crushedoranges
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User ID: 111
crushedoranges
1d ago
No.
But only because my answer to all calls for empathy, unbidden and spontaneous, is no. I'm not going to participate in the hyperreal fixations of others. Nor am I going to be coerced into accepting the implicit axioms such worldviews come with.
Others may support you. I will not.
crushedoranges
8d ago
They tried this when Musk first bought Twitter with Facebook-backed Threads. It didn't work out, mostly because the people just weren't there. Network effects are very powerful. I haven't heard anything from it since.
Truth Social, Gab, Mastodon and the like are also-rans. I suspect Blue Sky will be the same.
crushedoranges
12d ago
I think the big benefit of autonomous cars is that they are both a taxi and a valet service in one. Your car drives you to your desired place of work (for simplicity we assume the hypothetical person works in the downtown core.) It then shuttles itself off into a place where space is cheap, to charge itself. Perhaps in an old industrial zone. When its owner gets off work, it dutifully begins to make its way ahead of time, travelling in packs of five or ten.
Because there is no need for a steering column, the interior of a autonomous vehicle can be structured in a radically different fashion. The interior can be made much more luxurious, especially if it is for a single occupant! Since it's going to have an internet connection anyway, there's no reason not to do it up like a office, or put in a bed if desired. And when it drops off its occupant, it goes to another warehouse to charge. The convenience factor of not having to negotiate two permanent parking spots in a major metropolitan area is extremely high.
The increase in commute time could be greatly mitigated by the comfort factor, in my opinion.
crushedoranges
12d ago
I apologize, I wasn't making an argument of 'the most effective thing to do.' I agree, making a martyr of him would be grossly unproductive for the people on the left. But you can't peacefully transfer power to Hitler. You can't peacefully protest a Hitler. Leftist rhetoric is begging for armed resistance that can never happen. They made such a big deal out of it. Now they look like so very weak and shrill.
Their self-perceived Hitler arose, and they are unable to stop him. What a pathetic display.
crushedoranges
12d ago
Well, certainly not the liberals.
There's a popular conservative cliche: the ballot box or the bullet box. It's chest-puffy masculine bravado, but something completely lacking in their enemies.
Right now, the political left is awakening to the fact that their leaders are not only gaslighting liars, but spineless collaborators to a man they see as Hitler. There are no riots in the cities, no drama or fervor. Exhaustion.
At least the January 6th people showed up. I doubt this time around the left will muster any sort of response. There's no stomach to oppose him anymore. It ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
I'm not going to play the whataboutism game.
Did some people call Biden Hitler? (given reducto ad Hitlerlum, probably.) But Trump didn't call Biden Hitler. He didn't tell his followers that they were going to be put into camps and there was going to be a genocide. That's crossing-the-rubicon rhetoric.
You could say that 'stolen election' is that kind of rhetoric, too... but unlike so many, I have memories of the year two thousand of our lord when the Democrats thought Bush stole the election. Nothing happened to the American Republic. Life continued as normal.
If he is actually Hitler - and a minority of people seem to believe this with all their heart - then peacefully transferring power to him is what a cuck would do. Either that, or they never really meant it. That's all what I mean.
crushedoranges
12d ago
If people truly believe Trump is an existential threat to democracy and is literally Hitler reborn and going to put them all into camps, then they should stop squawking on their social media and friend groups and buy weapons to assassinate him.
I'm not kidding, either.
That is the logical end point of this rhetoric, if its assumptions and principles are genuinely held. If he is a tyrant, then that is what the Second Amendment is for. If he is not, then what has been perpetuated upon Trump is the most pernicious and cowardly slander campaign in American history.
Put up or shut up.
crushedoranges
14d ago
A child, when introduced to the concept of probability, gives equal weight to the possible outcomes. Two choices means 50/50 (a coin flip.) A pollster that isn't better than a coin flip is useless. You might as well ask a child. (I believe the children's election - 52/48 in favor of Harris - being +2 D, while being wrong, was more accurate than any of the left-leaning pollsters could muster.)
crushedoranges
16d ago
She's a good candidate in the same way your child's crappy Christmas pageant was a good show.
...bur seriously now. Do we have to be performatively agreeable, here of all places?
She lost to Donald Trump: arguably the weakest and most divisive candidate since the Civil War: and to a degree in which even Hillary Clinton did better. At least she didn't lose the popular vote!
The one thing political candidates need to do - absolutely and without a doubt - is to get elected. She didn't get elected. The prize for getting second place in politics isn't a silver medal: it's being publicly humiliated as a also-ran loser and run out of town tarred and feathered. If Kamala Harris is a good candidate, I hope that the Democrats get many, many more good candidates.
crushedoranges
18d ago
I didn't think it was real either. Iowa D+3 would have meant a Democratic sweep of historic proportions uncaptured by any other pollsters. But experience has taught me to avoid a mental states which invite punishment for hubris: the night isn't over quite yet.
crushedoranges
18d ago
I called him Nate Bronze back in 2016: I'm calling him Nate Bronze now.
crushedoranges
18d ago
I'm going into the crosstabs and your sample size of one is highly suspect. Young males (especially those in the 0-3 demographic) are extremely low propensity voters. If Trump is counting on the baby vote to get elected, he's about to be very disappointed.
crushedoranges
19d ago
I think Trump will win. I think he's being underestimated again, and low propensity voters and undecideds are splitting for him. The Democrats found the one politician less charismatic than Hillary Clinton. But then again, I also believed that he'd win against Biden, so I'm curbing my expectations this time around. But that's what I'm reading the vibes right now.
crushedoranges
20d ago
I'm a relic of a time when pro-choice advocacy was 'safe, legal, and rare'. If that's the definition of pro-choice, then I understand (if not in favor.)
The modern incarnation is not that.
I cannot imagine being fired up to vote for the new, aggressively feminist formulation of it, that views an abortion as a empowering, independent act of a liberated woman bereft of moral weight or consideration. Or rather, I don't want to understand the kind of woman that would be attracted to that kind of rhetoric. If there are enough women like that to sway an election, it would make me very sad.
crushedoranges
20d ago
I have to control for my own partisan bias and wishcasting, but the Democrat confidence in abortion being such a powerful swing issue as to decide this election is baffling to me. Does it have such a powerful grip on the female vote?
In my opinion, it's what Democratic operatives want to be true rather than reflecting the reality of the electorate - in that the most ardently pro-life voters are also women. Kamala is already winning her base of single affluent women by a lot. Increasing their turnout doesn't seem like a winning play - especially with her losses everywhere else.
crushedoranges
23d ago
Really? Huh. Hm. Shows what I know.
crushedoranges
23d ago
What I think was likely was that he was escorted off premises with Secret Service agents and sheltered in place in his home. Machismo aside, perhaps he thought it was like Lincoln in that there was a coordinated conspiracy with shooters assigned to him and Trump. Of course there was no such thing but you can't fault a man for having family on his mind.
crushedoranges
23d ago
I'm pretty sure those are outliers. At least, if you subtract the partisan reasoning, the entire industry is converging on even stevens. If Harris was suddenly doing landslide numbers it'd have been factored in already, no?
No offense to Scott, but I've long abandoned rational thought as a principle and embraced Kierkengaardian absurdism: I encourage everyone here to vote for Donald Trump, knowing that it will probably make things worse but having faith in God that everything will end well. Providence is clearly on his side. For Harris, it's clear that the only higher power on her side is the DNC.
crushedoranges
24d ago
I think there is an opportunity for MAGA-branded construction vehicle toys waiting to be the accessories to a Trump action figure.
crushedoranges
25d ago
Big Pottery is in the tank for ostracons. Who do you think manufactures all those perfectly broken, dulled ceramic pieces? You can see their shills in the thread right now.
crushedoranges
26d ago
The valence of 'people thinking it is murder' is actually non-zero, given the bombings and the murders of abortionists.
But I think that in of itself is an inaccurate measure, because it is very rare that people are strong enough of conviction in their beliefs to kill for them. Even Islam, who certainly puts in clear terms the valor of dying for the faith, only a very few are actually suicide bombers.
crushedoranges
27d ago
I would say that Bernie's ideas should have had a chance to be rejected by the electorate and consigned back to the doldrums of obscurity, but now the progressives have a bloody shirt in the form of a stab-in-the back myth that will haunt the Democratic party for generations to come.
crushedoranges
27d ago
Who is Atlas?
At this point, I think, it doesn't matter who he really is: the hyperreal personae that the partisan public impose on him are more compelling than the authentic human being beneath it all.
I would attribute that to the population getting older in general. City life, and its progressive paeans, are more attractive to the young who seek opportunity and change. They are willing to tolerate things like noisy neighbors and the homeless because they are willing to bear that burden, even if it annoys them privately. The old and those with families wish for the reverse and move away to where they can get away from that within their financial means.
It very well may be that the blues diminish because their societal bedrocks self-select and become redder in the bargain.
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