chooky
1d ago
Fair point, but surely we both immediately understand this as just an outgroup phenomenon. They are too foreign to count.
chooky
1d ago
The pattern I am obviously suggesting is a right wing cultural affinity for the clearly conservative Russia, which would not apply to the liberal EU.
chooky
1d ago
Prior to Trump, we probably would have said the same about the US GOP, too. It could easily turn out that right-wingers in Poland just end up culturally affiliated with Russia.
chooky
5d ago
I do not at all doubt the existence of hero bystanders; indeed, the latest school shooting was ended by a hero bystander parent. What I doubt is that armed guards dedicated solely to stopping school shootings would rise to the occasion, as I think that the commenter I was responding was correct that these would be people who couldn't manage to make the army. I am certain, given the rarity of shootings, that these jobs would rapidly devolve into playing videogames and watching Netflix.
That said, I am totally fine with cops in schools and the idea of School Resource Officers, which seem like a much better approach than this idea of a dedicated school shooting team.
chooky
5d ago
Hmm, I'm like 4 or 5 episodes in. Pugh was great casting for young Cathy. I disagree with you that she should lack vitality, or do you somehow see her as justifiably mean rather than just malevolent?
For older Kate, yes, I would agree they are not really aging Pugh enough.
The show seems good, though I can't imagine the subject matter allowing it to be a hit!
chooky
5d ago
Which makes me doubt that such a LARPer would actually perform if duty called.
chooky
5d ago
I have a pretty hard time describing even the early days of Chavez's presidency as mere "backsliding". The guy was consolidating power from day one, and his political career started with a failed military coup. In my opinion, Chavez was effectively a dictator by 2001.
Here's a 1999 incident from Wikipedia:
Chávez called an election on 25 July to elect the members of the constituent assembly. Over 900 of the 1,171 candidates standing for election were Chávez opponents. To elect the members of the assembly, Chávez used a formula designed by mathematical experts and politicians, known at the time as the kino (lottery) or the "keys of Chávez". Chávez obtained 51% of the votes, but his supporters took 95% of the seats, 125 in total, including all of the seats assigned to indigenous groups, while the opposition won six seats.
chooky
6d ago
But... Lula has been president before. Why would we compare Lula to Chavez/Morales rather than Lula's previous terms? I do appreciate the irony of my question as a US citizen since Trump's first term did not really predict his second term, but still.
chooky
10d ago
I think you underestimate how widespread the effects of Doge and changes to working conditions were. My family member worked on the nuts and bolts of building domestic physical infrastructure that you almost certainly believe are a good way for the government to spend resources. It is not the case that Doge-driven changes only affected questionable departments or competent people doing unproductive tasks.
chooky
11d ago
It is way too convoluted to argue that higher private sector pay denotes greater social value and that DOGE was thus correct to push out high performers. This is definitely not the path to government efficiency! A successful DOGE push out would have to be one in which the bad employees who couldnt find new jobs or who thought they would get fired or who were in unproductive jobs outweigh the "bad" cuts. It is probably not the case that literally everything done by one's preferred politician is perfect and awesome.
chooky
11d ago
I had a family member take the buyout because they started looking for a different job (since the security and flexibility that is the draw of a federap job is gone), and they scored a way higher-paying job. Like many buyouts, it would have been the case with DOGE that many takers were the capable employees you don't want to lose.
chooky
12d ago
And I guess the difference vs the past is that fielding, by far the most exciting part of baseball, has gone away because of the 3-outcome hitters you note. Boo.
chooky
12d ago
I asked one of my friends about why there arent very many good quarterbacks anymore a couple years ago. They said it was because defenses have gotten much more sophisticated.
chooky
14d ago
I found the climax of the quartet to be the darkest thing I had ever read in my life. I would describe book 1 as Greco, and by extension Ferrante, spectacularly embodying the ideal of a compassion and empathy through storytelling. In book 2, the values of the world, especially religion, get upended, setting us up for Greco having to reconstruct meaning in the next books. She basically fails, and her relationship with Nico eventually shows that she cannot even trust herself. In book 4, things fell apart to such a degree that I cannot even trust Greco's narration anymore. Harrowingly, what I took from the fourth book was that, no, we cannot, through stories, learn about others (like we can, for example, in Faulkner's Absalom) since even knowing oneself is hopeless - what is the fucking point of art if not that? And it can't do that. I didn't pick up a non-genre book for months.
I suspect my take is rather nonstandard, as is my belief that the fate of the doll from book 1 is completely ambiguous and a crucial part of the themes I proposed above. What I understand to be a lack of ambiguity in the TV show regarding this is why I refuse to watch the show.
chooky
16d ago
Canada's tariffs have ample exemptions for imports that are used as inputs to manufacturing so are not nearly as disruptive (or punishing to the US) as one might expect.
chooky
16d ago
Have we considered that it is simply on Netflix US? This also applies to much of the rest of the top list you cite, which makes me very surprised Jujutsu Kaisen is not on the list.
chooky
19d ago
Bad deal: Fancy carbonated waters (SpinDrift, eg) are super tasty, but that shit is pretty much the same price as a mass market micro beer (New Belgium, eg). Just way too expensive. If they could get their act together and scale manufacturing, I would drink these all the time.
Good deal: Video games. Do you guys realize that cartridges (Final Fantasy, etc) that cost $60 in the early 90s translate to ) like $150 today?
chooky
19d ago
I don't think the claim is whether Trump lies (all politicians lie) but in what service Trump lies. Probably, many politicians at least start out with the genuine belief that their policies are good ones that will help people, even if these goals eventually get subsumed by the idea that their party is better (so anything that keeps them in charge or, rather, prevents the other party's awful policies is worth it).
Trump seems to much more heavily prioritize self-enrichment and what he believes will be glory for himself.
chooky
21d ago
Brushing your teeth every day, applied to Iran's nuclear ambitions, would mean that we have to go bomb a uranium deposit or something every few years. Fine, whatever.
Trump seems to be attempting to extract a single tooth in the belief that it will remove the chance of cavities in all our other Iranian teeth, which will not work and is a pretty deranged dental philosophy.
chooky
22d ago
You are surprised Trump has a mental world model in which he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize (and all other prizes, so if he cheats or commits fraud to acquire gains he is merely taking what is rightfully his)?
I thought that the 2025 tariffs were too obviously a bad idea to be real. Since then, no idea has been too deranged.
chooky
24d ago
Presumably, Skynet was indeed in the sky, i.e., space-based data centers, or the humans would have quickly just hit the data centers. Alternatively, Skynet, having the resources to build weapons and killer robots autonomously, would have also had the resources to build and fortify data centers - heck, its human designers may have even intended this.
Hmm, I guess we agree to disagree then. Muslims, to Western conservatives, would be a huge component of the threat to the homeland culture they are trying to preserve. Leftists would not care about this, and supporting Muslims goes straight to the fundamental ideal of diversity/tolerance, somewhat overriding the opposition to Muslims’ generally more restrictive beliefs. This is all enhanced by conservatives generally being pro-Christianity and liberals just outgrouping Islam.
Liberals might be more offended than conservatives about, say, women’s rights in Muslim countries, but they care far less about Muslim culture in the West, especially since there are so many famous examples of Muslims assimilating fairly well into American consumerism (eg the Kardashians). I realize that Poland is not exactly Western.
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