haroldbkny
4mo ago
In the end, I'm hoping for a Trump landslide as I think that's the only path that leads to introspection, and then hopefully healing.
I really hope you are right. But the only introspection we got last time was "Trump's election proves the legacy of racism, sexism, colonialism, xenophobia, homophobia etc is real and strong and we need to feel bad/crush fascism"
haroldbkny
4mo ago
I didn't see the debate, so I don't know how awful it went for Biden, and I don't generally follow presidential debates, but I just wanted to ask if it's possible that all of this might blow over, and no one will even think of it come next debate, or even in a week. Sure, if Biden is really on death's door, he'll probably appear in poor condition in future events, too. But on the other hand, politicians oscillate in their presentability sometimes, and it doesn't always bear out. People cling to the latest thing saying "this is the most important event ever!", and at least 80% of the time, it ends up not being the most important event ever. Other politicians have had weird moments before, like when Hillary suffered some sort of temporary mental break or heat stroke or something during an interview back in 2016ish (I can't seem to find the video) and seemed completely unaware of her surroundings for a minute or two.
I've said this before, but man, I wish we could pause time and not move forward into election season. No matter what the outcome is, I'm going to feel terrible.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
haroldbkny
5mo ago
To me, a much more satisfying conflict among good guys would be for good people to fight over complex issues and/or ideological divides, and do so rationally rather than emotionally. But this is politically and culturally impossible, because you'd have to believe that there are good people on both sides (TM).
I hear really good things about Twelve Angry Men, though I haven't seen it yet. It's on my list.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
The dumbest thing for me about Civil War started in the beginning: where Tony Stark is guilted into supporting the Sokovia Accords because the mother of someone killed in the battle blames him. The Avengers were literally saving the world from a genocidal robot, and unfortunately, there were civilian casualties.
I don't think that's dumb. If there's anyone to blame, it's Stark. It was his idea to build the robot. I do think it's stupid for the rest of the avengers to feel guilty, but Stark should totally feel guilty.
You seem to be a bit argumentative. I think you may be nitpicking some details in my post, and misinterpreting some others.
IMO people are entitled to their right to vote for someone they agree with, the main reason they cant is the 2 party system which is only shared by America, Australia, and 30 or so 3rd world countries.
I never said anyone wasn't entitled to vote for whomever they want. Write-in ballots are doable, I think.
But people are not entitled for any given person to win just because they want it. They're subject to the votes of the rest of the country. And these people are not entitled to be free of consequences of their actions. The candidate they prefer less, the one that they previously claimed was trying to take over the country and send people to concentration camps, may end up winning in part because of their actions.
Someday you might end up disagreeing with both parties and have no choice but to join the crowd you are so dismissive of today.
I'm already there and have been there for a decade. I just don't make outrageous claims that my disillusionment is because of the unique failings of the candidates. I understand that the system itself sucks (despite being one of the best ones there is), because the world sucks, because it is filled with ridiculously difficult tradeoffs to make at absolutely every turn, such that being a politician is an impossible job on just about every front. And I have no expectations about how anything is going to ever get any better, because, once again, the world is filled with ridiculously impossible tradeoffs.
"these are the exact same people that said x" has never been spoken truthfully in my experience.
Are you the best person to be telling me that my social media acquaintances were not posting non-stop about hating Trump 4 years ago?
Or maybe they are allowed to change their mind, new things happen, they gather more information, they use the bayesian algorithm to generate new opinions. Up until the Israel/Palestine situation the lesser of the 2 evils was an argument about how Biden might be senile and have wishy washy convictions, but at least he is not killing people, now people believe he is killing people, so he is no longer a 'lesser' evil.
See my response here.
If these people have decided that Trump is not literally Hitler, then I have a new gripe, which is that they never called this out and admitted they were wrong about him by orders of magnitude. If these people decided Biden is literally Hitler to match their previous statements about Trump, then I think they really are just looking to label anyone at all right of them as evil, and I dislike that behavior.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
My company wouldn't do a nominal pay cut, but they can be nice and shifty when they want to be. They don't tell you your target bonus or stock, just your base salary. I did get good gains on stock for this year, but next year my compensation (stock included) shoots right back down again, because when they granted me stocks for next year, the stock price was already doing well, meaning they gave me fewer shares.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
Yes, that's a good way of putting it. That's basically what I think is happening
haroldbkny
5mo ago
Not quite. My company promised increased salaries in 2022, and did it for people who were promoted or hired that year. But then the rest of us never saw the increase. As for those folks who did get the initial pay increase, I'm not sure if they kept it. It's possible that the company simply replenished them less stocks subsequently. My company never actually tells you how much your target comp is, and more than half of your comp comes from stocks, so it's ambiguous.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
I hope you're right. But where I am, in tech, promised salaries increased for like a year, then dropped right back down once the companies started laying people off. They knew they could get away with it.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
We're stuck with inflated nominal prices but we're not necessarily stuck with inflated real prices
Are you saying that you think prices are going to go down? Or wages are going to catch up? I don't know enough about economics at all to necessarily know how these things tend to go.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
The hard left voices that are withholding their votes from Biden took the position that sure, Trump was horrible, but he was just saying openly what Republicans always believed.
That sentiment does not match up with anyone I know personally. Even if they felt Trump was saying things many Republicans believed, they still all thought Trump was a megomaniac who would seize power for himself, ruin our institutions, and start an apartheid state, and that's something I never heard anyone worry about from Mitt Romney.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
The economy and stock market doing great , as much as I may hold my nose at joe.
The stock market is doing great, but how much of those gains does the inflation nullify? I looked up an inflation calculator, and our dollar today is only worth 82 cents compared to what it was worth in 2020.
Also, interest rates are starting to decline, but still remain really high.
And inflation is coming down
Inflation is slowing down, but we're not gonna have deflation. We're stuck with these inflated prices, and I'm not certain, but I don't think wages have risen to match, at least not in all industries. So many people basically just lost 18% of their purchasing power for both their previous assets and future as well.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
That's an optimistic way of looking at it, in that these people might not just be moving further and further left really fast, or swinging with whatever is trendy right now. I hope you're right!
haroldbkny
5mo ago
Voters are not obliged to hold their nose and vote for a candidate that they find reprehensible. I myself rarely vote. And I also think that refusing to vote can send it's own message.
I don't personally disagree with you. But I'm not one of these people who thought Trump was literally Hitler 4 years ago. These people I'm posting about definitely are those people. Unless they actually think that Biden is literally Hitler this time around, then it doesn't make sense for them to vote Green.
And I really don't buy that they actually think Biden is as bad as they thought Trump was from 2016 to 2020. If they do, that points to another crazy phenomenon, the fact that they are so disconnected with their past, and with the people who they supposedly felt were most harmed by Trump from 2016 through 2020, as to be willing to throw them under the bus this time.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
From a far left perspective, Biden has mostly failed at being better than a Republican
Do they really think that? They must have short memories, because when Trump was in charge, they really thought the end was nigh. I cannot overstate how much these people really thought Trump was, well, just the worst in about every possible way. Like they really thought that any day he was gonna overturn democracy, start sending jews to concentration camps, all of that stuff. And Trump is who Biden is up against this time.
I'm seeing a consistent stream of content from people these days decrying Biden and saying that they're not going to vote for the Democratic party in the election. This is one example:
Voting for Biden is letting the Democratic Party know you are okay with them not raising the min wage to a living wage. It's letting them know you are okay with record military budgets while homelessness spiked 12% in one year and that you are OK with sending billions of dollars in US bombs and bullets to Israel to blow the heads and limbs off little children and babies while leveling 70% of Gaza. Sometimes in a democracy, the strongest word you can say is NO.
Here's another:
You don't have to choose between genocide and a felon.
And here's a tweet indicating that voting for the Green Party is not the same as voting Republican:
If I cast my vote for the Green Party ... my vote does not go to the Republican. We'll go over this again tomorrow
This sort of thing seemed to start around the time the Israel-Palistine culture war heated up and I haven't really seen it stop. I've even seen one that says that our choices for November are basically Voldemort and Palpatine.
This may just be coming from social-media acquaintances of mine and just the sources they follow (I have a lot of really leftist acquaintances), and may not be representative of the general populace. I really don't know.
I find this interesting for a few reasons.
- I somehow find this sort of thing even more annoying than pure Trump bashing, because it's showing me that absolutely nothing will be enough for these people. They seem to think they're entitled to a purely leftist president who agrees with them on everything, and anything right of that makes him evil.
- This is the exact opposite of the rhetoric I remember from 4 years ago. Everyone was rallying around the ideas that "we need to stop fascism (read: Trump)" and "it's okay to choose the lesser of two evils, as long as we depose Trump" and "a vote for a third party is akin to voting for Trump". Make no mistake, the people saying they're not voting for Biden in 2024 were the exact same people I saw making these "lesser of two evils" statements last time around.
- I think the group fervor and group commitment to all voting for Biden no matter what because they believed it was the only right thing to do, was a lot of the reason why Trump lost in 2020. I wonder if this severe disillusionment with Biden to the point of public denouncement really will hurt his chances in November. Maybe the people I see making these statements are just virtue signaling "look I'm so progressive, even the Democratic president isn't progressive enough for me". Or maybe not. But even if they are virtue signaling and they don't really mean it, they could easily influence others, and the break in the group fervor could have huge consequences.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
I have become passionately convinced that elected officials, in all levels of government, and irrespective of the major party they affiliate with, are working with Americans' best interests in mind
I'm guessing this is a typo, you probably mean "are not working with Americans' best interests in mind"
At any rate, I don't expect many people here will disagree with you
haroldbkny
5mo ago
Well, Dawkins's point is that feminists ranting about how women are made to feel uncomfortable by men asking for coffee is trivial, and that if feminists really want to help women, there are actual third world problems they should be dealing with, not first world problems. My point is that being made to feel guilty or awkward over difficult situations is likewise trivial first world problems, and somewhat of a natural extension of participating in a society composed of layers of social customs built on top of animal instincts. Having to deal with other people is basically just a part of life, and so is having awkward social interactions.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
over the years I acquired a few stalkers and have had a few women make aggressive and clearly unwanted sexual advances. It actually feels pretty shitty and occupies a lot of your idle thinking. It makes you feel guilty! Like you did something wrong
I will say upfront that I don't know the details of your situation, so I could be way off base here, but I'm reminded of Dawkins's Dear Muslima:
Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, ... Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with. Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself 'Skepchick', and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so. And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.
People desire other people. Some people will desire other people who don't want to be desired. Coordination is a really hard problem. It's not always as easy as one thinks to let it be known what they want and don't want, especially when people really do tend to change their minds when new opportunities are presented to them, and shit tests abound. And generally (though not in your case) it's a problem that causes men to have to be the ones to have to put themselves out there and take the initiative. Just be glad that we live in a society where the norms are such that you won't be physically hurt and you have the freedom to say no.
Wow, this sounds like the first 20 minutes of The Gods Must Be Crazy, wherein a hunter gatherer tribe gets a Coke bottle and it ruins their whole society. I'd recommend the movie, but the rest of it isn't that good.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
Well, my current job has most of the things you describe as being a part of the meaningful startups: the seniors with egos, the bureaucracy, the poorly thought out code bases and dependencies. The main differences are the fact that my job doesn't feel as impactful, but it pays triple to quadruple the salary you're citing for startups.
There's so much work to do that we need smart people for and so few smart people
If you're a smart person, how do you find this work that needs doing? I consider myself a smart person. I inevitably find myself working for companies where I do tons of work that only a really smart person could do, but that work is ultimately pretty meaningless and has little impact on society.
I drive down the costs of software systems, I improve operational maintainability of these systems, etc. I do this for products that you yourself know and have used. But still, it doesn't really matter much in the grand scheme of things, as I find it really unlikely that these products will change the course of human civilization, and I find it unlikely that my work to make it more maintainable or cost less is going to even matter much for these products. I'm a cog on a team inside of an organization inside of several much larger organizations, and everything that gets done is just so operational that it basically feels completely meaningless.
Give me something meaningful to do, where I really can make an impact. I'd love to do it. But everyone tells you they're working on meaningful stuff, and it always ends up being the same operational crap.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
I would be surprised if he did, given what he said here about how having any official ties to the culture war thread upended his whole life https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/
Interesting that he would throw in his two cents/blow his load now, this early in the election season. Maybe this is a more serious event than I was suggesting.
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