TequilaMockingbird
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User ID: 3097
TequilaMockingbird
17d ago
My understanding is that contra the popular narratives on /r/noncredibledefense the Ukrainians' major bottleneck is more equipment than it is manpower, and that they are specifically trying to preserve thier youth demographic to maximize future potential.
TequilaMockingbird
18d ago
It's worth mentioning that Bernie Sanders is dead wrong about a lot of things.
Is he really though?
Hasn't a signifigant portion of the culture war over the last 8 - 12 years been about how the "official numbers" no longer reflect reality? The powers that be assure us that inflation is below 5% and then when asked why a chicken dinner, or a tank of gas, costs twice what it did a year ago they respond with some nonsense about how "vibes" are clouding people's judgment of the "true" economy.
I think you are misrepresenting where people get their beliefs from.
Possibly but I am unconvinced. In all my years I have encountered a total of three unironic flat-earthers in the wild (that I am aware of) one of them was litterally a rando at the bar who would rant at length to anyone willing to listen (or unwilling for that matter) about Elon Musk and who certainly fell into the stereotype of "irreligious male of low socio-economic status". The other two were both upper middle class women one was some sort of health-care/social worker and the other worked in finance. My impression is that those two women are the sort of people who are actually watching all those flat-earther, q-anon, zietgiest, ancient aliens, videos and believing them.
I have a hunch that there's something going on with the female propensity towards secret knowledge, whisper networks, and true crime documentaries but i don't know.
This characterization assumes there is a group called 'Democrats' who 'do things'
There actually is "a group called Democrats" who do "do things" and they happen to be rather famous/infamous within the context of US politics for thier top-down organization and for exercising strict control over thier subsidiaries.
TequilaMockingbird
18d ago
By pressing the make the economy good button along with the make inflation not have happened button?
Not the op, but...
More like by pressing the "rocket engines go burrrrrrr" button and not pressing certain other buttons that a Harris administration would've almost certainly pressed.
TequilaMockingbird
18d ago
by the amount of “what did you people expect when you decided to call everyone Nazis” scolding, I’m very intrigued by one of the counter-narratives
The ironic thing about the Democrats accusing everybody they dislike of being "Nazis", "Fascists", and "White-Supremacists", is that the real honest-to-god Nazis and White Supremacists tend to vote Democrat.
I suppose a true fascist recognizes thier own.
TequilaMockingbird
18d ago
Ill admit that I was one of those people and am finding myself pleasantly surprised to be (at first pass at least) eating crow.
Too soon to tell re: my alternate lower confidence prediction/conspiracy theory.
What sort of "accountability" did you have in mind?
TequilaMockingbird
18d ago
It would be the funniest timeline.
TequilaMockingbird
18d ago
In my own experience, legal immigrants are often quite disdainful of illegals "jumping the line,"
In mine as well, in fact i would say that to call it "disdain" is to undersell it.
TequilaMockingbird
18d ago
I have germ of a post thats been percolating since this exchange here about how it's dumb to indulge in doomerism that I ought to flesh out along these lines.
But to answer your question about "what happened", the answer is that the fight isnt over until everyone agrees on who won. Reaganism was supposed to have been done-in by the end of the Cold War and the rise of "Progress" and Globalization but, to all appearances, its back baby.
TequilaMockingbird
18d ago
Few, would be my guess. The neocons have been de-facto members of the Democratic Party coalition since David French wrote his famous (infamous?) the Conservative Case for Obama op-ed back in 2012. And the reaction from the GOP base has largely been "good riddance" and "don't let the door hit you on the way out"
Republicans are happy because it doesn't create a new holiday and also it reduces the stature given to a black guy,
I think you misspelled "Democrats".
Democrats claim to be "pro black" but the moment any individual black man starts to have some success they immediately shift to tearing him down, eg MLK and Clarence Thomas. There is nothing a democrat hates more than a nigger who escaped the plantation.
TequilaMockingbird
19d ago
You're thinking like a democrat by assuming that republicans would want illegal aliens to vote. That they dont is pretty much the crux of the issue.
TequilaMockingbird
19d ago
That's the wild part. Our entire election system is apparently governed by the honor system
Yes, welcome to the party, this has been a GOP talking point since the Clinton administration.
TequilaMockingbird
19d ago
Can you define "mainstream credibility" in this context?
I'd intended to make an election post earlier this weekend but ended up spending time with friends/family and "touching grass" instead, but I also want to get something out before tomorrow. Glenn Reynolds (of Instapundit fame) has labeled 2024 "Schrodinger's Election" and I feel it. I look around my purple but leaning blue suburb and Trump Flags, bumper stickers, and yard-signs seem to outnumber Harris ones by a solid two to one margin and are often seen coexisting with more liberal municipal/state candidates and "vote yes/no on [thing]". My intuition is that Trump has this in the bag. But I also know that if history is any guide, my intuition is probably wrong as I thought the same back in 2020. I wouldn't call myself "an election denier" but I do have a sneaking suspicion that an honest accounting in 2020 would've resulted in either a Trump victory or a much tighter race for similar reasons to those that @Tractatus lays out in this post here. As such I find myself approaching the current election with a certain amount of trepidation, I think that support for Trump is much thicker on the ground than it is for Harris, but I also think that whatever "fortification" efforts that are in place now will be far more mature and firmly established than they were 4 years ago.
I am predicting a resounding "win" for Harris, but that win is in quotation marks for a reason.
My alternate lower confidence prediction/conspiracy theory is that the reason the media has suddenly started to give questions about voter-rolls airtime is that it's "battle space preparation" so that in the event of a Trump win all the commentators who've spent the last 4 years prattling on about "the Jan 6th Insurrection" and how there was no proof of election fraud, can pivot to "questioning election results is the mark of a true patriot" without suffering fatal amounts of cognitive whiplash.
In my experience unironic flat-earthers fall into two broad catagories, schitzophrenic nuerologically-diverse lumpenprole, and upper-middle class contrarians who latched onto it as a part of a part wider suite of conspiracy theories and new age woo. Astrology, Homeopathy, Crystal Healing, Second Shooter on the Grassy Knoll, Q-Anon, etc...
Meanwhile I've found that most of the "fiercely independent libertarians who believe in seeing things for themselves" who aren't also well to the left of Charles Murray's bell curve tend to work it out on thier own as they also tend to be travelers and consequentially end up having ties to the crunchier sides of the hiking, sailing, and general aviation communities.
In any case i think my point stands, as concepts go a flat vs spherical Earth has far more wide-reaching, and immediately observiable consequences than evolution vs young earth creationism, and that's well before we begin to consider specific claims about aryans' and indo-europeans' role in the bronze age collapse.
As an example: most people believe in a theory of human evolution that's much dumber, consequential and more immediately and obviously wrong than flat earth.
I get that its fashionable in this space to dunk on the "blank slatists" but this is a pretty dumb take that seriously oversells the rigor or "hardness" of fields like psychology and anthropology while underselling the significance of things like basic navigation, land surveys, and wireless communications to modern society, or the disciplines of physics and astronomy historically.
The spherical nature of the Earth along with its approximate circumference has been widely known in the western world since classical antiquity, and to the degree that flat-eartherism exists today outside of a "birds aren't real"-esque joke it seems most prevalent amongst PMC types who, interacting with the world chiefly through screens, seem to have difficulty thinking in three dimensions.
Contra the popular meme, 15th century sceptics weren't expecting Columbus to literally "sail off the edge of the earth" they were expecting him to run out of food and potable water before he even got a third of the way as the approximate latitude and longitude of the spice islands he was trying to reach had already been well established. Furthermore the sceptics were entirely correct in that it was essentially blind luck that Columbus stumbled upon the hear-to undiscovered island chain of the Bahamas just as his supplies were running low.
I think it says a lot about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the PMC in general and the Democratic party in particular that armed insurrection, and the burning of minority nieghborhoods can be dismissed as "inconsequential" or "the cost of doing buisiness" while possession of an unlicensed rodent is somehow a bridge to far.
TequilaMockingbird
20d ago
To make an absurd comparison, its like burning down the Branch Davidian compound rather than arresting David Koresh while he's out on a jog.
I think the true absurditity is that this is not a particularly absurd comparison, this is just Democrats and the deep-state playing to type.
Speaking of playing to type, the director of enforcement for the Department of Environmental Conservation who ordered the hit is apparently named Karen Przyklek.
TequilaMockingbird
22d ago
It has a "right wing wing valence" because the Democrats are openly the party of faceless bueurocrats drastically interviening in peoples lives for dubious health reasons and/or to save the planet.
By extension anyone who has a problem with a faceless buerocrats "euthanizing" house pets for dubious health reasons is assumed to be a closet Republican.
TequilaMockingbird
22d ago
TequilaMockingbird
22d ago
Yes but at the same time if she did work at a McDonalds in Montreal shifting the local to the states seems like a natural "bending of the truth" given how her campaign has been trying hard to downplay her family's ties to Trudeau and the wider Canadian left.
I wouldn't. In my admittedly annecdotal experience parents of young kids and young couples looking to have kids weren't just "turned off" by all the secret transition, and men in women's sports stuff coupled with all the "queering of _____" talk, they were in full "kill it with fire" mode and they seem to have broken overwhelmingly for Trump.
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