sulla
2d ago
If Ukraine welcomed their liberators in 2022 then who knows, maybe Ukrainians would end up in meat wave assaults against Poland or Baltics in 2025.
This has been a popular talking point in media, but it appears to be based on exactly nothing. There is nothing anywhere within Russian rhetoric to suggest that they have the slightest interest in Poland. Even the archetype of launching a surprise attack on Poland, Hitler, spent years talking about the Danzig issue before invading. While it was a surprise attack, Germany's motivation was not a surprise. Russian would need to not only launch a surprise attack, but would need a surprise motivation. Likewise, Russia's invasion of Ukraine did not have a "surprise motivation," but rather a motivation that was well-known and is consistent with Russian thought. The same would not be true of a hypothetical Poland invasion.
sulla
6d ago
I've known true alcoholics who still manage to hold down a job and live a normal-ish life, but I've never known a true stoner who was able to do this. Even light smokers seem to have more fucked up lives than light stoners. Alcohol will kill you faster, though.
sulla
8d ago
Agreed. If you are even debating the question, it’s a win by default for Trump.
sulla
8d ago
I will state for the record that yesterday a few hours before the debate I was reading about the Springfield affair and told my wife that "at this point if I were a US citizen I might actually vote for Trump." So in that sense, I was a 'floating non-voter', and Harris would have won me over.
Oh come on. You’ve been posting on The Motte, how long, since the SSC subreddit days? But you claim to be an innocent undecided after everything that was happened? Even if somehow you are undecided, you are the most atypical undecided imaginable.
If he'd stuck to messaging around the economy, used migration mainly as a competence issue ("Harris was made Border Tsar, well let me ask you this, do you the American people think she has done a good job of that?"), moved to the center at least rhetorically on foreign policy issues (why exactly couldn't he say it was in America's interests for Ukraine to win?), and made a more concerted effort to tar Harris with the failures of the Biden administration, I think he could have won.
This is why he did win. Everyone came away understanding that he had the winning hand on almost every issue. Whether he “won the debate” is irrelevant. Nobody says to themselves “I agree with Trump on everything, but since he was ineloquent I guess have no choice but to vote for Kamala. Sorry, I’m coconut-tree gang now.”
Trump persuaded people on the issues. On the other hand, I honestly can’t even remember one thing Kamala said.
sulla
13d ago
The polls underestimated Trump by 3-4 points in both of the last two elections. There is no reason to think this has changed.
“Surely they wouldn’t make the same mistake three times!” Please allow me to introduce you to managerialism.
sulla
19d ago
This is just mind games. The Harris Campaign is using meaningless nitpicks to bait Trump into doing something stupid. I think this is an underrated strategy in general. It would be very bullish for Harris if the people in charge are this smart.
The catastrophically bad setup and staging of her recent interview suggest that this is not the case.
sulla
22d ago
The verdict didn't surprise me because I'm already working from the sad assumption that in the woke West, biological sex is no longer recognized as real by anyone in a position of power. What was once a woman is now a “uterus-haver”, a “pregnant person” or a “chest feeder”, but such people have no collective rights. Those collective rights now belong to those who merely identify as women, even if they have penises and testicles, which means that there is no longer any legal basis for having female-only spaces, online or offline.
It's easy enough to just eat the L and start having uterus-only restrooms, which is open to anyone who has ever had a uterus. Intersex women who have never had a uterus due to developmental issues can use the non-uterus restroom. Same with uterus-only sports leagues, and uterus-only settings on dating apps.
sulla
2mo ago
The competency crisis rages on. Boeing's planes fall out of the sky. The Secret Service forgets to check the nearby roof. Anti-virus software bricks your computer. These sorts of incidents have always happened, but it's hard to deny that they have gotten more frequent.
sulla
2mo ago
If you are in a heavily left leaning area or social circle it will feel this way. But in more mixed groups, it’s the left leaning people who have been suddenly a lot more quiet. and those who aren’t have self-immolated themselves out of the group. This is just my observation. There has been a massive vibe shift.
sulla
2mo ago
Yes, it would not be unprecedented for the polls to change. However, it would be unprecedented if on Election Day the polls were what they are now, yet Biden won.
sulla
2mo ago
That’s true, Trump’s vibes are positive. The Dem vibes are schizo fire-and-brimstone. There is confusion about who the candidate will be. Everyone has a different insane conspiracy theory about the shooting. Their rhetoric is focused on 7-8 year old debunked misquotations of Trump. Their messaging and priorities appear utterly confused.
The Dems are supposed to be the party of experts, the ultra competent managerial elite. Schizo is not a good look.
sulla
2mo ago
The polls would all have to be off by 5+ points. With the electoral college Trump will win even if Biden wins the popular vote by 2% or less. It would be an unprecedented polling error, at least for American presidential elections with dozens of independent polling sources.
sulla
2mo ago
Brady at minimum should be above LeBron and probably Messi. LeBron won less in a league where individual talent matters more.
sulla
2mo ago
I think it was like bullies in the playground playing keep away. It’s not about the ball, it’s just about proving you can’t do anything about it. Except in this case the ball is life-saving SS protection.
sulla
2mo ago
What is not a conspiracy theory is that Biden failed to provide Trump with adequate protection in spite of the security detail begging for more manpower. Biden needs to answer for why this happened, and how refusing to protect political rivals is compatible with democracy.
sulla
2mo ago
This theory makes no sense. Everyone has had COVID and knows that it’s not that bad, especially if you have access to the best doctors and treatments.
Then again, if Biden’s doctors are as good as his SS he is as good as dead.
sulla
2mo ago
The short answer is that it would be almost immediately overturned on emergency appeal. What is more likely is that they sentence him to prison but delay the sentence pending appeal, preventing an emergency appeal and ensuring that he is a “convicted felon” through the election.
sulla
2mo ago
The false flag theories are incredible. Yeah, Trump planned to get shot in the ear with deadly rounds. What could go wrong?
sulla
2mo ago
The mainstream narrative says that the six alleged death camps were in the east. See: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/concentration-camps-1942-45-maps
Notice how all the camps in the west were not death camps. So in the context of the mainstream narrative, how do you explain contemporary newspaper articles from the time confidently claiming otherwise? Obviously they are understood to be propaganda. In other words, a “hoax.”
sulla
2mo ago
“Et tu, Brute?”
Biden got shivved last night. It was less of an interview and more a desperate attempt by George Stephanopoulos to convince Biden to step down. The narrative is moving from “Biden is senile” to “Biden is desperately clinging to power and is refusing to do what is best for the country.”
The critical moment was when Stephanopolous asked Biden if, “like Trump,” he was just running to pursue his own self-interest.
Biden’s choice is to “die” a hero or live long enough to see himself to become a villain. It seems like Dark Brandon has made his choice. It’s looking he is going to try to run out the clock to the convention. The Dem’s last play at that point would be to invoke the 25th. Or maybe they’ll slip something into his drink. Nobody would be surprised given his age.
In any case, we are living through a throughly dramatic and exciting piece of history. This will be a fun trivia question in 200 years (but not really—the robots won’t play trivia and if they do, the questions will be a lot harder).
sulla
2mo ago
This hypothetical is completely asinine for so many reasons. If there was such a complete breakdown of order that one party was murdering everybody in the other party, a Supreme Court opinion wouldn’t matter in the slightest.
Regardless, suppose the Supreme Court ruled the other way. Why not, in addition to murdering the opposing candidate, just murder all of your enemies on the Supreme Court and Congress until the only people left rule that you are immune and refuse to impeach you? Loophole!
It’s such a bad faith argument. If Biden or Trump went on a murder spree, the Supreme Court would find some justification, thin or not, to rule it not an official act.
sulla
2mo ago
This ruling is obviously correct. This is why impeachment and elections exist. If Biden ordered Trump whacked, the Democrats would face electoral ruin. If people continued to vote for Biden after… that’s democracy.
sulla
7mo ago
It's one critical item on the causal chain in most events, but it's an effect as much as it is a cause. For example, if your economy collapses and you are dependent on foreign oil, you probably won't have enough money or resources to buy enough foreign oil. This will cause problems, but the lack of oil was not the precipitating cause.
I disagree entirely with the premise that political polarization has anything to do with social media or big tech. It is an absurd claim on its face, because human history is littered with countless examples of extreme political polarization long before smartphones or the Internet. It's a waste to even name them, because basically every historical event learned in school would qualify. Relatively speaking, the current period isn't even particularly highly polarized.
The only semi-charitable way to interpret these articles is to interpret them as apologia for why the current regime's systems of control have failed. Before the latest technology wave, the regime had everyone's opinion under control because they could make sure that all three news channels were broadcasting the correct messages. They cannot control social media as a whole, therefore, it must be social media's fault because people are able to exchange information and ideas without their consent.
The article itself is self-contradictory. In one paragraph, it's attacking Fox News for "cherry-picking" quotes from Democrats, and in the next says the only solution is to "stop big tech" from using their current algorithms. I guess it's left as an exercise for the reader how "big tech algorithms" caused Fox News's programming. Yet Fox News's current state could not possibly have been "caused" by social media, because as I recall, Democrats hated and mocked Fox News more in the 2000's than they do now.
The fundamental mistake the article is making is to mistake correlation for causation. While a relative increase in polarization has coincided with the rise of social media, this does not mean that one caused the other. In fact, there is not even a common cause. They are completely unrelated. All civilizations oscillate between periods of division and periods of cohesion. America was in a period of relative cohesion, but it could not last forever.
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