TequilaMockingbird
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User ID: 3097
TequilaMockingbird
20d ago
Reagan was far more like Trump than he was Romney or David French.
In fact MAGA is quite literally about rejecting the last 30-40 years of rule by "experts" to return to the right-wing populism of Reagan. It may not be morning in America yet, but it can be if we try.
I have felt for a long time that fatalism more often than not a coping mechanism for a percieved or imagined lack of agency.
The attitude being that if nothing matters than I can't be held responsibile for anything can I?
TequilaMockingbird
20d ago
I'd much rather people wrote thier own inexpert understanding than open the can of worms that is giving people the opportunity to pull an "I didn't say that, Claude did" but it looks like i am in the minority.
TequilaMockingbird
20d ago
FWIW I've had a very similar thought/possible post about TV sitting on the back burner. While there are the rare few gems a lot of the recent streaming fair has left me wondering where all the adults went. Not just on screen but in the production department so many choices that left me feeling like "this should've been an easy win, how did you fumble it this badly?"
TequilaMockingbird
20d ago
Lots of people are going to have physical access to these machines who shouldn't have access to things like system settings.
Is it really so difficult for you to understand why that presents a problem? Or are you also in the habit of arguing that people should leave thier doors unlocked because a determined thief will just pick the lock or break a window to get in anyway?
TequilaMockingbird
20d ago
Not under his real name, but yes. He was the infamous "outlier" who kept skewing the income/net worth results of yearly SSC User Survey.
TequilaMockingbird
20d ago
I don't understand how anyone reasonably intelligent or familiar with IT could be so blase about this.
Lots of people from random officials and polling site volunteers, to the voting public themselves are going to have unsupervised physical access to these machines. Meanwhile the number of people who have legitimate reasons to access the bios, change settings, etc... can't be more than a few dozen. This is, to all apperances, quite bad.
TequilaMockingbird
20d ago
Often they are not straight up lying but saying something that is technically true but designed in a way to mislead their audience into believing something that is false. I think if you consciously do this it is not any different from lying.
I think that your intuition here is actually one of the biggest ethnic/cultural divideds between the median Trump voter and most of the posters here.
The list of people who could be suspected of tampering with a ballot machine goes from documented individuals with a need-to-know to... everybody. And there would be lots of people with legitimate reason to handle a ballot machine who would not have legitimate reason to know those passwords.
Yes, and in the event one of those "documented individuals" was planning something nefarious, "accidentally" releasing that data to the public would be a clever way to muddy the waters for any future audit or investigation. "I swear, it could've been anyone your honor."
Oops, I've strayed into cynical conspiracy-minded Republican territory again.
TequilaMockingbird
20d ago
Mods, can we get a moratorium on using chatbots to pad out one's word-count?
TequilaMockingbird
20d ago
she’s also abrasive and loud.
And Harris isn't?
I dont know what bar you're setting for "major movers and shakers" but David Friedman Peter Thiel and Glenn Reynolds, were all regular commentors on SSC prior to the community moving to reddit.
Either Thiel or Reynolds already establishes a maximum of 2 degrees of Kevin Bacon from Scott Alexander to JD Vance (and amusingly enough) Trump.
Deiseach is definitely an older, Irish woman.
...and Hlynka definitely didn't go to Yale.
I was just trying to think of long-standing users who would both annoy the most mottizens, and plausibly write Hillbilly Elegy ;-)
Jason and Kylie Kelce are the superior Kelce couple, change my view ;-)
The funniest answer would be someone like Deisach or Hlynka from the old site.
Or maybe @FiveHourMarathon here, come to think of it, has anyone heard from @JTarrou recently?
TequilaMockingbird
21d ago
My understanding was that the German Green party's core policy objective was to see Germany divest itself of locally produced coal and nuclear power in favor of what was sold as "renewables" on paper but was natural gas supplied by Russia in actual practice.
I also recall reading something back in 2019 (when there was all that talk about Germany wasnt pulling its weight in NATO was in news) about how the German left in general and the Greens in particular was rife with ex-Soviet/DDR apparatchiks and thier kids.
The invasion of Ukraine may have been an inflection point that flipped a bunch of incentives, but it seems to me that the Green Party being a bunch of watermelons (outwardly Green but Reds/Communists under the skin) and the Russians quietly looking to sow political dissent amongs thier nieghbors isn't a crazy conspiracy theory as much as it is a solid prior.
TequilaMockingbird
23d ago
Palestinians saying that they want their land back isn't actually germane to the topic at hand...
How can it not be germane when it's one of the core points of contention?
The Gaza strip is the product of an armistice between Isreal and Egypt, the West Bank a product of an armistice between Isreal and Jordan, if might makes right why doesn't it make right here? If it doesn't make right, what are you so bent out of shape about?
Some Palestinians too which was kind of my point.
If we are going to condemn the Jews it seems only fair to condemn the Muslims too. You wouldn't want to be seen as taking sides in a religious dispute would you?
TequilaMockingbird
23d ago
My thoughts exactly.
But as soon as you compress the ballots into a count--as soon as you move away from the pottery in an urn--you're leaving an opening.
Yes, which is why maintaining a strict chain of responsibility/custody is so crucial. So long as said chain is maintained, any discrepancies should be readily identifiable along with those at least proximally responsible.
As i said, This is not rocket science or brain surgery. This is a social technology the western world has had for millenia. If you want to argue that the US is too poor, too stupid, and too fractured, to impliment the sort of basic checks one might expect to see in France or the Sudan, that's fine, but make that argument explicitly so that we may offer a proper rebuttal.
TequilaMockingbird
23d ago
I believe the standard is that combatants must "clearly identify themselves as such"
TequilaMockingbird
23d ago
There's no shortage of evidence to support the idea that many high-ranking Israelis believe that their territory ultimately covers the areas laid out in their religious scriptures.
Are you refering to calls from "the river to the sea" (the Jordan and the Mediterranean) respectively?
TequilaMockingbird
23d ago
"Uncharitable" i will grant, but it is far from "stupid", remember if something is stupid but it works it Isn’t stupid.
TequilaMockingbird
23d ago
Maybe im just so math-brained that i've sufferered some sort of intiger overflow condition but im genuinely coming in from the opposite direction.
I find the typical "Grey Tribe" attitude that unless your specific vote gets to be the deciding vote/change the course of the election it was a waste of time quite dumb. Granted, in any election involving millions of people the likelyhood of the result coming down to a single vote and that specific vote being yours is functionally infitesimal but to take that as an argument against elections and voting in general strikes me as a sign of extreme narcissism and innumeracy.
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