domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
birb_cromble
1hr ago
To me, the more interesting question is how 44% gets an endorsement, but 58% gets no endorsement.
I have never been a union member. My only experiences interacting with unions have been profoundly negative. As such, I am unqualified to make any suppositions about why the leadership would act in such a way.
Is there anyone here who could speak to the culture and explain it?
This one is clearly angling for "hey guys it's both sides but don't you think Hillary Clinton has a point about the need to nationalize twitter and jail misinformation czar Elon Musk"
Placing the blame on tech companies after a decade of regime journalism is insane.
Instead, the Trump campaign appears to be approaching this apparent assassination attempt as an opportunity rather than as a moment to reflect.
Ah yes, he should be asking what he did to deserve being assassinated.
demanding that the big tech companies stop creating algorithms that are designed to incite
Yep, there it is, party control over social media.
Let’s remember who is at fault for sorting Americans... The tech companies
He's literally saying people should be banned from posting true things the regime doesn't want talked about, because "malinformation" creates division.
It’s why it’s hard to take seriously the outrage from some in Trump’s orbit that it’s the Democrats and their media allies who have created the more violent conditions in our political landscape"
"It was convenient to selectively delete my memories of 2020, so I did"
My friends on the left love to scream about both sides-isms and love to complain when some of us hold them to a higher standard than Trump.
"Both sides bad, but the left of course is better, and the bad things they do are only bad if they help the real enemy"
birb_cromble
1hr ago
And the attempted shooter at the golf course had also voted for Trump
This appears to be untrue.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/did-ryan-routh-actually-vote-144911519.html?guccounter=1
North Carolina voter records show he voted in 2012, but show a gap between 2012 and 2024, when the unaffiliated voter cast a vote in the Democratic primary in North Carolina.
Don't worry about anything like that. How much energy you can get out of crops is capped by photosynthesis. It's not that much because photosynthesis is extremely inefficient. If there was a plant that had a higher photosynthesis efficiency, we'd know.
That was just a doesn't-matter-farfetched-hypothetical to quickly illustrate how past shifts in ecology might (or might not) have unrealized impacts on human progress, it's not meant to be a serious postulation. I could have said "What if the Gros Michel banana specifically contained some protein that could have cured malaria"
You heard wrong. Truffles are still farmed, and apparently there's been a recent breakthrough. Some micro-testing which lets people buying tree seedlings are successfully inoculated with the symbiotic fungi that grows truffles.
That's interesting. Do you have any links you can share? Perhaps only certain species of truffles were impacted?
ace
1hr ago
“This translation service isn't available in your region”
That’s classic Petteri Taalas.
What if the Gros Michel banana specifically contained some protein that could have been turned into a low-carbon-emission fuel source using 2025 technology
Don't worry about anything like that. How much energy you can get out of crops is capped by photosynthesis. It's not that much because photosynthesis is extremely inefficient. If there was a plant that had a higher photosynthesis efficiency, we'd know.
they had the technology to farm truffles, and the decimation of France in the war resulted in them somehow losing that capability.
You heard wrong. Truffles are still farmed, and apparently there's been a recent breakthrough. Some micro-testing which lets people buying tree seedlings are successfully inoculated with the symbiotic fungi that grows truffles.
humans have been responsible for the extinction of tens of thousands of species, mostly bugs I think I recall,
There are many, many species of bugs. Notoriously many. Apart from pollinators I've not read anyone related to farming worrying about anything going extinct, as a niche wouldn't stay unfilled for long.
IguanaBowtie
2hr ago
I think it 'indiscriminate' is a curious word here.
It's not the targeting of Hezbollah but the method that is indiscriminate. If you can't see your target and you detonate an explosive device, you've probably committed a warcrime - you can't be sure you didn't blow up a pager in the pocket of a terror cell member currently working his day job as a bus driver, or while he was pumping gas at a crowded station, or carrying his 10yr old daughter on the hip directly over the pager. It's a lot less indiscriminate than peppering an area with antipersonnel mines, and quite a big improvement over bombing houses in civilian neighborhoods* but it's still bad.
*even though the latter is explicitly not a warcrime if the enemy has stationed military assets and personnel among the civilians - or rather, the warcrime was committed by the other side by using human shields. So why are the pagers no good if blowing up suburbia is ok? You don't know where the former is going to go off, and you need to know. A bomb you can aim, though the collateral damage may be horrible it is something you can estimate. You can choose not to bomb a school, or a hospital, at the very least without 'knocking' first. When you fire blind, you're saying that the worst possible outcome is acceptable, and IMO that's a bright moral line in the sand that should never be crossed. **
**And yeah, Hezbollah and Hamas and their like go there all as a matter of course, which is precisely why I'm fine with blowing them to pieces in a discriminate fashion.
SteveKirk
2hr ago
A bunch of people here probably have NVGs or thermal optics of some kind. I was hunting caterpillars the other day and got curious if they're as well-camouflaged outside the visual spectrum.
Can anyone check?
Amadan
You are capable of doing better, more often, and I wish you would.
2hr ago
Nope, happened to see this belatedly while going through the mod queue.
So, are you going to actually back up anything you claimed?
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
2hr ago
I think both sides fail to put themselves into the mind of a voter who is still uncertain which of the options is the lesser evil.
I think if Trump could frame himself in a way where he's going to be hands-off about abortion and let the states decide, and also hands-off on entitlement programs like Social Security or Medicare, he could more easily win. I believe there's a persistent and reasonable fear that if Trump takes office, he'll let the GOP establishment raid the federal budget and reduce entitlements. That's the sort of fear that motivates centrists, particularly elderly centrists, to vote defensively.
No_one
2hr ago
- the spread of inflammatory rhetoric and disinformation propagate by big tech.
Just..big tech?
Are you really saying it's big tech's fault blacks and many liberals whites believe what's basically blood libel - that is, that police kills thousands of unarmed blacks every year ?
Amadan
You are capable of doing better, more often, and I wish you would.
2hr ago
They are clearly not aligned with our geopolitical objectives.
This is not clear to me. You might disagree with our geopolitical objectives, but Israel and the US seem to be pretty much on the same page about them, even if we don't always agree on strategy and tactics.
If we were a serious country we would withhold aid, confiscate military weapons that have already been delivered, and demand Israel align with US objectives in the region. But our news media, University system, and government are all controlled by Zionists so there's nobody to stop them.
When you said:
Israel can follow that playbook if they want to go to war
I claimed that you would not, in fact, consider that to be more ethical than what they are doing now. So you have now admitted that that's correct. My original question was "What can Israel do in its own defense that you would consider ethically defensible?" So the answer from you is clearly "Nothing" and the answer from @functor is "They can cease to exist, or they can fuck off to a backwater of Russia (and cease to exist)."
So now that we've gotten that out of the way:
Israel escalating the conflict with IED tactics that not even the US has used in its wars/occupations is a level of insolence that is only accepted because we are an occupied government.
"Insolence" implies they owe us fealty, which is ironic when you then claim we are an "occupied government." How can ZOG both be insolent and secretly ruling us?
We did fight wars against asymmetrical adversaries who used terrorist tactics. We did not, nor would we ever, boobytrap civilian office supplies with explosives and send them among the civilian population. That is an IRA tactic or a tactic of the Iraqi insurgency.
That's not remotely close to what the IRA or the Iraqis insurgents did. I notice how very carefully you phrased this: "boobytrap civilian office supplies." It must have taken you some small amount of time to figure out the best way to describe "boobytrapped communications equipment used by the Hezballah" in a way that sounds like they were doing something like planting bombs in copy machines. Golf clap for the clever wording. But we've all seen the news and the videos. They targeted Hezballah pagers and walkie talkies, and almost nobody but Hezballah were injured. Yes, I'm sorry for that 10-year-old girl who was killed (I am certain, in fact, that I feel more genuine regret for this than you do), but no war in history has avoided civilian casualties.
Now let's be real here: you aren't morally offended by Israel's tactics. If they sent snipers to take out Hezballah leaders, you'd be accusing them of escalation. If they dropped bombs and rockets, you'd be accusing them of war crimes. If they sent troops, you'd be accusing them of unprovoked aggression and imperialism. If they used Jewish space lasers to target Hezballah leaders from orbit, you'd accuse them of space terrorism. If they had Harry Potter wands and could Avada Kedavra Hezballah soldiers with zero collateral damage, you'd accuse them of black magic. You don't actually care how Israel responds to its enemies. You object to the fact that they exist.
Which brings me to my other question which I'm sure it just slipped your mind to answer, as you so often forget to answer inconvenient points when pressed:
Israel should negotiate a settlement,
With who? What settlement? What is your brilliant plan for peace in the Middle East? @functor's idea is at least rather straightforward about acknowledging that he doesn't think Israel should exist. But you speak of a "settlement" as if you think there is some meaningful and workable deal the Israelis could actually make that allows them to continue to exist but isn't "insolent" or doesn't cause you to shed crocodile tears over dead Arab children. I remain fascinated to hear what it is.
SteveKirk
2hr ago
Interesting, that's a surprise. I know a lot of eligible people who either just don't file or don't bother to take the credit (because it's tiny for single people and probably audit-bait).
Guess I have a biased sample
Thanks, I'd heard rumors that was the case, but no evidence.
They need to take lessons from Hamas and intertwine their procurement with humanitarian groups. Mossad can't make your stuff explode if it was bought by the red cross and half the pagers went to the Charity Home For Puppies and Photogenic Orphaned Children Who Don't Want Their Dicks Blown Off
Amadan
You are capable of doing better, more often, and I wish you would.
2hr ago
Absolutely not, because I remember this exact same scenario playing out at least three times, and in two of those cases a bet would never have been adjudicated fairly.
Really? Bets were made and stakes were put on the table? I don't remember this. People throw "Want to make a bet on it?" a lot, but I don't recall anyone ever trying to set up a formal wager.
And I'm pretty sure that one catholic girl was banned for pressing them on it at least once.
I wish she were still around to react to being called "that one catholic girl."
I don't know which specific ban you are talking about, but her repeated bans were never because she was saying things mods disagreed with or against someone who enjoyed the mods' favor, but because she had a problem saying things without being an antagonistic and personally insulting about it.
Who's going to judge the bet? Some of the mods are the people from those other cases.
Who? Name names and post links.
Quite a lot of lipo have more than two leads, starting at a third thermistor wire, going up to per cell voltage leads, and eventually going to annoying Apple bullshit.
And even with two leads, if you're manufacturing a thousand battery-bombs, there's a lot of ways to do a one-wire (and ground) protocol to pass data to a microcontroller, which can easily be the size of a grain of rice. Or you could hard-short the battery leads on a battery without builtin overcurrent protections, and use it as a primary for your real explosives -- even a well-contained lipo fire is definitely hot enough to set off most thermal-ignite explosives.
The entire philosophy is based around respecting what consenting adults do. They're fine with restricting what children do.
- Define all X as not-human with some scientific-sounding justification ("brain not developed till 25", "they're closer to gorillas", etc.)
- Claim anyone who disagrees with that definition is in opposition to the Science, and are obviously just in favor of X freedom because they want to have sex with [more generally, exploit] the women in X
- Rinse and repeat for Y, Z, etc. until you've reinvented traditional morality wholesale (more popularly known as "intersectionality")
No, I can't imagine why any freedom-minded person would have any problems with that. From a liberal standpoint, the problem with this strategy in an illiberal milieu is that you can't really take it on directly, and liberals being mistake theorists (and their tendency to be sexual mistake theorists doesn't help that) generally fail to understand that.
Thus, they tend to get baited into attacking (2), when the actual answer is to either go after (1) [which isn't scalable and is still vulnerable to "why do you care so much about hoaxes?", where people who can attack (1) can still be somewhat-credibly accused of having the same motivations as the people who just attack (2) do], or seek/implement/maintain social conditions such that yeschad.jpg is a valid response to (2)- this is being able to respond "all of them" to "how many children have to die before people who have (and will do) nothing wrong will give up their freedom to X" criticisms of [insert civil right here].
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2hr ago
If the Chinese are so easy to bribe why aren't they giving Israel their full-throated support right now? From where I'm sitting it looks to me like China has no real motivation to assist Israel and they definitely don't act like it (understandably, in my view, given how Israel has treated their last imperial patron). As for Russia, I don't actually believe in the antisemitic conspiracy theory that jews are a fifth column who will abuse their economic power to subvert the will of the nation they live in - so I don't think the presence of jews in industry/manufacturing actually means anything when it comes to geopolitics.
zoink
2hr ago
Doesn’t the whole concept of externalized costs undermine this claim?
Capitalism isn't utopian, and most capitalists are willing to let the state address its inadequacies. You acknowledge that this isn't solely a failure of capitalism, but isn't the externalization of costs even greater in bureaucracy or democracy as a whole?
roche
2hr ago
Wireheading, definitely.
Another perspective that's been knocking around in my head is that for ~150 years, we've been burning through residuals from Christianity, and we're discovering that things we took for granted aren't human universals. Your point about promises is exactly right. The last few years have made me feel exactly like those Great War veterans who complained about the decline in manners, values, and behavior in the youth. It seemed like we'd reached a new equilibrium but something tells me we're about to slide even further.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
I still think that overall, mentioning the cat eating thing was a mistake by Trump, because it allowed the Democrats to reframe the debate in a way which is very advantageous for them.
Can you point to a statement offered or an issue raised by a Republican that has not allowed Democrats to reframe the debate in a way that is very advantageous to them?
Stingray3906
2hr ago
Chuck Todd wrote a fantastic op-ed about the current state of our political polarization: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/chuck-todd-unite-nation-trump-harris-election-rcna171303
It comes down to (1) Our acceptance embrace of inflammatory rhetoric to "own the [other side]", (2) our ever-present, chronically online culture, and (3) the spread of inflammatory rhetoric and disinformation propagate by big tech.
Some notable quotes:
"The problem with political discourse in America right now is that we are all stuck in a social media funhouse mirror booth. What we see isn’t what is, and how we’re seen isn’t who we are. And yet, here we are."
"But just because Trump started it doesn’t mean his opponents have the high moral ground when they single out him and some of his supporters for personal derision. I still want to live in a society where “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
"Come Jan. 21, we all are going to be living in the same country and sharing the same group of people as our elected representatives. We need leaders who accept that there are major political differences between us and that governing needs to be incremental and not radical.
"Right now, our political information ecosystem doesn’t reward incrementalism or nuance, instead punishing both and, more to the point, rewarding those who make up the best stories.
"Most Americans have an instinct of de-escalation when things get heated, and yet most elected officials in the modern era are incentivized to behave the opposite way."
MollieTheMare
2hr ago
Yeah, I managed to track down some unconfirmed videos of the reported explosions. It does look larger and more violent than you would get with even the most kinetic LiPo fire. In that case thought, the battery must have been significantly below standard capacity or have the dimensions way out of spec. Maybe that's fine though, like having to pull every radio and pager with a pillowly LiPo out of action effectively dismantles the communication network.
You could probably find the explosives by x-raying a Hizballah battery a some random guy's battery of the same type.
Explosives have a specific density, I've heard they show up on x-ray the same way cheese does. If you want to give someone a fun time, gift them some oval shaped hard cheese, pack it next to electronics..
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