laxam
3mo ago
and there's a very decent chance that they would actually lose the conflict militarily to boot
This is delusional. Obliterating the formal militaries of near peer competitors is the one thing the US military is utterly dominant at. The US loses wars when you go all fourth generational warfare and wait for the American public to get tired of hearing about the steady trickle of dead American soldiers and foreign civilians (who are innocent and mostly women ad children, of course).
laxam
3mo ago
Israel's next elections are scheduled for October, 2026. Once the war is over, Netanyahu has no reason at all to hold them early and his coalition isn't in incredible danger of breaking up.
laxam
3mo ago
This is a place where people pattern match 'leftists are upset about a white on black killing' to 'the whites must be innocent' a little too readily. Is the media often wrong about this sort of thing and only able to enforce consensus through sheer exercise of power? Of course. Were they wrong in that instance? Nope.
laxam
3mo ago
They were civilians who chased someone down in their vehicles and came at him armed. He was justified in trying to get away and then coming at one of them when they made it clear that wasn't an option. They were absolutely guilty.
laxam
4mo ago
In tech, staying at a job for more than 3 years is seen as coasting. Devs are increasingly expected to do everything, because 'everyone should be full stack' and everything that isn't feature development (testing, staging, canaries) get deprioritized. Overworked novices means carelessness, carelessness creates mistakes.
This may be true amongst the Dev Set, but it's very much not once you get outside of that small corner of 'tech' and into the infrastructure side of things. While there are plenty of greenhorns puttering around, there are also the true gray beards who have been in the same position for decades and know literally everything about the systems they administer (and design and build).
I'm a network engineer and there are enough grizzled old men on my team that our collective experience no doubt stretches into the centuries, and several of these guys have gotten a big chunk of it at this one place. We just had a guy retire last year who started in the late 70s...
laxam
4mo ago
They starved MAGA candidates of support in the midterms
One of the big reasons Vance won his Senate seat at all was because McConnell drowned Ohio in NRSC money.
You're stuck in the same oppressor-oppressed mental dynamic the Left has. Trump is the GOP right now. All of the party establishment positions are filled with his people. Pretty much everyone who ever opposed him speaks glowingly of him at the Convention (or they've left the party).
Stop playing the victim.
laxam
4mo ago
And universal sufferage only 100 years old.
Suffrage without respect to class is significantly older in this country and glimmers of it date back through initial settlement.
laxam
4mo ago
Trump would have been safely defeated and probably too old and beleaguered to run again
And imprisoned. I think, if Trump loses, there's a very high chance he's found guilty in the Smith case and he goes to prison. That hanging over his head is probably a big reason he's so willing to listen to campaign advisors on so many things.
laxam
4mo ago
This is a little more exhortative than analysis or discussion.
Is this place supposed to be a recruiting ground for 'wy' Nats?
laxam
4mo ago
Aletheia also just means 'truth'.
People have been doing translation and Biblical criticism for some time now.
laxam
4mo ago
By the way, the "truth" Jesus claimed to be was not material factuality, but aletheia -- literally non-concealment and non-forgetting (or, to put it positively, revelation and remembrance). This is the Greek word that is translated as "truth" in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament, etc. In Greek, aletheia is typically not a property of sentences, but a property of the way someone communicates with another person on a given occasion. The modern English equivalent would be something like, "being straight with someone". For example, when Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinski", his statement was materially factual, but he was not speaking with aletheia, because he was either concealing something or forgetting something (almost certainly concealing something).
The English word for this is 'honesty'.
laxam
5mo ago
Both the majority and the dissent write about the history from the perspective that the 16th amendment redefined income taxes as indirect, not that it made a specific type of direct tax legal. This seems silly to me.
It's apparently a popular opinion in legal circles these days that Pollock v Farmer's, the decision that necessitated the 16th amendment to legalize income taxes, was a terrible decision and that income taxes were always indirect taxes. This bit is, I think, a snipe in that direction, included because the 16th amendment means the Court will never get the chance to overrule Pollock itself.
I have never understood the hate, but it's a moot point now.
laxam
5mo ago
It started as that, but the New Left was captured by the managerial state in the process of capturing it and now they're its biggest beneficiaries. That whole thing about the hippies cutting their hair and getting jobs and becoming yuppies.
laxam
5mo ago
This kind of professionalization is older than the New Left, although they're certainly beneficiaries of it.
laxam
5mo ago
Your burner phones also uniquely identify you. If two phones are in the same location (or connected to the same wifi networks) for extended periods of time, the borg can link them together as belonging to the same person pretty easily. These burners are probably a waste of money unless you are literally throwing them on a train after buying them and using them once.
I can say with some definitude that your phone's individual identifiers are trivially available to anyone who cares to know. So, triangulating you based on using multiple burner phones in close sequence is easier, not harder, than using one phone in sequence across a few discrete locations and then using a different one.
laxam
5mo ago
He's not a journalist, never went to journalism school, never (except for the 4 hours when it looked like he'd write columns for NYT) worked for a newspaper
I hate living in a world where these two things are qualifiers for being a 'journalist'. Journalism is something you do and journalists are the people who do it, no more, no less.
laxam
5mo ago
"Inventing new legal theories" is an inherent part of the common law system.
All of the laws Trump is being prosecuted under are codified statute, ie. not common law in the strictest sense.
laxam
5mo ago
All of that was still considered corruption back then, and was occasionally punished.
Now it's considered normal.
laxam
5mo ago
It's both, plus state money. Plus, the big foundations that finance a lot of this receive favorable tax treatment to pretend to be charities.
laxam
5mo ago
So fleeing El Salvador because random gangs try to murder people every day because they're not wearing the right tattoos is outside of the definition of asylum.
This was changed by the Biden administration several years ago.
Russia can't establish reliable air superiority against Ukraine. What makes you think it would require a significant investment of resources to gain air dominance and support the Ukrainians right back to their pre-2014 borders?
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