding all the audience he grown being "contrarian" into voting Blue No Matter Who anyways because "The Republicans are still worse."
You missed Step 0, where he's in denial about how crazy Democrats are. See the "menstruating men" discussion with Dennis Prager.
You can't have a left-wing Joe Rogan because the next time he strays from the line on COVID or anything else, they'll get what Rogan got. Friedland has already had one brush with cancel culture for utterly inane reasons. He got past it because he was too small to be the priority target. Whoever sits in that spot will go down for something.
This whole discussion is a bunch of evangelicals sitting around trying to figure out why they can't make movies that appeal to outsiders while refusing to mention the mile-long faith statement and guidelines they need everyone working on the film to sign on to and the essential points of doctrine that must be squeezed in. There haven't been many good movies about Mohammed for a reason.
You can have a left-wing person who's at Joe's level. You can't have a left-wing Joe Rogan because Joe Rogan isn't a partisan warrior. That's how he got so big!
Even desiring a left-wing Rogan is telling on themselves. Not everyone sees their media consumption as a way to bring about the Kingdom. It's just more of the same: people need to be educated -> people resist and flee our spaces -> well, we should just colonize that outlet too so they have no escape. Doesn't work as well with new media.
Tanista
1mo ago
I reject this premise. What we can do is work with them, educate them on how to live a better life, and love them.
As with HBD the question is what happens if you can't do that (at least at scale) and it's easier to do other things?
In this case "destigmatize" whatever their condition is, which seems to have somehow flowed directly into "publicize" and even "encourage".
You can see why. It's simply much more convenient, and less mean, if society has the problem and it can be made to disappear in a puff by encouraging the "marginalized".
If you take punitive/mean options off the table it's an excruciating problem to find some way of containing bad memes without containing carriers. And, frankly, it cedes power to a certain sort of person I'm not sure it's wise to trust.
The suicidewatch subreddit has always struck me as weird, in that it expects incredibly specific behaviors from posters that are in line with the way suicide hotline call center workers are trained, but from anonymous redditors.
I honestly don't think it's weird at all. Except maybe in a sort of Tumblr-ish "weirdos online intuit where the culture will go" way.
A lot of the stuff around microaggressions, trigger warnings and pronouns essentially insist on turning first any employee in proximity and then the average person into a caregiver for those who are or claim to be fragile.
A sad story. But I wonder if the object lesson is not so much about intolerance of dissent as it is about the characteristic Christian calling of humility: humility before morality, before duty, before other people, and ultimately before God.
Atheists of a certain sort simply do not see humility in religion but the opposite so this point never lands with them. But it should raise an interesting question: Christians are tyrannical, know-it-all busybodies, how bad do the consequences of a lack of humility have to be that even their book warns against it?
I get the sense that Democrats really, really, really wish they could just run against 2006 era George W Bush again, or Mitt Romney.
I mean, people just explicitly say this. Even with a sense of humor
They frame it as Trump being particularly awful but W was called a war criminal who killed hundreds of thousands for years, hard to say that 2016 - especially early - Trump was worse by any utilitarian calculus. It isn't just that Trump is loathsome, it's that it doesn't seem to stick. People giggle along way too much.
My roommates got a mining rig in college and, in hindsight, it's great for my FOMO because it made it clear I obviously would have done what they did and sold BTC off long before the peaks.
Lots of parents deputize the one kid they think is reliable. The wisdom can be debated but it doesn't really contradict the playground cop thesis. The US also bribes countries like Egypt on the other end which fits as well.
As for letting them squabble... this'd work if a)everyone didn't already agree that the use of nukes is a taboo to be maintained and b) there was no chance of it spreading to the exact sort of groups that got Iran into this mess and c) one of these nations didn't continually insist it was in a religious war with the rest. That gives people reason to deny you a nuke.
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