firmamenti
10mo ago
This entire discussion is just painfully terminally online.
My experience is that nobody who spends the majority of their time in meatspace is thinking about this stuff. The weirdo conservatives you see online are just as rare in real life as the weirdo antiwork type communists you see online. Yeah there are weirdo conservatives...but the guy wearing a MAGA hat at this point is considered a weirdo even by his conservative friends, unless he lives in an extremely rural area. Most cons just want the economy to go back to the way it was, and wand their kids left alone.
firmamenti
10mo ago
Presumably then you feel there should be no Pope at all, Muslim or otherwise?
What is the purpose of this other than extremely bad faith argument?
firmamenti
10mo ago
My criteria, outlined in my first comment, was that would prefer if only naturally born citizens of The United States were allowed to hold office.
firmamenti
10mo ago
Allowed by the Catholics.
I, an American, would prefer if non Americans were not allowed to hold positions of power over me.
firmamenti
10mo ago
Do you think a Muslim should be allowed to be the pope?
firmamenti
10mo ago
What country are you in? Your friend has also chosen to eliminate themselves from all of the jobs in India by not moving to India and trying to get a job there, presumably. Why, if this is just a matter of increasing the possible number of jobs available, do they not do that?
firmamenti
10mo ago
Nations are by default nationalistic and self interested. Your religion is orthogonal to your nationality.
Do I think a muslim should be allowed to be the Pope? Similarly no.
firmamenti
10mo ago
The government by its nature exerts power over me. It takes my money (by force), and implements behavioral prescriptions that it enforces with violence.
That's different than most jobs, and because of that different scrutiny should be applied to the people being entrusted with that power. I'm sorry your friend really wants to have that power but can't, but honestly in this scenario I am going to start wondering why they want the power that badly.
firmamenti
10mo ago
Re the first one, does this extend to cases where someone's a dual citizen due to essentially not being able to get rid of their second citizenship?
Yes. There are many jobs that your friend would still be eligible for.
firmamenti
10mo ago
Do you have that same energy for the US congressman Brian Mast who wore his IDF uniform to Congress and said
I'll say this: if you are a dual citizen, you should not be able to serve in congress, and probably shouldn't be able to serve in any role whatsoever in government including police. I'll even go so far as to say that only natural born US citizens should be able to serve in congress.
firmamenti
10mo ago
With the border patrol union statements in support of Greg Abbot, this will probably happen.
"Sorry boss we ran out of gas on the way"
How long could that really go on before we are in a similar sortof mass insubordination crisis?
There is a happening currently happening along the Texas/Mexico border which seems to be escalating in an interesting way.
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The state of Texas has been taking measures to secure their border with Mexico. These measures include installing concertina wire (colloquially known as "razor wire") along the border.
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A supreme court ruling said that US Border Patrol (the feds) are allowed to go into Texas against Texas's wishes and cut this wire. As /u/slowboy points out below, it is a bit more nuanced than that. There was an injunction preventing CBP from going to cut the wires, and the Supreme Court overruled it. Interesting culture war fodder: Amy Coney Barrett sided with the majority on this.
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Yesterday, Greg Abbot signaled that he did not have any intention of complying with this.
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Today, President Biden said that Texas has until tomorrow (Friday) to let them in. (Sorry for the low quality link here. If somebody has a better one please share it).
This does seem to be escalating rapidly. I don't see where the offramps are other than Abbot backing down. If he doesn't, what does that mean? Texas National Guard vs the Federal Government sounds awfully close to...I hate saying this, but a civil war? That's not right though since I can't imagine them shooting at each other.
This is also confusing to me politically. The border situation is not a political win for Biden. Even among liberals the cracks are starting to show. Morning Joe (msnbc show) this morning was talking about how there is a border crisis and it's the republicans causing all this illegal immigration by not doing a "Comprehensive Immigration Policy". That's obviously absurd, but it does show that liberals are willing to agree that completely open borders are suboptimal.
Edit: Trump weighs in
This, to my stupid non-lawyer brain, seems way more like an "incitement to insurrection" than anything he said on January 6th. Interesting.
firmamenti
10mo ago
They've already set the precedent with Trump not debating for the primary, and Katie Hobbs not participating in her Gubernatorial debates in Arizona.
Biden has nothing to gain from debating Trump. Not only that, but Biden has all but completely stopped talked to the public aside from rehearsed speeches. On the rare occasions that they hold something roughly resembling a press conference, the questions appear to be preset, with the people asking them also preset. He won't even get in front of more or less friendly-to-him journalists. There's no way he's going to get in front of an openly hostile Trump.
firmamenti
10mo ago
Yeah, but then you get into them basically having a 'town hall' or something that is close to the types of 'press conferences' (where the questions, answers, and people asking them are all pre-programmed) that Joe Biden has on the rare occasions where he is willing to speak to the public.
That doesn't feel like a debate at all, just like those "press conferences" don't feel like press conferences.
(I'm not saying that this is the optimal debate. I'm just saying that this is how the debates have gone for 20+ years, and I think this is the first cycle we won't have one)
firmamenti
10mo ago
Gentleman’s wager of $5?
A debate in this case is: Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the same room on the same stage at the same time with the ability to interrupt each other, and a moderator.
Televised live.
firmamenti
10mo ago
Trump is 77 and at least seems to be in remarkably good physical condition.
firmamenti
10mo ago
There is absolutely no chance of a debate.
firmamenti
10mo ago
From the link you posted:
Ernest, a Jewish autistic demiromantic queer fat trans man submissive, and Nora, a Jewish disabled queer fat femme cis woman switch, have to contend with an age gap, a desire not to mess up their lovely polyamorous dynamic as metamours, the fact that Ernest has never been attracted to a cis person before, and the reality that they are romantically attracted to each other, all while planning their dominant’s birthday party and trying to do a really good job.
This low conflict foodie romance novella by Xan West includes a queer trans man/cis woman romance, forced proximity and friends to lovers tropes, and polyamorous, demiromantic, bisexual, pansexual, trans, Jewish, fat, autistic, disabled, diabetic, PTSD and depression representation.
I believe there was briefly a period where this group was trying to force themselves to watch football. It was part of some culture war thing I can’t exactly remember. The NFL was doing something annoying, normies stopped watching, and this sunset started trying to signal that they would fill the gaps. This of course failed.
firmamenti
11mo ago
The Latin phrase "numquam iacuit aleam et habuit fidelem" translates to English as "never has thrown the dice and had a loyal [companion/follower]."
(I used an LLM for this mods please don't ban me)
firmamenti
11mo ago
Yes there are lots of people in relationships which are not working. My point is that polyamorous relationships don't seem to work because they aren't trying to form relationships. Calling a group of friends who have sex with each other a "relationship" is intentionally confusing language.
We used to just call this "friends with benefits", and the people engaged in it knew that they weren't trying to create long term stable bonds.
firmamenti
11mo ago
Having been engaged for 2 of the four years they’ve been together, and intending to have kids but not doing it, and this is the exceptional example?
firmamenti
11mo ago
Can you pick one and describe them? Just some questions: how long have they had this arrangement, how long after they started dating did it start, are they married, do they have kids, etc.
The closest one I can think of is: has kids, married, but the husband openly resents the woman (who is substantially more attractive than he is, and obviously gets a lot more extra marital activity than he does).
The others were "polyamorous", but eventually got married, had kids, and are now monogamous.
The rest are as I describe: angry bitter facebook rants about people lying to them (and everybody knows exactly what they're talking about). Lots of eventually finding somebody they really like and entering a relationship with them.
The core difference I see between people building normal relationships, and people attempting to build “polyamorous” relationships is that the poly people aren’t really.
Sex with my wife is certainly a property of my relationship with her, but it’s more of a manifestation of our relationship than it is the point of it. We have sex with one another as a result of the rest of it.
If I had to guess, I’d say >70% if my peer group engages in polyamory. I can think of 0 of them who are in long term stable relationships. But I think that make sense. The thing my wife and I are building is just categorically different than what polyamorous people are doing. The depression these people seem to almost always experience I think results from incorrect expectations about what they’re doing.
There is probably a comparison to be made here to the trans movement. The cycle is: a trans person engages in surgeries and drugs, but doesn’t get the results they imagined or were promised, so they become an activist who insists that the answer is to target younger people with more surgery, and more drugs. Of course this also doesn’t work, and the cycle continues until the answer becomes that the whole of society is broken and we need to completely tear down all of the structure of the world and rebuild it from scratch (which of course will also not work).
I see this behavior with poly people. You are not creating relationships in the traditional sense, you are creating transaction agreements, and when this doesn’t result in a relationship, the answer becomes bizarre activism, thinly (or not so thinly!) veiled attacks on your outgroup, or angry rants on social media.
Again I think that there is a comparison to the trans movement here in that poly people want to redefine various words to try and make sense of their behavior. This is where the attempts to redefine words (which just so happen to align with mean ways of talking about their outgroup!) like trust and jealousy come from.
What’s especially sad and insidious about this to me is that when these things reach their obvious conclusions (not working), the answer is to double down and recruit people, instead of warning them off of it.
As a broader comment: there is definitely something interesting there. Is there a name for this? It’s like “no I didn’t ruin my life I like this actually and we need more people to do it!”, and then a cycle of escalation that seems to end in “all of society is invalid”. This pops up all over the place in the culture wars.
firmamenti
11mo ago
Just wanted to say that I agree with this 3 day ban. I know you guys get a lot of crap for bans, but this one is actually reasonable (especially the time).
Good bot.
Do you really see no difference between:
Has never been to a place.
Was born in a place, was a citizen of a place, eventually left the place and went to another place and went through the process of becoming a citizen of that second, new place where they weren't born
?
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