VinoVeritas
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User ID: 2910
VinoVeritas
6mo ago
That presumes the people who received medical care in lieu of my father would not have been better served by staying home. Which the official corona statistics seem to suggest because the average age of a corona fatality was above the average life expectancy and the survival rate of those who sought treatment was lower than the rate of those who didn't
('Ackshualllyyyy that's what we'd expect since sicker people would be more likely to seek treatment.' Fair enough, but it holds true if you normalize for presenting symptoms)
Also but importantly, it's weird that I have to say it again, but it's not like there was a binary choice between my dad and someone else. This was not triage after a battle. I had multiple zooms with the surgeon while he was on his couch in his sweatpants.
Lastly and not for nothing. I would have gladly paid whatever had I that kind of money but it was 7 figure stuff to bring the surgeon here. Had travel been 'permitted' for him then he'd also still be alive
VinoVeritas
6mo ago
Neither were the romans? Yes they achieved some gains with triarii but they thrived primarily after the Marian reforms and the move to manipular formation and legionary standardization with gladius, scutum, etc.
Were you aping on Obama being so catastrophically wrong in '12 about horses and bayonets? Could you explain why you chose to share that thought?
VinoVeritas
6mo ago
Britain could have just not fought the world wars and not rationed, next
Why am I in the house with three other people? Are they my immediate family? If yes, then obviously I will let them shower and skip my entirely because I love them.
If no, then I will pay for my shower and everyone else will pay for theirs, as befitting our agreement. Next.
I know where I was at during COVID (WTF is that? who came up with that? It's like Kyiv) and it was trying to get my dad an "elective" surgery that they cancelled because all the doctors wanted to televisit
Then he died.
Think about him please before the next time you start lovin' on 'the system' -
VinoVeritas
6mo ago
This was all fake unless you put up some evidence otherwise
VinoVeritas
6mo ago
I still believe in God, gauche as that may be in our circles for the last few hundred years.
VinoVeritas
6mo ago
Here's my half-joking conspiracy: all condoms are the same size because I've tried every size and they all fit the same until "after"
VinoVeritas
6mo ago
Then you get the stupid suckers like me, who were genuinely biologically compelled to 'nut' in a perfect mate but thought abortion was like plan B and we could just make another baby later
VinoVeritas
6mo ago
I made a comment early about how this all seems cargo cultish to me. Thank you for doing the work to collect the data on how many angels fit on the head of a pin in Minnesota in any given year, but I'm personally not interested in quibbling over the million-baby-skulls-a-year sized Baal-pit in which I as an American voter have been playing for the last couple generations.
This may sound to some readers like a woman saying "I'm not interested in quibbling over the government telling me what to do with my body" - I am also writing for you. Please consider that the dead babies are real. Those 10's of millions of lives snuffed out are real. Their right to life came from God. The "right" to an abortion was made up by communists.
VinoVeritas
6mo ago
@The_Nybbler also
Misses the point so hard as to nearly suggest you're doing so on purpose. The assertion is so perfectly subverted from the truth that it's almost enjoyable to encounter such chutzpah.
There was not a single missionary to a single country that brought along thousands of his closest friends and demanded the existing institutions provide for them.
They by and large sailed from shockingly modern countries to people who had fundamentally not changed since the pre-historic era because they were still in it before the arrival of the Europeans!
Christian missionaries have, if anything, a reputation for trying to save souls by otherwise withholding necessary aid to the natives
VinoVeritas
6mo ago
Funny that some people here claim that being Jewish clearly provides a nepotistic admissions advantage over being gentile white and others claim that Jews are deliberately hiding their identity for admissions.
'Funny that some people claim x while others claim y?'
There must be something about this argument that is highly effective because you see it virtually everywhere
'Funny that some people claim immigrants are stealing jobs while others claim they're getting taxpayer benefits'
Ad nauseum
It's all enough for me to say "voting was very obviously a mistake." Not women voting, not freedmen voting, not unpropertied men voting - the franchise itself was a mistake.
This argument should have been over after the invention of language because it's not even an argument: People can reach similar conclusions for different, even seemingly opposite reasons. And, more than one thing can be true at the same time.
As an aside because your original thing was so absurd, the only Jewish person in public life that didn't gentile-up their name was Neil Diamond - and that's because they'd already changed it in the old country!!
VinoVeritas
6mo ago
The world is always like this, it isn't worse now or something. The can will be kicked forever
This assertion is a perfect representation of the type of thinking I suggested I found cargo cultish.
The Romans had somewhere in the realm of 1,000,000 men in the field at any given time. Recruiting, training, equipping, paying, housing, feeding, dealing with waste, disciplining, etc. From Scotland to Syria. For centuries.
The next time a European power could field a million men for any amount of time was the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century
The next time the state capacity existed to successfully garrison a million men across the continent for an extended period of time was the American/Soviet involvement in WWII/Cold War in the middle of the 20th century
VinoVeritas
7mo ago
If it were real I would have heard of it.
Just my unsolicited advice, but 'if it were real I would have heard of it' doesn't seem to me like a sensible way to approach a world where the number of things that might be 'real' are limitless and the number of things you 'have heard' isn't
VinoVeritas
7mo ago
Gonna gingerly put my hand up and say I think many (most?) people who still choose to contribute to the 'national conversation' these days are in a cargo cult, pretending that because we're still going through the motions it's all business as usual. My explanation for this is because for many (most?) it would be psychologically devastating to acknowledge we might be headed toward a thousand or so years of unthinkable-yet-predictable decline like the Mediterranean civilization of the 3rd century AD.
VinoVeritas
8mo ago
Can't decide between these two jokes:
That's the reason they call it long covid
Or
I was taught to round up if it's more than 50
VinoVeritas
8mo ago
Sardonically, I think the Israeli government is answering that question for us right now
VinoVeritas
8mo ago
You just explained it to yourself my dude, a baseless assertion deserves a baseless response. Mockery is a powerful tool, and sometimes (as in this case) more appropriate than intervention from authority
VinoVeritas
8mo ago
This is an absurd assertion. There's a notice you're blocking me so I wont go on ad nauseum as you won't see it anyway but for my own sanity I'll say my piece that it's farcical to pretend to forget that the Palestinians living there TODAY are the descendants of people who were living there during the TIME OF CHRIST and that hundreds of thousands of Jews invaded their country AT GUNPOINT in the 1930's and 40's
VinoVeritas
8mo ago
As someone who plays paradox games the map gore of the modern eastern Mediterranean has always bothered me - thanks I guess, monkey's paw
VinoVeritas
8mo ago
But what about ‘white dudes for trump’
VinoVeritas
8mo ago
Leaps and bounds my man
VinoVeritas
8mo ago
Ah yeah - glad I asked since that's what I thought you meant (the awkward kiss on the cheek)
In my experience when a woman gives you that particular juke it's because she doesn't want you to mess up her make up. I'd imagine that applies 100x if you're a literal super model and 1000x if you're in front of the entire country
VinoVeritas
8mo ago
Thanks man, appreciate it
( @NewCharlesInCharge I shared some dem fundraising messages and attempted to tag you in the post to which @ToaKraka is replying)
VinoVeritas
8mo ago
I haven't been a democrat for a decade but was in deep enough in back in the day I cannot 'unsubscribe' from everything, ever. Here are a few of the ones from the last few days:
Kamala Harris just SOUNDED THE ALARM: "We need to fight." 700% MATCH your Dem donation to flip the House:
PLEASE! Kamala Harris CAN defeat Trump. Top Dems are so confident they've unlocked a 700% MATCH!
URGENT: Will you sign our card THANKING President Biden for his incredible career of public service?
I have never signed up for GOP stuff (because I don't want the same thing happening lol) but first thought is that this seems much better? More for 'normal people,' at the very least
VinoVeritas
8mo ago
Those are for our older relatives who love getting emails because they're retired and might say 'well shit, I guess I can send another 20 bucks"
Most of the time you hear politicians touting how their average contribution is 20 bucks, that's from the same handful of people donating over and over again. There's something quite tragic about it all
Donald Trump could literally shoot someone on 5th Avenue and I wouldn't vote for Kamala: OR: the Republic is dead, God save the Republic
I am not the average American voter. I went to 'college prep' - one of the best - instead of high school. And while I was there, I took more than two full years of college courses. On the "AP" tests for credit I got a perfect score in every course but one, which in the immortal words of Jordan Belfort, really pissed me off. I went to a top 20 undergrad on a merit scholarship as a straight white guy with married parents. Yadda, yadda, this post is not about my bona fides because yours are all much better
Nothing could get me to vote for Kamala or any democrat ever again. Nothing could convince me the 2020 election did not have just way too many ballots cast for both candidates. Nothing. A voice could descend from the clouds insisting that if I love Christ I must vote democrat and I'd think it was a trick of the devil.
This is deeply concerning to me as someone who got over the "what if there's an invisible space teapot" question when I took a philosophy class at Stanford one summer as a teenager because I asked my parents nicely and they were thrilled to pay for it. I just looked up to check the program was called EPGY and apparently shut down in '18.
If I can't think of anything that would change my mind, that tautologically means to me that my position must be indefensible. But I gesticulate wildly toward the national debt, the open border, the limitless unfunded mandates and all the rest and enjoy this 1% chance that something might change with Trump vs my visceral certainty that nothing will change without him.
Please forgive me if any of this seems like prideful ignorance - it's meant to be quite the opposite. This post is hoping to invite open discussion on what I consider to be the tension here. When you have the guy who took a summer school philosophy class at Stanford for fun disregarding his best instincts for want of action, what's going on with the guys who are just getting increasingly mad with no framework through which to process their lived experience?
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