anon_
1mo ago
Biden himself presided over that. Should he have voted not to certify the true count of electors in 2016 because of some retarded “not my president” wing?
anon_
1mo ago
And I'm trying to implore you that every time someone spergs out on (D), it's undermining the case for (A-C) by association and scaring the hoes normies. No one is ever going to accept "my opponent tricked the populace into voting for him, therefore I can disregard the will of the people manifest through the ballot".
And if at all this does somehow get accepted, it's 10x more likely to be deployed by the left and their TDS anyway. They've certainly parroted this 1000 times since 2016 about fascism and the end of democracy, maybe those brain worms have come home to roost.
anon_
1mo ago
That is fair. He's certainly smarter than the other 3 by a whole league, which is why I found this error to be particularly galling.
It's more akin to Lebron missing a wide-open layup by tripping himself over his own feet.
anon_
1mo ago
Not just the package, an actual set of personnel that can pass it without getting stuck or outmaneuvered.
anon_
1mo ago
There is another reason:
- To be able to deploy into government extremely-competent people whose market-clearing rate of compensation is far in excess of the pathetic sums we pay the civil service.
This works by ensuring that the people you want to be available to serve in government have a job waiting for them at think tanks or lobbying firms when they get out -- arranging the proverbial revolving door such that their total expected compensation over one full revolution is not too far below what they could earn
This is really not a joke -- if you are advocating in favor of and you want to advance it with moderately-competent people, you are are competing against a market clearing price for that competence. You can ignore that and get the kind of competence the Civil Service is gonna pay for and you're gonna get the amount of actual movement that entails.
And for the folks in the (2) of the above, this is a reasonable way to spend money. Want to get folks reporting to the Director of the FTC whose FMV compensation is more than $150K (lol, this is half a baby lawyer's salary at BigLaw or anyone doing any kind of strategy or execution at an F500 firm) -- pony up. Money well spent, a couple of cracked operators int he right spot can do more than armies of mediocrities.
anon_
1mo ago
make them feel more superficial, submissive, meme-like and less like the Wonderful, strong independent #GirlBosses that they of course are.
Nah. This kind of thinking about a globally-consistent view of how one is oriented towards the world is a prototypically male thing.
I know plenty of girlboss (and even feminist) types that embraced submissiveness (sometimes extremely), leaning into whichever role they wanted to pay in a given interaction. The ability to switch between those modes without feeling like either contradicts or diminishes the other is probably a female power that's worth more analysis here.
anon_
1mo ago
Anatomy of squandering an argument: JD Vance talks to the NYT and somehow manages to take the very valid point about media censorship and piss is out the window
But you're repeating a slogan rather than engaging with what I'm saying, which is that when our own technology firms engage in industrial scale censorship, by the way, backed up by the federal government in a way that independent studies suggest affect the votes, I'm worried about Americans who feel like there were problems in 2020. I'm not worried about this slogan that people throw. Well, every court case went this way. I'm talking about something very discreet, a problem of censorship in this country that I do think affected things in 2020. And more importantly, that led to Kamala Harris's governance, which has screwed this country up in a big way.
Senator, would you have certified the election in 2020, yes or no?
I've said that I would have voted against certification because of the concern that I just raised. I think that when you have technology companies.
The answer is no.
When you have technology companies censoring Americans at a mass scale in a way that, again, independent studies have suggested affect the vote, I think that it's right to protest against that, to criticize that that. And that's a totally reasonable thing.
I'm really trying to emphasize that I'm saying this as someone that agrees with the premise, but this is the most retarded and ahistorical possible conclusion. Can you imagine Ben Franklin telling politicians they don't have to accept the result of a vote because the Pennsylvania Gazette wrote absurd lies about the candidates? Even if it was true, it's completely bonkers.
Worse than being ridiculous, it's a blunder to take the cause about media censorship and then piss it away on election certification. Sure in the abstract sense drawing untenable conclusions from an argument does not weaken the premises, but in actual popular consciousness those things are all woven together.
I had really hoped Vance was smarter than this. If he was baited into it he shouldn't have bitten and if it was intentional then he should have known better.
anon_
1mo ago
Indeed. And if he had, that would not have been within his rights and we'd be here saying "he did not have the right to fight the results of the 2020 election in that way"
anon_
1mo ago
within his executive right to fight the results of the 2020 election
Kind of depends what fight actually entails. There are things he could do and things he couldn't do, it can't be that literally any means he might have chosen are fine.
anon_
1mo ago
Iran launched 180 missiles. Their total stockpile is estimated around 3000. That would be 6% of the total.
anon_
1mo ago
This missile attack is a dramatic warning that Iran can decimate oil production and other regime critical infrastructure
Didn't they spend the major fraction of their most modern ones just now?
If anything, the expenditure of materiel means that they have diminished capacity as compared to before.
anon_
1mo ago
ISTM that the reason that primates take pleasure in punishing wrongdoing is that it is group-selectively-adaptive to evolve to take such pleasure. Cue all those game-theory results (I assume you've read them, otherwise will cite) in which participants willingly pay to punish defectors even at personal cost.
Same as eating a ripe piece of fruit or seeing a beautiful flower, the pleasure in punishing the wicked might be the result of evolution creating a brain that maximizes fitness.
anon_
1mo ago
But there's nothing in the mechanics of the Veil of Ignorance that prevents it from being used the opposite way: imagine you were rich, would you dislike any of the redistributive policies you currently advocate for?
I don't at all agree with Rawls, but I think the point is that there are far fewer rich than poor.
anon_
1mo ago
My reaction to him (putatively, let's say) suffering is that if Canada and others can figure out MAID, it's not a technical problem.
That said, regardless of what he deserves, there is a valuable fence in not engaging in cruelty or barbarity for our own sake. Civilization is discipline and if we wish to impose it on others, we must be willing to impose it on ourselves.
[ Conversely, I accept the observation that since civilization isn't imposing it and is countenancing disorder on a large scale, the breakdown is happening across the board. ]
anon_
1mo ago
You're paying for the optionality here -- you can take the bike for one ride then pivot to bus/Uber/walk for the next.
Buying is the better deal in money but severely constrains options.
anon_
1mo ago
Broadly agree.
I guess I think the statement "the feds can pick and choose prosecution" needs elaboration -- do they already investigate everyone so they have dirt pre-made before they are chosen? That kind of thing seems difficult to keep under wraps -- it's not like you can have an official marker on the file that tells middle management "not for prosecution until he steps on the wrong rail", so you run the risk of someone taking it at face value. And in the worst case, the next admin can come in and actually use it.
anon_
1mo ago
Doubt, but with sufficient room to be convinced if there's evidence.
In particular, the timelines don't make sense. The comments on fake asylum seekers are after many of the matters in the indictment.
anon_
1mo ago
You could just as easily take this the other way, right wing sides with a major D figure for once.
If that's the case, it's the absolutely most retarded choice.
anon_
1mo ago
The choice of whether to have a union is with workers. If Starbucks wants to not have one, it needs to convince workers that they will benefit more not having one.
anon_
1mo ago
The issue is that they get seniority for their kids by padding out their timecards.
anon_
1mo ago
Naturally, the right wing didn't stop for a second to acknowledge that the Biden DOJ has indicted a major D figure.
Part and parcel of a politics where even if opponents do something completely and unambiguously right (for once), it can't be acknowledged. Which is sad, because Adams had it coming and the DOJ was absolutely right to indict him (and Hunter Biden while we're at it).
"They used fake ballots therefore the result isn't valid" would at least be an argument that, if you accept the premise, you could see the conclusion as tenable.
He didn't say that -- he specifically said "they censored people on Twitter therefore the result isn't valid". That is what I'm claiming is the bad take here.
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