domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
jeroboam
1m ago
Biden is now a lame duck President. What can he do to help secure his legacy in the small remaining time he has left? Here's a couple ideas:
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End the Ukraine War. The war is coming to end soon in the next year anyway (80% chance). Trump might get credit. Why not strike a deal now and make a bid for the Nobel Peace Prize? Obviously, there are pitfalls here. But in the end, it will be seen in the same light as Afghanistan. Messy, but ultimately necessary.
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National parks. This is a common thing that Presidents do to secure their legacy. Biden is the first President not to create a new National Park since Truman. Surely they can dig one up (hopefully better than the St. Louis Arch).
I hope he resists the urge to issue a bunch of unpopular ultra-left executive orders before he leaves. No doubt his staff will want him to do that, but ultimately this is going on his permanent record, not theirs.
What else could Biden do to salvage what will no doubt be seen as a bottom-tier Presidency?
eudemonist
1m ago
So, I had suggested this in response to someone asking about ways to disrupt the process rather than accomplish actual fraud, and so I tossed it out there with that in mind, thinking that the investigations and sorting of good from bad ballots post-hoc would be a wrench in the gears to sow discord. Application to successful fraud with this method would be somewhat limited.
However, in Pennsylvania any registered voter can "Vote In Person By Mail Before Election Day" by providing a valid Penn driver's license number--not a license, but a number--in person at a designated location, and apply for, receive, complete, and submit a ballot all at one time. Problems with this approach are that 1) in-person limits the number you can crank out to one per visit; 2) employees at the designated locations are finite in number, so while you could maybe get away with a couple visits depending on the size of the office, even that would be pushing it, and 3) if those voters ended up trying to vote on Election Day, they wouldn't be able to because a ballot had already been submitted in their name--which is fine for chaos, but not good for successful fraud. The latter of those could perhaps be gotten around if the fraudster limits themselves to inactive voters, but would require eithier getting really lucky none of them pick this year to become active or somehow having knowledge they won't, like perhaps knowing they're dead or have moved states. Alternatively, an associate in the Clerk's office would make things a lot easier.
Generally speaking, though, I think for successful fraud you'd be almost better inventing voters from whole cloth.
roystgnr
4m ago
I could take or leave the music, but I do have to admit that PowerPoint-97-looking music video is amusing.
She seems to have some impressive vocal control, though. Flipping through other videos, it sounds like this one is way above her usual register, and yet she's still doing smooth glissandos up to the highest notes?
oats_son
4m ago
Are politics in Japan as vicious as they have been here lately? Can you summarize the "sides"? Maybe material for Transnational Thursday.
No_one
7m ago
This belongs to the WW thread, I think.
And yeah, social media is a great timesink good for.. very little.
No_one
8m ago
I don't even know who a single of these people is.
How does one even get exposure to pop girls?
Olivia Rodrigo
I thought that song "Vampire" was alright, if a bit melodramatic. Can't imagine getting that bent out of shape about some dude you probably didn't even have sex with.
I’ve liked Charli XCX since 2013 and she’s only gotten better since
There were a few songs off the How I'm Feeling Now album I enjoyed, but I found the marketing campaign surrounding brat so annoying and inescapable (not least of which the "Kamala is brat" "endorsement") that I'm refusing to listen to her as an act of protest.
campfire
11m ago
That’s the only one of her hits I don’t find obnoxious. I mostly can’t stand the new crop of pop girls. Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter have some okay singles but their most popular songs are annoying, Espresso has some of the worst rhymes I’ve heard in a while. On the other hand, I’ve liked Charli XCX since 2013 and she’s only gotten better since.
justmotteingaround
16m ago
Its worth keeping in mind the pitfalls of the media landscape. A fund manger posts screenshots of an AP article to 1.5M followers, with the incisive commentary "wait, what?!" What does the payoff matrix look like in this environment?
On one hand, information is spread widely and quickly. Great! On the other hand, I have an aunt who has long told me that Hitler put fluoride in the water to shrink the pineal glad of the populace, reducing their creativity and making them obey. She teaches anatomy and physiology at a community college, and loves listening to Coast To Coast on the AM radio. Crank it up fuckers!
But what does the article say? Well, the AP reported on this "long awaited study" two months ago. We didn't find this out this until quite recently. However, it seemingly only applies to 0.6% of US water systems, and then again only to children and pregnant women. For adults, more study is needed. The 300 page report was done by the National Toxicology Program, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. In 2015 Federal authorities revised their recommended level of fluoridation down from 1.2 mg/L to 0.07mg/L. This study pertains to levels of fluoridation of 1.5mg/L and above. How much above? I don't know, but the WHO currently thinks that 1.5mg/L is safe. The EPA actually mandates that water systems contain less than 4mg/L, the impetus in that case being fluorosis. This study extends research done in China in 2006 about cognitive effects of fluoride - naturally occurring and otherwise - and wait, what!? This is fucking booooooring. A bunch of nerds debating a the effects of less than one PPM of fluoride in a country that already recommends half the level studied? Fuck that. Give me Hitler. Give me chemtrails. Inject me with autism. Lets blast some Coast to Coast on the AM radio!
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
21m ago
No, people would fall right in line just like during COVID, and any that didn't would be forced in line by government force, just like during COVID. There might be some violent resistance in Red areas until some high-profile loudly-praised shootings of the resisters.
No_one
26m ago
I spent almost all the entirety of its free time playing Factorio: Space Age. Even to the point of neglecting the imaginary girls and thus giving my GPU a well-deserved rest.
Yeah, fun week.
population
But what about area? Personally, I feel that a useful statistic for comparing the "sizes" of geographic entities with significantly different population densities is the product of population and area.
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K. of Bavaria: 9.4⋅1011 people⋅km2
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K. of Austria: 7.6⋅1011 people⋅km2
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K. of Pennsylvania: 1.6⋅1012 people⋅km2
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K. of Virginia: 6.3⋅1011 people⋅km2
Also, what really matters is the inherent prestige of the title, not what the title actually controls. The ERE was an empire even when reduced to one province.
I think the US was a Kingdom-tier title at the time of the founding (given that it was plausible for the British Empire to vassalize it) and became an Empire in the usual way once it de facto controlled 80% of its de jure territory.
Well, we can imagine that the de jure map changes as population density skyrockets with the colonization of virgin land. Start with the sparsely-populated colonies as duchies, the Dominion of New England as a failed kingdom, and the USA as a successful kingdom. Then at some point (between EU4 and V3) population density becomes high enough that the states now are important enough to be considered kingdoms. The sea-to-shining-sea USA can be a hegemony, encompassing the empires of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the South, the Midwest, Louisiana, and the West. (Or something vaguely similar to that.)
Shrike
32m ago
Correct, but that was two years ago. Even if the Russians still don't have front-like troop superiority, they have larger manpower reserves and have narrowed the deployed troop gap considerably.
No_one
32m ago
Thx. I also note the UA numbers are probably bullshit - we can be reasonably sure how many Russians died, but no one's counting Ukrainians and it's a state secret too.
yofuckreddit
42m ago
Agreed. I can't believe this whole planet fell for the scam, to be honest. I guess double-walled steel water bottles were more expensive in the 90s or something but...
Folamh3
49m ago
Earlier this week, I said that everything I've learnt about Chappell Roan was against my will. But after repeated exposure to her single "Good Luck, Babe!" I must confess that it's grown on me and the hype might be warranted: this didn't top the singles chart here for no reason.
johnfabian
59m ago
Depends on where you live; varying with the source tap water can be awful or quite tasty. The tap water in Toronto is delicious, in my opinion.
It's just a motte-and-bailey, because "race realists" would be quite happy to carve up races further for precision (and do ime) but their opponents have no interest in that task at all.
Admitting that the colloquial definition of "Asian" isn't fit for purpose and maybe we should speak of "East Asians" and so on has never, AFAICT, won someone over to some sort of race realist view. If anything, people just seem to ignore it altogether and go back to attacking the model that has like five races.
The classification based in the idea of notable biological differences itself is the sin.
Lazuli
1hr ago
American workers are very rich by world standards. Claiming that they can barely afford necessities, when even the lowest paid among them make several times what people in other countries make or what the average American made a couple generations ago is absurd.
The original point was never to compare American workers to those across the rest of the world.
Even someone earning the minimum wage in the US, which is rare, makes far more than most people in the world and makes more than the average person did in the 60's, even after adjusting for the cost of living.
Wages are up, but the price of goods in the United States is outpacing that growth to the point that lower- and middle-class people making decent wages still can barely afford the necessities, e.g., rent, groceries, gas, childcare. Swing state voters said this was their biggest concern and hope (and believe) Trump and the Republicans will come to the rescue.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
people who won
The person who won is an elderly, lazy reality TV star with somewhat idiosyncratic political views with a long history across multiple careers of not honouring obligations to people who helped him out. He isn't seeking re-election and doesn't have a plausible dynastic successor (the Kushners don't want it, Don Jr and Eric aren't up to it, and Barron is a long way from 35) so he doesn't need you for anything.
The people who think they won will have exactly as much say as Trump (or whoever controls access to him if he becomes too senile to make decisions) wants them to. They can say they won't take no for an answer, but they say what they want and Trump does what he wants.
FWIW, my best guess is that both the upside and downside potential of the Trump administration will be limited by Trump's laziness and lack of attention to detail. This is what we saw in his first term, and also what we saw with Boris Johnson in the UK, who is a somewhat similar character.
Tanista
1hr ago
And that also isn’t a good reason to say religion is unimportant. Just because Southern Baptists, Anglicans, and Greek Orthodox Christians are all Christians, that doesn’t mean they’re identical or interchangeable in obvious ways.
The people who use the "social construction" deepity are ironically the people who take the thesis the least seriously.
Imagine if every human disappeared and alien scientists had to puzzle out the purpose of these giant buildings and steel veins that dot the landscape. Why some buildings on a certain coast are built to different specifications, why standards vary.
These things are clearly artificial but no archaeologist or historian worth his salt would start and stop at "people made this, so they just made it up because".
It really is just a blank slateist motte-and-bailey.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
The one thing I didn’t have a response to was when she brought up the fact that she has friends who are “undocumented”.
There are nuanced approaches. I wrote a kind of steelman a few months back. There really are bureaucratic SNAFUs. And the United States Government is truly not kind when an actual SNAFU happens; they are incredibly by-the-book, even when that book is extremely opaque and confusing. Even though there are significant pro-immigrant advocacy organizations out there who will throw every argument they can at the courts on a pro bono basis (yes, they'll throw utterly silly arguments at the wall which should be rejected, too), the courts are for the most part pretty deferential to the gov't in the realm of immigration. The threat of penalties like being banned from the US for ten years can be bandied about for surprisingly minor things.
Now, the trick is to try to divide that group, who mostly are at least trying to do things legally, but who get caught up in some garbage, from the group of folks who are literally just walking across the border, not even trying. Rhetorically, this may get you a long way with your girlfriend. Of course, that trick is surprisingly more difficult to translate into actual policy, and she may honestly be fully justified in thinking that Donald Trump is not going to thread that needle. He may genuinely make things more difficult for some number of sympathetic folks. But of course, now we're getting into the land of tradeoffs, where it's hard to make good estimates. How many people in the 'mostly good' category are really going to suffer? How many people in the 'not even trying' category are going to be kept out? It's probably impossible to predict what fine-grained policy choices will ultimately be made up/down the chain and how those choices will ultimately come out in terms of the tradeoffs.
If you can get her at least this far, and she's capable of understanding that the truly apocalyptic-sounding BS that people are spouting off (e.g., "They're gonna deport all green card holders!") is completely irrelevant and that the most likely outcome is some shifting around of tradeoffs, which may or may not impact her friends... and that you do feel sympathy for any 'mostly good' folks who get further harmed by the tradeoff game, then you're probably in luck. If not, and she simply can't extricate her mind from the most insane propaganda takes? Whelp, you've got decisions to make.
Throwaway05
1hr ago
Wokeness is widely popular with women and necessarily involves holding together a lot of contradictory opinions, so the training is out there. Consider the modern dating market - women still want a man who is masculine, pays, etc. but they also want feminist girl bosses at the same time. These things don't work together, but they manage.
Cultural acceptability is what is normal. Lots of culturally acceptable believes are unwise or harmful, however.
One of the comments on the video:
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