netstack
Texas is freedom land
No bio...
User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
Overt racism has definitely gotten less acceptable. Opponents of civil rights have been fighting a defensive action since the 50s. Atwater probably said it best:
Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger". By 1968, you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this", is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger". So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.
So, sure. Republicans didn’t implement anything as racist as the Southern Democrats. They just fought a rearguard action for policies more extreme and immoral than anything in today’s Overton window. Every now and then, they’d try something on a large enough scale to get slapped down in the courts.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
My mistake. I conflated him with Harry Byrd Sr., who never made such a pivot, but also died much earlier.
I’d personally count the Trump travel bans, but I understand that’s contentious.
North Carolina gerrymandering. Pretty explicit. Appealing to the VRA was a fig leaf; the easiest way to satisfy it would have been to draw reasonable districts.
If you’re willing to go back a generation, the cadre of former Southern Democrats provided plenty of examples. Thurmond and Byrd held on into the 2000s, even!
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
Point taken. I’m willing to believe that the images are real per Media Rarely Lying.
My arguments about selection bias and lack of statistical evidence stand.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
Damn. I’m not surprised by draconian speech laws so much as search&seizure ones. Do you have no protections against what ought to be an obviously expansive warrant?
I was also going to ask if you’d written whichever of these representatives might possibly run in your area. A statement on this board is weak. A letter might actually reach them. But I don’t know how allocation of reps works in Ireland.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
Against: his political advocacy, the official statement from Trump’s campaign.
For: fake ID, fake plates, multiple weapons, bringing all these things into a security checkpoint??
I dunno, it’s hard to apply normal logic to a guy who thinks this was a good idea. Only time will tell.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
Four? By my count, this would be number three. The bomb and/or dog thing didn’t pan out.
Though apparently there were two attempts years ago! One by an autistic UK tourist who didn’t know about retention holsters. Another by a forklift thief.
I concur. I think that photo, at least, is obviously fake.
Ed: or the bullet only killed a child after expending its energy in four or five Hamas bodies. That could also explain how they were so close to a hospital!
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
Headshots Georg, who lives in Gaza & sees over 10,000 children each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
How many of those doctors saw the same kids? How many heard each others’ stories, or were interviewed based specifically on their involvement?
There are also some credibility issues—the number of kids who made it to the ER with fatal wounds, the quality of the x-rays—but overall, I don’t think this is a statistical argument. It’s a vibes-based argument dressed up with a survey. That’s fertile ground for all the usual confirmation biases, group consensus, etc. I’m not buying it.
And look. I know that you’ve got this weird conviction that Jews are rule-obeying golems, but it’s not realistic. It doesn’t make useful predictions, and it’s less defensible than just accusing them of religious fanaticism. Making your criticism strangely specific doesn’t always make it stronger.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
The 7.62x39 round used in an AK is different than the 7.62x51 NATO. Or the Mosin’s 7.62x54R, for that matter. They’ve all got the same bullet diameter, but different bullet lengths/weights and cases.
Maybe @NelsonRushton was thinking of the IMI Galil, which had a 7.62x51 version. But as you noted, Israel used and uses 5.56x45 for its infantrymen.
He also could have been referring to rifles like the SR-25 or M24. Those would fit the “sniper” narrative. But news outlets can’t decide if the Israelis are shooting children crossing the street, or executing them point blank, so who knows?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
It looks like this is actually a fourth category: people Belarus has lured into making the attempt?? I’m left with a lot of questions.
I’m not sure they fit the usual categories. Maybe 2 if they really are persecuted Kurds. Maybe 3 otherwise. But I have to wonder how many would be there if Belarus wasn’t subsidizing them.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
Mmhmm.
Looking a little further…it might actually be mostly Iraqi Kurds? That’s not a terrible fit, and I can see the irony,
But I suppose drawing attention to the fact that Belarus is apparently encouraging the problem wouldn’t be as funny to channers.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
Okay, but for a random Muslim sneaking from Belarus to Poland to Germany, or a random Nicaraguan looking for a job in SoCal, there’s nothing religious about it. Is there?
Well, that’s the tension, isn’t it? The Culture wants to spread its memes, but one of those memes says they shouldn’t. All their material excuses are gone. Contact is their way to either resolve or dodge the contradiction, depending on how cynical Banks was feeling about America that year.
So “it’s too much like colonialism” is precisely in character. Any intervention has to be laundered through appeals to principles, plausible deniability, and maybe a historical study.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
So it was written for the world wars specifically, by countries which were only beginning to establish a “rules based international order,” when the technological gulf between the first and third worlds was at its peak. And then expanded to everyone by the 1967 amendment. That explains a lot.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
That…doesn’t make any sense. “Zion” has a specific meaning: it’s a hill where David built the original kingdom of Israel. What’s the equivalent to an economic migrant?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
The U.S. does not want a war, either. No no no no no. Not without some radical changes to infrastructure and onshoring.
The risk is that one side tries to exploit that unwillingness but overestimates it.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
Haven’t those already been dismissed?
I’m sure the DoJ appealed, but I can’t find anything newer than April.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
…but it is 100% worth discussing.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-14/la-me-no-assassination-trump-coachella
On one hand, the perpetrator is an outspoken Trump supporter, running an advocacy org to expose the Deep State.
On the other, he runs an advocacy org to expose the Deep State. I don’t think that selects for the most stable individuals.
On the gripping hand, the guy is taking fake IDs and fake weapons into a restricted area with his fake license plate. He’s lucky to be alive.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
This is like…the third time you’ve announced some Trump situation via a one-paragraph press release. Where are you getting this stuff?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
Yes, it was cool as fuck. I’m sorry I missed it live. I don’t know about price per kilogram, but this is instantly recognizable to the layman as something out of science fiction. Here’s to a new generation of space ops.
No, this means next to nothing for the culture war. Most people are not supporting their team due to a calculated future trajectory of humanity. They are assessing the personal economic impact, the respectability of their social circles, the overall sense of security. Rocket milestones are remarkably insulated from all of those in the short term.
I’d say it remains a shockingly gray-tribe issue. Degrowth is (thankfully!) not as influential as you suggest. Climate activism remains strong, but oddly technocratic, even as it incorporates the trappings of idpol. See the NSC’s Call to Action. Meanwhile, most of the right wing doesn’t care unless the topic can be linked to American exceptionalism.
Which brings us to Trump. I would argue that he has personally dragged the Republican Party further from laissez-faire, libertarian politics even as he has enacted some of those policy goals. The niche which was, in 2010, occupied by Tea Partiers now hosts outright populists and social conservatives. This election is a referendum on any number of social, economic, and personal-conduct issues before it’s about the future of space exploration.
Please don’t vote for Trump on the basis of Musk’s political drift.
Predictions: I do not expect the Biden admin or the Harris campaign to speak out against SpaceX. The latter might snap at Musk, but it will be for his Twitter remarks, not for anything about space exploration. I particularly do not expect the FAA to “block” Elon, especially since Flight 6 allegedly got approval already. Neither a Harris nor a Trump admin will move against private space companies, Musk or otherwise.
More effort than this, please.
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