domain:jessesingal.substack.com
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
8hr ago
My personal belief is that the election was "stolen" but I take a very limited perspective that I don't think really provides the information you're looking for - I think that the amount of actual electoral fraud wasn't that much greater or smaller than what is normal for American elections, but the "steal" largely happened when the intelligence community knowingly lied to the public about the provenance of the Hunter Biden laptop. There have been studies done which plausibly make the case that this actually tipped the election towards Biden, and it isn't really something that anyone on either side of politics tries to disagree with.
YoungAchamian
8hr ago
I was introduced to the term "titalitarian"
Fun, and barely relevant anecdote, I was born very premature, like so premature that it was unlikely I was going to survive. I'm told I also cried nonstop for milk but never could latch on. The La Leche consultant (Activist) was absolutely nasty to my mother about allowing me to be bottle fed. It didn't matter if I died to her as long as I was breast-fed. Sufficed to say she reduced my mother to tears and a breakdown and my father almost got arrested throwing the activist out. I can totally imagine these people as the sort of crusaders that then get infected with woke-beliefs, but this is very much leopard-eating-my-face for them.
ABigGuy4U
8hr ago
This nuke talk coming out of Ukraine seems absolutely insane. Arguably just this report alone gives Russia cause to use nuclear weapons against them, much more if they actually go and try to do that. It’s especially bad when combined with the constant grouching about how they need weapons that can hit the city of Moscow. Is Ukraine trying to provoke that kind of response?
Felagund
8hr ago
I assume the question here has an intended answer (there wasn't much fraud).
Anyway, asking anyone who does think the 2020 election was stolen, do you have any examples of things that seem like obvious problems or evidence of substantial fraud? I'm currently inclined to think that there wasn't anything of that sort, but a lot of people seem really firmly convinced, so I'd be interested in seeing the evidence.
DirtyWaterHotDog
8hr ago
Will the baby latch, will the latch hold, how to avoid painful latching, how to deal with chafing,
Doesn't pumping solve all 4 problems ?
YE_GUILTY
8hr ago
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
It's probably my mere-mortal unsophistication compared to highfalutin' lawyers, but "eleventy gazillion dollars" civil judgments seem much, much more like violations of the spirit of the Eighth Amendment than prohibitions on sidewalk camping do.
FarmReadyElephants
8hr ago
A prominent, vocal greengrocer taking down his "worker's of the world, unite!" sign is a big deal.
Rov_Scam
8hr ago
Se my comment above, but AOC will have it a lot easier than Kamala, if only because it's a lot easier to backtrack from a position you took a decade earlier as an idealistic 29-year-old who was new to public office than from a position you took in the last election cycle as a 55-year-old sitting US Senator who had been in politics for 15 years by that point.
I mean, the "my values haven't changed" schtick wasn't good, but I can't imagine her saying anything that would have played better. California is an oil-producing state so she couldn't use ignorance as an excuse. The technology was old enough by 2019 that most of the specific arguments in favor of its environmental benefits had been made. There was no new information that came out between 2020 and 2024. If she'd been against fracking in 2012 and changed course in 2019 it would have been easy to give her a pass, but there's really no good explanation. The real explanation is probably that she's against a fracking ban now for the same reason she was in favor of one in 2019 — because that's the position her advisors told her would give her the best chance of winning, which leads one to wonder what her actual thoughts on the matter are.
If Jones had killed those kids the civil suite would have been a fraction of this.
Edit: How to get the answer to a question online? Be wrong. I appreciate all the work; so what I am seeing is that if Jones did kill all these kids damages might approach this judgment which I think pretty clearly demonstrates just how egregious this judgment is.
Rov_Scam
9hr ago
Honestly, the immigration thing is the easiest issue on which to thread that needle. The people crossing the border are mostly normal people in really desperate situations who hope they can have a better life in the US. While there are practical reasons why we can't let everyone in, Trump and the Republicans lack any sense of compassion whatsoever and have dehumanized them almost completely, giving them license to enact whatever brutal policies they can dream up. His political career literally rests on his belief that the vast majority of illegals are rapists and fentanyl traffickers who are only here so they can commit crimes. Her earlier positions were merely a reaction to Trump's policies at the time, and she was also young and idealistic. Ten years in politics has taught her the practical realities of governance, but we at least need to acknowledge that we're dealing with real people here and not faceless monsters.
Some of her other positions are going to be harder to backtrack from, but she has the advantage of coming into office young enough that she both gets a pass for her earlier positions and develops into a shrewd politician by the time she needs to.
some
9hr ago
Let's say Germany decided to bring the hammer down on some Shoah denier. It sentences him to life in prison, and assuming he is quite young and genetically excellent, he spends 100 years behind bars. This is 876600 hours. Each hour of Shoah deniers life spent unfree would have to valued at 1255 USD in order for his punishment to equal to that meted out to Jones.
This would be a draconian punishment by any standard, yet as you can see it pales to camparison to Jones's. And Jones denied an atrocity of a much much smaller scale.
I feel like "killed twice as many people" is pretty obviously "more lethal"?
There were 16,000 murders in the US in 2018, but "only" 3,340 murders in El Salvador. I guess this means the US was "pretty obviously" 5 times as dangerous as El Salvador?
No, because DUH, the US population is fifty times the size of El Salvador.
Even more pertinent example: millions of people have been killed with guns since they were invented, but nukes have only killed a quarter-million people. I guess this means guns are "pretty obviously" more lethal than nukes?
No, because DUH, hundreds of millions of bullets have been fired in combat situations, but nukes have only been deployed in combat situations a grand total of twice.
It's so obnoxious that you're just pretending you don't know what the phrases "per capita" or "case fatality rate" mean. Or pretending that you don't know that an older population will always have a higher death rate than a younger population, because that's what "life expectancy" means. Or pretending that you don't know that one can easily end up with worse health outcomes from contracting a moderately severe illness in a developing nation vs. contracting a very severe illness in a developed nation, because of differences in the standard of medical care. Or pretending you don't know the difference between "an otherwise healthy person contracts an extremely lethal disease and dies" vs. "an old person who has been in out of hospital for years as their body slowly breaks down picks up an opportunistic infection which finishes them off (when a young healthy person would have shrugged off the same infection without even needing to be hospitalised)". I mean, you obviously do understand all of the above. No one thinks a disease which only kills 1% of people it infects is more lethal than one which kills 10%. To spell it out, in case it wasn't already abundantly clear:
- Case fatality rate and infection fatality rate are the key metrics for gauging how lethal a disease is. Covid has killed 7 million people, but there have been at least 7 hundred million confirmed cases, meaning its case fatality rate is 1%. Its infection fatality rate might be 0.5% or even lower. By contrast, 90% of people who contract HIV ultimately die from it, generally because of an opportunistic infection they're unable to fight off because they're immunocompromised.
- Per capita death rates also matter, just like when comparing murder rates between countries. The global population has increased by 2.5 billion people since the start of the HIV crisis. Had there been 7 billion people on the planet in 1981, the death toll from HIV would have been proportionately higher.
- As above, but also consider the fact that the total population of the most at-risk demographics for HIV (homosexual males, heroin addicts etc.) is vastly smaller than the total population of the most at-risk demographics for Covid (old people mainly, plus immunocompromised people). In 2020, there were 735 million people aged 65 or older. In 1981, I doubt there were more than 200 million homosexual males and heroin users in the entire world.
- Older people are more likely to die than younger people - this is what the term "life expectancy" means. All things being equal, an older country will have a higher all-cause death rate than a younger one. At the start of the HIV crisis, the median age in the US was just shy of 30 years; at the start of Covid, it was 37. If the world population had been younger in 2020, the death toll from Covid would have been far lower. This is plainly demonstrated by the fact that many countries which had unusually low rates of Covid deaths per capita also have median ages far below the global average.
None of what I'm saying is controversial or in dispute: this is all extremely basic medicine. When ranking how dangerous diseases are, we take all this into account, which is why no one would take you seriously if you claimed that AIDS is less dangerous than pneumonia, even though pneumonia kills around 4 million people every year - because, duh, in many if not most cases pneumonia is just the straw that broke the camel's back, the illness that finally finished off an old person (or indeed a person with AIDS!) who was bound to die soon anyway, and even for old people the case fatality rate is less than 50%.
From the person who is so gung-ho about "female" only having one meaning, you sure seem eager to redefine words all of the sudden.
I cannot believe my gender-critical opinions are now being used as ammunition with which to rubbish my apparently controversial claim that "diseases which kill a higher proportion of those infected with them are more lethal than those which kill a lower proportion". I look forward to the day when I tell someone that murders/100k of population is a more accurate gauge of how violent a country is than absolute number of murders, and they scoff and tell me how can they believe that, coming from someone who thinks Trump isn't Literally Hitler™?
Straight up, the important question: do you really think Covid would have had the same death toll if we had never imposed any restrictions, never asked anyone to mask up, etc.?
The meta-analysis from Johns Hopkins estimated that NPIs probably prevented 0.2% of Covid deaths, which seems near enough to zero as to make functionally no difference.
And NPIs were not costless actions: they caused thousands of additional deaths both in the short-term (suicides, drug overdoses and other deaths of despair) and long-term (many health services deemed "nonessential" were shut down for extended periods of time during Covid, meaning there are tens of thousands of people in the world right now who have cancer and don't know it, or who know it and would have received treatment for it several years earlier if not for the hysterical overreaction to Covid). It's rather telling that the only country in the EU which never imposed a lockdown, Sweden, actually ended up with fewer Covid deaths per capita than the EU average, suggesting that whatever effects lockdowns etc. can be completely dwarfed or negated by local factors (population density, climate, age of population etc.). I think most of the deaths from Covid were baked in as soon as it left Wuhan, and even if NPIs prevented a few deaths on the margin (or, more accurately, allowed a few old people to live a few extra months before something else finished them off) they did not come close to passing a cost-benefit analysis.
But can you acknowledge the very basic idea that at least one (1) extra person would have died?
This is such an obnoxious and emotionally manipulative way of phrasing a question. Governmental policies are supposed to pass a cost-benefit analysis. "One person who would've died didn't die as a result of this policy, ergo it's a roaring success" is a standard which literally any government policy in the world could meet with ease, ergo it's meaningless.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
9hr ago
I wanted to make a meme like that for rdrama.net around Easter time with the soy devil screaming DO NOT REDEEM to bloodied Chad Jesus wearing the crown of thorns but was too lazy. Anyways, there's always next year...
In terms of AOC, this clip of hers asking Trump voters for who they follow came up on my Twitter feed the other day, so she could be actually trying to figure out why the Dems failed this election. Of course, many have called this just a Hundred Flowers Campaign, though I'd think, as a NY representative, she just couldn't do a whole lot to negatively affect these podcasts and internet celebs, so I'd actually take her at her word on this, which is surprising to me. I don't keep track of her, so I'm not sure how much of a woke true believer she is versus a leftist socialist making shrewd use of the advantages bestowed upon her by her genes within the woke environment that she inhabits, but I could believe she's the latter and ready to drop the trans ideology stuff if they seem to be disadvantageous to her political career (edit: I also stumbled on some rumors that she's pregnant, which certainly could transform her views very quickly - we'll find out within 9 months, I suppose).
Whether or not this represents Democrats coming to see the extremes of gender ideology as a political liability, I honestly think it might. When I've checked out clips from CNN, MSNBC, or NYTimes, Washington Post podcasts, i.e. media where I'd expect the mainstream Democratic view to be heavily overrepresented, I've been pleasantly surprised by how much actual self-reflection there is about how not distancing themselves from the woke side of the culture wars hurt Democrats and how little of the more expected "it's all the racist/misogynist white/black/Hispanic men's fault" narrative there is (still too much of the latter and too little of the former). In terms of high budget failures, 2024 has been the year of the woke, with a number of films, TV shows, video games, and a political party that fit the woke profile having essentially wasted literally billions of dollars. In any given failure, it's been easy to cope by pointing to non-woke reasons for the failure, but if you're greedy or power-hungry enough, that kind of pattern won't escape your notice.
I don't think this represents some major pivot by the party, though. They're coming to see it as a liability and making small corrections. What I'm hoping for is that in 2026, we'll see Democrats in contested local and Congressional elections finding success from specifically distancing themselves from the extremes of gender ideology and the like, allowing them to defeat other, more extreme Dems in the primaries, and the Republican opponents in the close 50/50 races. That'd be a sign that some actual progress is being made. However, if the next 2 years turns out to be disappointing for the electorate - which I think is the modal case for any presidential election - that'd leave the Republicans vulnerable to losing to extreme Democrats, which could embolden the extreme gender ideologues once again.
When will the Dems learn? Coastal elites lose elections.
America only has 2 swingable regions that matter:
- The great lakes mega region [1]
Includes Mich, Wisc & Eastern PA. All 3 states have swung together for decades. - Southwestern Sun belt [2]
This includes Arizona & Nevada. Both states are growing rapidly and have a massive (30+%) swingable Latino population. The tiny black population means that an alienated white populace + unenthusiastic Latino population will certainly lose you both states. They tend to swing together too. Both went Blue-senate, red-presidency this year.
AOC would be horrible for both these regions. AOC is young. No reason to force it. Show your wider appeal by becoming NY Governor. That's America's 4th most powerful elected position after President, CA Governor & Texas Governor. Big improvements to NY state should give her enough visibility and time to become a Presidential candidate.
But for the next decade, the democratic candidate must identify with one of the above 2 regions.
The 3 nationally recognized candidates from this region are:
- Pete (Iowa)
- Whitmer (Mich)
- Kelly (Az)
Well, look at that. They are also the 3 most liked active democrats.
I am biased towards Pete because he's charismatic, doesn't treat republicans like idiots (has a solid fox news relationship) and is a pro-transit YIMBY. He is also Gay in a lowkey, pro-family way. I don't much about Whitmer. Kelly's dedicated husband + Top gun + Astronaut story is an incredible sell. If only he wasn't bald.
It's still very early, but among those who are more tuned in, how do people around you perceive these 3 politicians ?
Random insane stat:
In the last 50 years, every Republican president has been a coastal elite (Trump, Reagan, Bushes) and no Democratic president has been both coastal and elite (Carter, Clinton, Obama, Biden).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
9hr ago
The problem with the values side is the values aren't really verifiable.
This, but there's also another problem: changes in values can go either way. If anyone can become American by adopting "American values"… what if they change their mind about said values? What about natural-born citizens who stop believing in those American values? Do they lose their citizenship?
Of course not, for several reasons, one of which is the difficulty of verification you note. But notice that this creates a ratchet — there are multiple ways to become an American, but far narrower paths to cease being one. (AIUI, renouncing American citizenship is actually very difficult.)
(One might draw a comparison here to how an atheist (ethnic) Jew and a gentile convert to Judaism are still both Jewish.)
Tanista
9hr ago
can increase its appeal to young men.
A nickname like "Momala" attached to AOC will take on a whole different sheen with Zoomers men, that's for sure.
Being hot worked for Trudeau.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
9hr ago
I’m okay with the DNC pivoting to “no step on snek,” but I’m not holding my breath.
We’re getting Newsom 2028 and we’re going to like it.
Pynewacket
9hr ago
I mean, maybe one can say that parts of the Secret Service seemed remarkably unconcerned should something happen to him under their "protection," but 'if someone should take him out for us, that would be good' ≠ 'we need to take this guy out'.
too many weird issues with the situation and handling of it, to be just a lone wolf attack without institutional backing.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
9hr ago
This week in the dankest timeline: Satire publication The Onion buys Alex Jones’ Infowars at auction with Sandy Hook families’ backing.
Yes, a site for unbelievable comedy playing to the biases of the gullible is now owned by the Onion. It appears they intend to use it to promote gun control. I can only hope this is presented in the style of existing InfoWars schlock.
While I deeply disagree with gun control activists, I’d much rather the site goes to them than to Jones’s merchandising companies. One of them was apparently the runner-up. But it’s alright for Jones: he’s allegedly on the short list for Trump’s next press secretary. Wait, no, that was last year. It was also only ever going to be a temporary fling, but that’s a given for the position.
I suppose Jones will have to keep shouting at globalists under a different brand.
Ezra Klein actually brought up Obama's lie to the Pod Save America guys who worked for him. No one contested that it was a lie btw.
He identified a different reason the trans stuff sunk Harris: both Harris and the ACLU are fucking stupid.
That sounds harsh but that was the tone. He was as angry as Klein gets, furious that the ACLU would even send out an exam (a paper trail!) on a policy that was almost designed to be maximally offensive and that Harris was dumb enough to say she supported and actioned it on tape instead of ignoring it or simply handing it in.
In essence, they didn't lie as good or as smart as Obama did.
I think the trans thing legitimately is a heavier lift but I think he has a point.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
9hr ago
And regardless, the message this sends to guys is that they can lose enormous chunks of wealth in a divorce (and thanks to no-fault, the cheating part is optional!) and so they probably shouldn't risk getting married if their assets are considerable.
Bezos married Scott before founding Amazon; his wealth was made while he was married to her.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9hr ago
Breastfeeding has not received quite as much cultural attention as childbirth, for reasons I can only guess at.
Yes, yes it has. Screaming about breastfeeding has been A Thing for a while now.
I'm well aware, which is why I said "not . . . quite as much . . . as" rather than "none at all."
Tanista
9hr ago
How well that plays in four years will depend on how badly Trump's border policy is carried out over his second term, but since the worst case for her is "Trump's Executive Orders don't make any big photogenic mistakes and the civil service who has to carry out his orders also don't make any big photogenic mistakes", I'm betting she still ends up with some swing-voter-friendly territory to stake out.
No. The worst case is that the left makes mistakes and punches itself out trying to stop deportations of the wrong sorts (they love a lost cause) and blow all their powder.
Then Trump's deportations proceed and go even further, the numbers drop compared to Biden and the Overton Window is shifted because people feel deportation wasn't so bad. Maybe let little Elio stay but still.
Some schools secretly socially transition children. Some locales will take children out of parents' custody if they fail to support transition. This is not all right wing paranoia.
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