Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
16d ago
I'm joking obviously, but the way that people on Reddit are talking about this murder is frankly concerning.
There's a reason far-left governments turn into skull factories within 5 minutes of coming to power. It may be concerning but it shouldn't be surprising. Once Reddit (or similarly far-left dominated communities) manage to coordinate deciding that some individual or group be put to death, they're not going to be quiet or subtle about it.
Tophattingson
16d ago
A) Cremieux argues that much of the gap in life expectancy between America and Europe is due to obesity. But America is good at one thing at least – spending money on health care. Combine high spending with effective weight loss drugs, and the U.S. is on track to significantly narrow its life expectancy gap with Europe.
Self-driving cars will close the gap further.
The comparison between America and Western Europe is usually done because they are seen as peer developed countries. But after 15 years of no meaningful economic growth in much of Western Europe. the U.S is on track to no longer have European countries as it's peer, but rather sit entirely above them in it's own category. The U.S. can buy its way to higher life expectancy not because it's good at spending money on healthcare, but because it has the money to spend on healthcare.
Tophattingson
17d ago
Ehlers-Danlos syndrome seems like a very strange choice for the latest brand of anxiety-like illness. Unlike all the others, it's an existing disease with diagnostic criteria, symptoms that are pretty exclusive to it, and a suspected genetic cause. Are people now claiming to have Ehlers-Danlos despite lacking connective tissue symptoms?
Tophattingson
17d ago
I prefer to describe these as anxiety-like illnesses, since they're all co-morbid with each other and with anxiety, and share demographics. Yes, that includes hysteria.
Tophattingson
26d ago
The White Genocide conspiracy theory can also be steelmanned as people using an overly-expansive definition of genocide for motivated reasons, akin to the one originally proposed by Lemkin:
Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.
And then the flaw of the steelman is that if we were to revert to Lemkin's original wording we'd have to reclassify a lot of stuff that isn't treated as genocide as such, and then would inevitably need a new word to replace genocide to describe the narrower meaning.
Tophattingson
26d ago
I think what broke a lot of people (myself included) was the disastrous and anti-scientific response to Covid, which every step of the way was blessed by the so-called experts.
To add to this, if "conspiracy theory" was used in a neutral way instead of only being used against right-wing beliefs, then supporters of the mainstream response to COVID are conspiracy theorists. After all, they believe, without evidence, that masks stop covid, in the same way that a tinfoil hat might block mind control. They believe, without evidence, that imprisoning the entire population in their own homes, for just two weeks, with a "real" lockdown, will make covid go away. And they believe that governments that don't do this, such as Florida under DeSantis, are conspiring to commit mass murder while covering up the true number of deaths. Similarly, they treat all opposition to policies they support as motivated by criminal conspiracy (by some combination of Trumpists, Russians, the religious, or far-right) rather than by differing opinions or priorities.
Pretty much every crank view on the right has an equivalent on the left, just couched in academic language and with institutional support. There's plenty on the left that believe in a "Trans Genocide" or that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, to state the obvious equivalents to white genocide conspiracy theories. And as for broader conspiratorial worldviews like QAnon, critical theory is just that: a conspiracy theory. Just one that's popular enough in academia that it dodges the definition.
Tophattingson
27d ago
Muslims are definitely not fargroup in the UK yet this pattern still holds.
Tophattingson
28d ago
And for what it's worth from an Atheist, I've only ever seen this attitude get applied towards Christians, not towards the religious in general. Opposing e.g. Islamophobia has the baked-in assumption that Muslims can't simply choose to not be Muslim to avoid discrimination. But when it comes to discriminating against 'fundies' there's no such consideration.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
North Korea has performed six nuclear tests since 2006. Based on this alone there's about a 17% chance that North Korea detonates a nuclear weapon in any 6 month period. But with only 6 weeks of the year left, the chance should now be 4%. That prediction market was broken from the start because nobody seemed to account for the most likely nuclear use case.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
Vernon Dursley is the director of a mid-sized company. Second paragraph of the first book.
Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills.
The books and films might have lowered his mannerisms below what you'd expect for such a position, but that's because it's meant to be a negative stereotype. And part of that negative stereotype is that he gets to be the director of a distinctly unfashionable business, rather than working in a high-paid but fashionable (for the 90s) profession.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
Harry Potter's adoptive parents are an overtly negative stereotype of the Tory-supporting upper middle class, as would have been understood when the series began in the 90s.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
Bluesky seems to be trying to optimize for a more amiable, relaxed experience, and hopefully the lack of chuds brigading people’s posts to call them Jewish faggots will contribute to that goal.
Given the Venn diagram between the most progressive and most pro-Hamas is almost a circle, you'll get this on Bluesky, except it will be people calling you Zionist cishets.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
Your odds of a natural-causes death double every 8 years, starting at age 30 at the latest (though possibly much earlier; non-natural causes obscure things for 20-somethings and teens).
The odds of death that most closely follow that curve is, of all things, covid. Doesn't have a peak for infant mortality, and doesn't have another peak for violent deaths in late teens and early 20s.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
Bodily autonomy is a fake argument because in practice nothing else follows from it aside from abortion.
Hey, there are some of us who are actually consistent on this - pro-abortion, pro drug decriminalization, and anti-vaccination. You just won't find us in the Democratic party.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
Covid caused states to take actions that would increase turnout through a bunch of second-order effects. From increased polarization, from how increased government power made who that government was more important, from how being at home with nothing to do all day but consume political content, from how it made it easier to vote.
Now, you could argue that (mostly) democratic governors broke the law with the covid response in ways that, via second order effects, happened to also benefit their election chances in 2020. And that is a misuse of political power for personal gain. But this isn't the usual definition of fraud. It's not even the media censorship non-fraud argument for election rigging.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
I agree with the link between horror and pornography, in broad strokes. I just think you've made a terrible argument for that link. A better one would reference authors and artists that make the link, generally on the basis that unlike other forms of art you're just trying to maximize one lizardbrain emotional response. And then point to H. R. Giger's art as an example of the crossover, which is widely appreciate as having artistic value despite being overtly sexual and often in a more extreme way than zootopia gangbangs.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
Like instead of a McDonald’s double cheeseburger
Which is ~450 calories. You could eat a McDonald's double cheeseburger as your 3 meals a day and lose weight. And since I remember what I used to make it, the last burger I prepared at home (albeit not with your ingredient list suggestion, the beef was pre-packaged refrigerated patty, not from mince, though nutritionally it would be near-identical) was instead 480 calories.
Short of directly eating blocks of lard, there is no specific food item that can be responsible for the 600lb outcomes that OP describes. It instead requires an inordinate quantity of food. That it's more likely to be McDonalds instead of homemade burgers has more to do with the general dysfunction that you require to hit 600lb, rather than because McDonalds is better than the equivalent amount of homemade burgers at making you 600lb.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
I think the supreme court getting in the way of policies that democrats want to implement would serve as an example. Either way, I didn't say these had to be justified grievances.
You need more than that to have a functioning democracy. In order to avoid incentivising defection from democracy, you also need to have fair post-game reward distribution. It's not enough for the vote itself to be fair. The actual exercise of power after the vote must be fair. If one side wins elections and then gets to enact policy, while the other side wins elections but then doesn't get to change policy, then this is hardly any better than the election being rigged in the first place. But this also has to balance against not harming the losers too much. There's no reason for the one sheep to accept two wolves voting to eat it, and it would be wrong to describe their subsequent attempt at self-defence as an attack on democracy.
Both parties in the US seem to hold both these grievances with existing elections, though they both responded to it in different ways. Republicans by claiming the voting process is flawed, and Democrats by claiming foreign interference made it flawed.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
There are some leftist progressives: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0i4ZETgfNuM
I don't know how sincere this is. I guess it being made in 1990 makes it possibly sincere. But I can't help but point to it's spiritual follow-up.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
The obvious difference between food and other addictions is that you cannot go cold turkey on all food. At least not without dying. The common recommendation for recovered addicts to never engage with the thing they got addicted to again, even in moderation, cannot apply to food.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
If your problem with Reform is that it lacks a coherent internal structure and meaningless membership, then sure, that's an actual criticism. One that I'd also levy at the Labour and Conservative party, which have internal democratic processes in theory but not in practice. But you should just say that, instead of complaining that reform is a company.
Reform lacks much internal structure as it was a very small party, re-founded during a time when the organisation of something akin to Conservative Associations or Constituency Labour Parties would have been mostly illegal. and only recently growing to a point where such an internal structure would be necessary. So already it's committed to changing structure to a company limited by guarantee.
Given that one man's primary source of income is his appearances on foreign media
GB News is not foreign media.
he certainly didn't find himself leading a substantial movement of still-salty-about-lockdown libertarians in the UK given Reform's anemic poll performance at the time.
Political organisation against lockdowns was de facto illegal during lockdowns. This is about as surprising as finding out there were no pro-Capitalist parties successfully participating in Soviet Elections in the 1930s.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
is a private limited company
Most small political parties are organised as companies because there's no other coherent legal structure for managing the finances of a political party. What else would they be? State owned? Not in a democracy. Charities? By law, they can't be tied to a political party. This talking point about Reform is intended to misinform someone with (admittedly typical) ignorance about what companies are. It's not a serious argument.
One contributor to the UK's economic dysfunction is probably that we have a slim majority of the population with living standards that have been entirely insulated from the wider state of the economy, by pensions, welfare, or otherwise. Causes all kinds of political malincentives to place almost all the burden on a dwindling share of gainfully employed childbearing-age adults, while giving them nothing in return. The prescription exemptions are just a tiny fraction of the whole system.
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