domain:questioner.substack.com
Dean
Flairless
1m ago
Strictly speaking, any evolutionary / branching system can look like a horshoe if you zoom close enough to see the modeled divergence.
< is just the more angular form of C, and family branches can easily share traits (and re-merge, Hapsburg-style).
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2m ago
GoatGuns
Funko pops for the red tribe?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
4m ago
A world that would turn on Israel for imposing these conditions would not impose these conditions on Israel lest it must turn on itself.
If somebody imprisons innocent people in their dungeon and uses them for slave labor people don't actually find it hypocritical to sentence that person to prison. The world in fact did not object to imposing the same conditions on the nazis (death) that the nazis did to the jews. More importantly, those Israelis could simply flee as refugees or return to the country their parents left from - they're actively choosing to remain in their genocidal (remember that we're still talking about the hypothetical so the argument that they haven't been convicted yet is irrelevant) ethnostate. The fact that they are unable to feed themselves because they prioritised ethnic cleansing over sustainability is not really going to engender much sympathy or charity from the outside world.
Somewhere north of 70% of Israelis were born in Israel.
This isn't actually a statistic that's relevant at all by itself. If you're the descendant of someone from an EU country, you're able to get an EU passport - it doesn't matter where you were born. The actually relevant statistic here would be how many Israelis are able to get a passport/citizenship for another country. All this statistic really does is establish that at least 30% of the country could just immediately fuck off back home if they objected to Israeli policy.
AnonymousActuary
4m ago
you can't forget the "in the middle of a pandemic" part. For two months everyone had been told the most important thing to do was slow the spread of the virus. People sacrificed immensely in those two months to do so. And then, suddenly, no, the most important thing is for people to protest, and riot, and loot.
Fauci at least was consistent in saying they were a bad idea. I won't give him much, but I will give him that.
There's been a myth that there was not a rise in COVID afterwards that was pretty easily debunked by looking at city by city data - a lot of cities had spikes a few weeks after protests started. SpottedToad (may he RIP) had some great threads on it back in the day...
Dean
Flairless
6m ago
This is the lovable sort of self-confidence/smug/humor that, well, I love.
Thanks for the smile.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10m ago
Except, because it is not a literal machine but is actually humans implementing complicated emergent behavior, it does not fully embody any of those. It can be bargained with, because the humans that compose it can be bargained with: both individually and collectively. It can feel pity and remorse and fear, because the humans that compose it can feel pity and remorse and fear.
It is currently engaged in a strategy of encroachment: defecting more and more often and more severely in order to exploit the forgiveness of its opponents and see what it can get away with. But this is NOT what a defect bot does. A defect bot defects: always. A defect bot cannot pretend to be anything other than a defect bot, because it has no degrees of freedom with which to signal anything. It does not pretend to cooperate or tit for tat in an attempt to fool its opponents, it just defects.
Again, look at the world around us. Are we currently in the middle of a civil war gunning down each other in the streets? No. That's what maximum defection looks like. We're not there yet. I hope we never get there. And strategic, proportional punishment to defections without escalating maximally is a good way to fight off the encroachment without immediately getting to that state. Even if your opponents are engaged in bad-faith behavior and you need to stop them, deceiving yourself into thinking they're something other than what they are is not strategic. Exaggerations don't help you learn or prepare effective strategy. Maybe you think the appropriate punishments need to be much harsher than they currently are in order to more strongly disincentivize future defections, but this only works because the opponents are not actual defect bots (who ignore punishment and can't stop defecting ever, and can only be solved with death).
Dean
Flairless
12m ago
Sure. Agreement with this is more, not less, market reason to cancel.
Media market analytics tends to go by national/regional demographics, not partisan demographics. Flat cost decisions (such as hiring) that might make sense if you view yourself in a 320 million market make a bit less sense if you're in a 'merely' 160 million market due to a political filter.
If the 160 lost market might be recovered, you fire the excess and bring in new help. But if the 160 market can't be recovered, you still fire the excess.
DiscourseMagnus
12m ago
This has got to be one of the starkest and most pathetic instances I've ever seen of the "pseudocomedian political commentator shielded from scrutiny on the basis of their supposed comedian status" complex.
At least Kimmel can rest easy knowing that the Biden administration as recently as last year was publicly mooting to global business elites how to address the sort of disinformation that Kimmel was perpetrating in his remarks, and which has had reoccuring Democratic elite support for years.
Polls indicate that Americans’ trust in the media is at an all-time low. Those on the Right often refer to much of what the mainstream media reports as “fake news,” while those on the Left characterize much of the reporting from the Right as a “disinformation” problem. However, the approach to resolving these concerns remains partisan.
This issue has come into sharper focus recently following comments by John Kerry, former secretary of state under President Obama, at a World Economic Forum conference. He described the First Amendment as “a major block” to achieving accountability in media reporting on facts.
Kerry’s remarks underscore the delicate balance between protecting free speech and addressing what different political factions consider fake news or disinformation.
“There’s a lot of discussion now on how to curb those entities to guarantee accountability on facts,” Kerry said. “But if people go to one source that has an agenda and puts out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to just hammer it out of existence.”
Kerry noted that the problem of disinformation is unique to democracies, where no single leader has the authority to define what constitutes factual information. He suggested that the upcoming elections in November could lead to changes, depending on the outcomes for Congress and the White House.
“What we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to implement change,” he said.
Kerry’s comments have revived sentiments expressed by progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2021, when she called for greater restraint on media practices during an Instagram live video.
“We’re going to have to figure out how we reign in our media environment so you can’t just spew misinformation and disinformation,” she said. “It’s one thing to have differing opinions, but it’s another entirely to just say things that are false. So that’s something we’re looking into.”
Well, Kerry's monkey paw seems to have well curled on parts of that. But Kimmel's remarks on the partisan nature of the political assassination-
"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them"
-would be an almost textbook example of disinformation, i.e. false information intended to mislead. In this case, a false claim that the political assassination was a MAGA partisan, to mislead from the already apparent and growing weight of evidence of a left-partisan.
I'm sure if the Biden administration had won, it would have applied its desired rules, fairly.
GroundNews seems aight, I've recommended it to normies after repeated exposure from sponsorships though do not use it myself.
GoatGuns look kinda cool and I've considered getting one to fidget around with but probably won't.
Nebula and History of Weapons & War seem great but I have too much other great stuff in my backlog and I can't really organizationally afford another platform.
Skeletor
25m ago
There has never been a point where saying something like what he said wouldn't get you shithoused from a show like his. It was fun when Norm MacDonald went on The View and called Bill Clinton a murderer, but I wouldn't have expected him to keep a network TV show afterward if he'd had one at the time.
Dean
Flairless
39m ago
Specify 'a few.'
In some contexts, 'a few' is three. In other contexts, three thousand might be 'a few' due to the scale. 'A few' is as specific as 'a bit', which doesn't have to mean 'one.' The Ferguson Effect was long downplayed for having only being 'a bit' of an impact, even as later research claims argue that homicides during a follow-on period raised one-zero percent (10%) as opposed to one percent (1%).
This is before duration-over-time is applied to metrics. Consider the Seattle CHOP autonomous zone, which lasted nearly a month as a de-facto secessionist zone of no law enforcement at the city's tolerance before being quickly and quietly rolled up after an unambiguous murder. Does that count as 1 protest, or nearly two dozen?
Lizzardspawn
39m ago
It is financial. No reason to think that it was in better shape than Colbert. And it was a just a good pretext to sack him, while letting the admin take the blame. Disney would have fought tooth and nail to preserve a real moneymaker.
On the other hand - a person has an absolute right to go on the street and sing ding dong the witch is dead.
Which as I remember was actually some of theirs mishandling a flare
I saw this claim many times, linking the videos (there were 2-3) as if it were self evident. I literally did not see anything like that, watching them over closely several times. I think it was either a conscious bad-faith lie by many claimants, or else identifying the sparkling thing that fell out of the sky as obviously not a drone itself or a typical drone attack as we'd recognize it from frag-grenade-drop footage from Ukraine. But there was still no mishandling (or any handling at all) in evidence in the videos: a sparkling thing just slowly fell out of the sky and exploded.
I saw some evidence it was an incendiary grenade but did not pursue it deeply. Moreover, evidence that it was a model of incendiary grenade in use by Israel, the US, and others (which I pursued even less deeply).
I also noted that its position, velocity and acceleration apparent in the videos really only seem consistent with having been dropped from not very high up and ignited only in the last moments of its descent (which wouldn't be consistent with a gun-fired flare).
On the balance of evidence I believe it was a drone attack
This hoax is much older than last week
Yes I too remember that, and moreover I remember seeing it before. Perhaps it was a re-creation or a leak. What happened this week was official and mattered for that.
(I do not currently have time to properly look up and link any of this, but might if you really want)
I stand by my description.
Masked and uniformed men with rifles took over several blocks of a major American city, and began threatening and shooting at anyone that displeased them. The police let them do it. Local officials described it as a street festival. After their several attempted murders escallated to an actual murder, the police allowed them to flee unmolested, making no apparent effort to detain or even identify those involved.
I think that fits the description "let them do it".
Hundreds of easily-predictable and highly destructive riots were allowed to proceed without police intervention, or with the police only moving in to close things down after the rioters had their fun. Rioters were allowed to burn a police precinct. Rioters were allowed to besiege a federal courthouse. Rioters rampaging through suburbs were at one point confronted by a homeowner armed with a shotgun; the police arrested the homeowner. Numerous cases of legitimate armed self-defense on the part of citizens were maliciously prosecuted by the authorities, resulting in long prison terms and at least one death by suicide. Numerous cases of highly-illegal and entirely unjustified "self-defense" on the part of the rioters were quietly cleaned up with minimal or no charges.
In the overwhelming majority of these cases, nothing has ever been done to address or rectify the problem.
Nor was this limited to the Floyd riots. Police stand-downs have been commonplace and easily observable at least as far back as the battle of Berkeley, the better to allow Leftist thugs to brutalize those who dissent. My understanding is that this is still happening in Blue strongholds; the thugs wear masks and work in teams, the police decline to intervene, and then shrug at the victims who have no actual culprit to point to. Locals approve, because to them, the thugs are the "good guys".
Here, have some video from a while back, via these guys. Clearly it is only due to their mastery of the criminal arts that these people manage to evade apprehension.
Lizzardspawn
43m ago
I actually think celebration would be less cancel-worthy than blatantly spreading misinformation like that.
Ahh yes. A comic is always obligated to spread truth ...
I think that is quite an exaggeration. The riots ended up killing a few dozen people and destroying a few city blocks total across the entire country. That's really bad, but that's not what happens when "the police let them do it, because their local, state and federal government wanted them to do it, because Blue Tribe collectively wanted them to do it."
Outside of a few isolated incidents, the police did not let them do it.
To the extent that police did let them do it, not all of that can even be blamed on politics. Police often tend to be quite risk-averse when dealing with large crowds, both to protect themselves and to protect the crowds. They often follow careful procedures rather than just rushing in and meleeing with rioters as soon as they notice that violence or property damage is happening.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
56m ago
You have me blocked, but if any agree with you and would like to have a go at it, by all means speak up. This is a place for arguments, not faux-wearied retreats into implied implications.
JarJarJedi
56m ago
Qatar was kind of friendly to Israel before
Welcome to our universe, stranger from far away realms! No, not in our universe, Qatar has never been friendly to Israel. Qatar was a major sponsor and enabler of Hamas instead. Qatar has been playing a game where they try to make themselves useful by serving as a middleman to Hamas, but there never was anything friendly in it.
and in the US pocket.
That's another part of the game. They try to be useful, in a hope that this excludes them from the consequences of their actions - such as hosting and supporting Hamas, which is engaged in active warfare with Israel. Turns out they aren't useful enough.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
And the police let them do it, because their local, state and federal government wanted them to do it, because Blue Tribe collectively wanted them to do it. You are failing to appreciate the nature of the problem; it is not that we have riots and murders, it is that we have half the country that sees riots and murders against people they don't like as a good thing, and they don't like the other half of the country.
JarJarJedi
1hr ago
Greta flotilla drone attack
Which as I remember was actually some of theirs mishandling a flare (I suspect fun substances were involved because come on, we know who we're dealing with here).
Trump Epstein birthday card
This hoax is much older than last week, Snopes reported on it in July: https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/07/18/trump-epstein-birthday-card-drawing/ which is about when I remember it happening but maybe even earlier.
Sunshine
1hr ago
It's not a hill, it's a pit of mud that the Democrats and Republicans have been wallowing in together for the past decade.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
The tweet was discussed last week, and it turns out Destiny in fact has made some efforts to do this the other way. Given his recent comments, I'm skeptical he'll be making a habit of it in the future, though.
I think that the misinformation mattered in how events are unfolding. I think that this in particular would not have happened without it.
Just as an autistic matter of documenting events from the ground as I witness them.
Of course it's all just a forgettable skirmish in a much larger war that's still in its preludes, in which a whole lot will be lost in the foam.
can’t quite pinpoint it - maybe a preference cascade or something more. The online left can’t imagine it, but for a non-negligible chunk - maybe even most - of the Professional Managerial Class, Charlie Kirk wasn’t beyond the pale. Justifying his murder as a “Nazi/fascist/white supremacist”? PMCs paused: “Wait, Kirk’s fine. I like him, or someone I know respects him. You’re okay with us getting brutally murdered?” It’s not exactly what Kimmel said, but the smear’s are everywhere. Kimmel spread an obvious lie. PMCs bought into the “motte” of woke, but now they see hundreds of thousands cheering the brutal murder of a normal family man. “The right lied about the election to steal it? These freaks lie to justify killing.” I’ve been preaching here and in real life: This isn’t the fight. Normies run on vibes, and the vibes are against you on this one.
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