TavernSurvivor
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User ID: 3281
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
I did note it. He’s just derailing things, as are you, about whether Trump supporters do or don’t believe his lies.
During ABC's presidential debate, Trump said: "In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there." But city officials have told BBC Verify there have been “no credible reports" that this has actually happened. -BBC
For Jamie McGregor, a businessman in Springfield, Ohio, speaking favorably about the Haitian immigrants he employs has come to this: death threats, a lockdown at his company and posters around town branding him a traitor for hiring immigrants. -NYT
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
That anyone has produced evidence that Haitian immigrants in Springfield are eating cats and dogs is a lie. And this gets back to the initial point. Immigration does cause tensions and problems. So a non-zero number of Trump supports are happy to swallow the lie, as opposed to the claim they view him as an honest liar.
And yet the WSJ tracked down the woman who made the complaint that triggered the embellished lie — she later found her cat in her own basement — and the at-core intellectually dishonest like Rufo then when looking for “directional” truth to prop up the lie.
And even for Rufo, it’s an African, not Haitians, plural.
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
This is why the people that like him like him and don't like the rest of the government. Honest liar. There's value in knowing exactly how you're being conned.
I think there’s ample evidence, from the consumption of cats and dogs to FEMA relief being capped at $750 per household, instead of that simply being the limit on one specific, short-term FEMA aid program, that a nonzero number of these people do not know they’re being lied to.
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
Spend some time thinking seriously about what you, personally, truly need to be happy. You’re one of eight billion people in the world. Everything you have is better and worse than what others have. But how does it relate to what you actually need to find happiness? I am not saying, necessarily, don’t be ambitious, or don’t be materialistic. But at the same time, no matter what you acquire or achieve, there will probably always be someone else who has more or better. It’s a near-endless ladder to climb. Establish what rungs you actually need to reach.
I like our house. There are unquestionably nicer houses than ours, several of which are in our very neighborhood, within walking distance that I see every day. Is our house an actual impediment to my happiness in and of itself? Absolutely not. I love our fireplace and the view from our second story picture window. Don’t let endless comparison be the thief of joy.
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
I wasn’t asking rhetorically, given your other suggestions for changing the legal process.
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
Expanding on your thought, Pelosi’s approach is also superior because the victims are far less sympathetic. The press and general public have no particular love for whatever bank or hedge fund sold those calls. Whereas the ANC’s victims are the general public.
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
ENCOURAGE as many audits and court cases (with discovery power, that are not dismissed on “standing”) as they want.
Waiving the requirement for legal standing will inevitably be abused by a bunch of crazy, partisan, pro se plaintiffs to tie up every election official and manufacturer of voting equipment indefinitely, let alone those coming from less-reputable lawyers. This is not a remotely-reasonable suggestion. If this is something truly desired by the right, then I am massively lowering my opinion of the right.
Drop all the lawsuits against Trump.
Did you mean to say prosecutions? Or are private citizens to be forbidden by the government from filing suit against Donald Trump?
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
The Jets’ owner has, per the NYT, unilaterally fired Robert Saleh after a 2-3 start amid high expectations. It was reported the owner discussed the firing with GM Joe Douglass, beforehand. And per CBS, Saleh was considering firing offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett prior to getting canned himself.
This is delicious. The offense stinks and it appears they’re still all-in on an aged Rodgers, and perhaps sacked Saleh to keep Rodgers happy, as they let the quarterback pick Hackett to be the team’s offensive coordinator during their courtship of him, as Rodgers and Hackett are friends from their time in Green Bay.
A moody ayahuasca-enthusiast is the most-powerful person in the Jets organization, at least through 2025 if they want to avoid a cap hit. And there’s no proper chain of command.
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
Her team’s polling models also assured her the “Blue Wall” states weren’t in play, and she ended up losing Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, without much personal campaigning in or money spent on those states. Trump got 258 electoral votes absent those three states, Hillary got 227, and that trio was worth 46.
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
I’ll disagree with you on the point that the Arab Spring itself wasn’t about democracy. But as it was decentralized, it could only create a vacuum, and that then let groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, that had organization and structure, fill that vacuum.
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
I don’t think these prediction markets are big enough to hedge against catastrophic geopolitical outcomes, whatever one’s views and hopes. $7 million moved the market noticeably toward a Trump victory. I’m not sure how a bunch of Otzma Yehudit hardliners could offset the cost of having to leave their settlements without driving down the expected return.
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
I mentioned Kyle Clark in another reply but he said something along these lines when asked why his debates/interviews were as substantive as they are. He said that whomever is running for mayor of Denver or one of Colorado’s seats in the house still needs Denver’s NBC affiliate to reach voters, and that may not hold up with national office.
Because they thought they could hide Bidens senility to the end of the election. They are just arrogant or it’s just too hard to coordinate of a problem, replacing an aging president, that Kamala just sort of fell into this position. She didn’t earn it, and if she wins it’ll be pure luck on her part: “the accidental president”
I don’t think this captures the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party. It isn’t a monolith.
It’s hard to go against an incumbent and the Bidens as a family, are very clannish (small-c, not ‘k’, please). When you say, “…they thought they could hide Biden’s senility…”, that is certainly true for the Bidens, as they shrank the inner circle around and access to Joe as criticism mounted.
Plus, a particular source of stubbornness from Biden was 2016. He was dealing with the loss of his son, true, but in order to get the Clinton machine behind him for his own election, Obama had already accepted it would be Hillary’s turn that year, after being his Secretary of State. And it bothered Biden when Obama informed him the support would be behind Hillary, it bothered Biden even more when Hillary lost to Trump as he felt he would have done better, and then Biden took 2020 as vindication of all his prior grievances about 2016. So, when people were trying to nudge him away from running again, in Biden’s mind, they were just more skeptics that he’d already proven wrong.
The next guard of Democratic presidential hopefuls — Whitmer, Shapiro, etc. — didn’t have the clout to push Biden aside on their own, and evidently none wanted to risk dimming their own star by losing an open primary going up against Biden and the money he had already raised from Democratic donors worried about a second Trump term.
The in for those outside Biden’s camp was the early debate and a bad performance, so power brokers from other camps within the party could claim through clenched teeth, of course they still supported Biden, but it was the public and donors had lost faith, and their hands were forced. This is when Pelosi, the Obamas and large donors struck.
As mentioned elsewhere on this topic, Harris was then effective in back room dealings and was able to scuttle a contested convention on the grounds that internal division might harm the chances of defeating Trump, and also, that if Biden withdrew, she was the candidate that would retain access to the money that had been raised for the Biden-Harris ticket.
I suspect if Whitmer and Shapiro could travel back in time, knowing what they now know, they would take their shot in an open primary. Now, there is at least a possibility Harris serves two terms, and who knows how hot their careers will be in eight years, plus Walz’s increased name recognition puts him in the mix.
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
Kyle Clark who works for Denver’s NBC broadcast affiliate station has rightly gotten good press for his moderation of debates. But given he is only moderating debates between mayoral candidates and people running for Colorado’s seats in congress, I am not sure if he rises to the threshold of popular. Would love to see the national network put him in font of Trump and Harris.
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
Then you had the Arab Spring, which succeeded only in ruining things and not increasing US power either.
I concur on a lot of the aforementioned U.S. foreign policy being a failure but think this veers into a Chomyskite type dismissal of anyone’s agency other than the U.S. government’s. The Arab Spring in Egypt and Syria began organically, as corrupt authoritarian states did not yet have a handle on the virality of social media. The U.S. government certainly picked sides, but I think it is unfair to treat this as the type of own-goal attempting the regime change and democratization on of Iraq was.
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
Do we even know if that was an academic? Or was it a terrorist or FBI agent that had undergone then cutting-edge plastic surgery in 1997.
I will set aside how some or most viewed the Secret Service. But a decline in prestige? How long have they been paying attention? In any case, a brief history of recent Secret Service failures:
2009: Two party crashers — a couple — with thankfully no ill intent, sneak into Obama’s inauguration without credentials and shake his hand. Just put on some evening wear and a smile and you too can reach out and touch the president. No need for vetting.
2011: A bullet hole from a rifle round is discovered by a housekeeper at the White House. It turned out to have been fired four days prior, not that the Secret Service had previously noticed.
2012: Agents in Colombia are caught drinking and consorting with prostitutes just hours before being on duty.
2014: A knife-wielding looney jumps the White House fence. Is he confronted on the lawn? Hah, no. He reaches the East Room before he is apprehended.
2015: Two off-duty Secret Service agents, both drunk, one driving, collide with a security barrier at the White House.
2017: Another looney jumps the White House fence. He wanders the grounds for 16 minutes. No rush, fellas.
2019: A Chinese national with a flash drive full of malware passes through a Secret Service checkpoint. Thankfully the elite operators at Mar-a-Lago’s front desk confronted him.
2022: Two Secret Service agents are sent home from a trip to South Korea after getting in a drunken fight with a cab driver.
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
I am trusting Serhii Plokhy‘s book on Chernobyl regarding the USSR’s preference for cheaper reactors being the deciding factor. I’m not a nuclear engineer, either, so happy to consider additional aspects.
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
Also, Chernobyl, due to cost, used channel reactors that the West was already avoiding due to safety issues inherent to their design. The most-famous nuclear disaster was entirely avoidable when it occurred. Though I suppose political and economic pressures and human error pose some level of risk anywhere.
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
The Vikings have yet to trail this season and are 5-0 largely on the strength of their first-half performances. In the opening two quarters they’ve outscored opponents 69-24 and haven’t conceded more than 7 points to any team.
They’ve only outscored two of five opponents in the second halves of games, and are only +1 (53-52) in the closing two quarters on the young season.
I suspect there is something going on, outside of a team being conservative while protecting a lead, with O’Connell and Flores outscripting opposing coaches over each week of preparation and dominating opponents out of the gate, but then being a bit slow to make counter-adjustments after their opponents make changes at halftime.
Flores mentioned to the NFL Network crew in their production-prep interview with him that he is deliberately holding back certain aspects of play calling until high-leverage drives in the fourth quarter. Perhaps a valid defensive strategy, but the offense could hasten how soon the opposing team is facing high-leverage drives by scoring more than 10 points in the second half (only accomplished once this season, against Houston). This has led to back-to-back games in which Green Bay and the Jets kept the game alive until their last offensive possession, respectively.
Hopefully, their bye week upon them, O’Connell can address the need to counter halftime adjustments by opposing defenses.
You present your argument in a bunch of binaries. If there are additional reasons to see live opera, then suspense inherit to live performances doesn’t matter, apparently.
And if the average NFL fan does know the general difference between power and zone run blocking schemes, knows what an RPO and a zero blitz are, and can differentiate between cover two and single high, still, the league’s ongoing tactical evolution is of no interest to them unless they can explain why mesh and four verts are the building blocks of an air raid? They need to be able to diagram jump calls in a cover four or an ever evolving league is of no interest to them?
I suspect many people, absent a solid grounding in Schenkerian analysis, can still find the aesthetic contrast between Bach and Beethoven of interest. Just as the average NFL fan has a general appreciation for the contrast between a Harbaugh/Roman offense and a Kevin O’Connell offense.
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
This is despite the improvements in film technology…
But continued live performance has led to continual innovation. The NFL is live action chess. There are coaching family trees tied to different systems/concepts. Systems have shelf lives as there is perpetual innovation and counter innovation.
TavernSurvivor
1mo ago
Why do you think people watch current NFL games, and would not view older NFL games if they were less expensive? Is it based on the content of the product, or is it based on the manufactured hype around the product? If it is based on the manufactured hype around the product, to what extent do you think this hype is due to the astroturfed (pun intended) millions or hundreds of millions in making NFL appear socially relevant on social media and TV? If the consumers understood that the hype is fictitious, do you think they would still watch as much?
Why have many people, myself included, attended more than one performance of Die Zauberflöte when the Met Opera and Medici.TV have prior performances available for streaming?
The leap to an F6 in Der Hölle Rache is challenging even for professional sopranos. Elite performance witnessed live is thrilling, as the possibility of failure adds to the stakes.
I realize your conception of whether or not someone is lying is that one can throw out factually incorrect statements on national television, and that’s honest, provided post hoc, someone else can track down an isolated event that doesn’t actually fit the former so long as it fits a vibe.
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