2rafa
3mo ago
I’m always suspicious of the “yeah I wouldn’t have fallen for it”, take. Okay, yeah, if I was there it wouldn’t have gone down the way it did etc etc.
If the powers that be wanted you to die for Ukraine or Israel you would do so with a smile on your face. The only question is what story to tell and what buttons to push to get you to do it.
No offense.
2rafa
8mo ago
People seemed to have defined "election rigging" as specifically electronically hacking election machines to change votes.
Yes, because this is the universal definition of a rigged election and always has been (ie ballot-stuffing ie tampering with vote counts directly).
Shady behavior by an incumbent is universal in democracies. One party dominating the media is near-universal in democracies. The ‘establishment’ trying to stymie the ‘populists’ is near-universal in democracies.
The fact remains very simply that if most evidence that is considered evidence of 2020 being a “rigged election” counts as proof (or strong evidence for) a “rigged election”, then every election in American history has been rigged. Go back before about 1970 and corruption was vastly more brazen than anything Trump has seriously alleged, and that’s like 200 years of so-called democracy.
Low level corruption, propaganda and shady behavior is clearly universally accepted as part of America’s democratic tradition. The only thing beyond the pale (and even then only in the last few decades) is literal manipulation of vote counts in bulk, and this is the definition of “rigged”.
2rafa
11mo ago
Nah, other countries with similar diversity still have much more widespread public transport.
2rafa
1yr ago
I’ve been to many wonderful small towns in the US, but they were all in New England or in the outer suburbs of wealthy cities and the residents all had some source of external wealth, either from commuting into highly-paid PMC jobs in the nearest major city or from tourism. And again, if it’s a low variance rural lifestyle in a pretty, walkable, homogenous locale, much of Western Europe easily vastly outdoes the US and the US’ advantages (like much higher salaries) are less necessary.
Idk, what actually rural small Midwestern towns very far from the nearest major city are you thinking of? Happy to take a look on Streetview.
Surely there are many appeals and other delays a wealthy defendant can file for before assets are seized and sold forcibly in this way.
That’s to say nothing of what Trump could do to hurt New York if he wins again, which would presumably result in some behind-the-scenes negotiation.
2rafa
1yr ago
The point I'm trying to make here and the point that yourself the OP, @2rafa, @SwordOfOccam don't seem to be grasping is that onus of proof is not on the losers to provide evidence of illegitimacy, the onus is on election officials to convince the losing party that they lost fair and square.
And my point is that Donald Trump is a sore loser who was never going to accept that he lost “fair and square”. What do you think it would take to convince Trump he lost fair and square? This is the pivotal question in this debate, since most of Trump’s supporters will take his opinion on the matter.
2rafa
1yr ago
I think this is dismissive. What rape culture typically seems to refer to is men strategically getting young women very drunk so they’re less likely to decline sex.
You can disagree that that counts as rape, and indeed often it isn’t, it’s just young people getting drunk and hooking up. But it’s also not the same as young men merely being ‘interested’ in having sex with women. “Girls are easier when they’re drunk” is kind of a universally accepted male wisdom, so it’s useful to have a term for men pressuring women into drinking for that purpose. One could imagine a society in which, for example, getting people blackout drunk so they didn’t object to sex with you was considered generally objectionable behavior.
2rafa
1yr ago
Do you likewise think his unpopularity was arrived at by legitimate means?
No, I think it likely a result of his longstanding poor character and reputation coupled with a failure to accomplish most of what he promised his voters once in office.
That is, do you think that people on the other side should accept outcomes secured through such methods?
I am yet to be convinced the other side don’t do the same thing themselves.
2rafa
1yr ago
What would the consequences for women be that they aren’t already? Women are already a main group of losers in the sexual revolution and (as I note) Redpillers already argue that women face great, dire consequences of promiscuity - eg. low social status for having a reputation as a slut, spinsterhood, hitting ‘the wall’, being an ‘alpha widow’, unhappiness, loneliness and becoming a cat lady. By contrast, Brand faced no consequences until now.
2rafa
1yr ago
Becoming a FAANG dev or majoring in computer science at Stanford is hard. Going to a bootcamp and doing basic data science python stuff for a plain old corporation that pays $105k a year in the burbs of some Sun Belt City isnt. But I think you’re getting distracted, because my focus wasn’t just on tech but on ‘email jobs’.
Do you think millennial girlbosses in HR or ‘Product Marketing Managers’ are doing an ultra-challenging job intellectually? Because they all make decent money too.
2rafa
2yr ago
Adult first class men on the titanic had a 33% survival rate. The lifeboats overall (if full) could have accommodated perhaps half the ship. I suppose Lightoller was ultimately a villain for turning men away (especially as he survived himself), but extrapolating his ‘chivalry’ into the rest of the men of the ship seems a stretch.
2rafa
4mo ago
There was literally an entire monastery in the first game along with a ten hour sequence around it.
2rafa
4mo ago
When were they lying? I don’t think developers should be forced to disclose instances of homosexuality or non-white characters in their games before publication.
2rafa
5mo ago
You mentioned once that you have many female relatives who waited until marriage for sex. Given that this is practically unheard of among the native Angloid population, you must be a foreigner, but from where? The Balkans? South Asia?
2rafa
5mo ago
Sloot’s view on these girls and the state of western womanhood is, as far as I can tell, the same as (the dreaded) Jim’s, which is to say near identical to the Mirpuris in question.
2rafa
6mo ago
Extending it down to surrendering our own borders and our own cities—isn’t that the source of most of your complaints?
If anything, I’m an American imperialist. I think America should directly rule the majority of the world, especially Central and South America, Western Europe and probably Japan and Korea. I just don’t care about China. The Chinese have no great imperialist instinct the way the Japanese, Russians, Anglos and French have or have had. They don’t seek to rule me or convert me to the Chinese system and never have. Theirs is not - in a deep sense, deeper than surface level marxism - an imperial civilization with global aims.
2rafa
6mo ago
We’ll see, I expect that if Trump comes out in full support (like last time) you will.
2rafa
10mo ago
It’s actually a very simple explanation, which is that men play many more video games for many more hours than women do. Men spend roughly double the number of hours per week playing video games than women do. That extra leisure time goes somewhere. What changed since 1970? Video games. It’s really that simple.
2rafa
11mo ago
Did the Supreme Court not just rule that even the President is exemption from real consequences (other than being fired, which of course happens by different mechanism) for “official actions”? Would be hard to apply a tougher standard to lower level peons.
2rafa
1yr ago
Yes because some countries have extremely high birth rates and highly dysfunctional societies with no real economy to speak of, and that hugely distorts per capita growth figures. If you look on a per country level (as the very article you link says) there are many success stories.
2rafa
1yr ago
breeze right through the process to a "legal" path to permanent residency and citizenship.
The bill hands Democrats exactly what they want, and enshrines a permanent increase in "legal" unrestricted immigration forever. Doing nothing at least leaves all these people in limbo, with no path to legal status forever, and the possibility of eventual deportation
Again, you do realize all these people’s kids get passports anyway, right? Birthright citizenship renders ambiguous status, doing nothing, limbo blah blah arguments complete bullshit. Any of their children born on US soil are 100% unquestionable Americans under the law. Whether their parents do or don’t get a green card means nothing, these people (quite rightly) care about their descendants more than whether their lives in the US might be slightly easier or not.
What this bill did was allow a future GOP president to create a little more friction. It didn’t make things any easier or harder for the Dems, who can already (and have) left the fence open anyway. But it improves the selection of options a Republican might have.
2rafa
1yr ago
In fact, he doesn't need Trump to pass the border bill. If this is a great bill that Democrats are happy to have, they can pass it in the Senate and leave it to the House.
Because the left faction of the Democrats hate it and oppose it, which is why they need GOP votes in Congress? I mean this isn’t in any way new. The real question is that if this bill really does nothing and wouldn’t stop any immigration, why did Liz Warren, Bob Menendez, Bernie Sanders, Ed Markey and others vote against it?
…Markey said in a statement released after the vote. "We need meaningful pathways to settlement and citizenship, full and fair processing of protection claims, and safeguards for our DREAMers. But in this package, Republicans instead demanded and secured provisions that are contrary to American values, eviscerating due process protections for countless people seeking a better life in the United States, expanding the use of inhumane detention for asylum seekers, and funneling scores of new arrivals into rushed legal proceedings that cannot adequately or fairly assess their claims. Republicans cynically walked away when Donald Trump admitted he preferred to campaign on a broken immigration system as a political issue. I voted no because I am not only against Donald Trump, but also against hateful Trump policies."
Hmm.
If he’s not attracted to adult women then why would it be a perk? The only answer I can think of is so he doesn’t get beaten or killed by the other male inmates in a revenge attack, but in any case progressives (and many non-progressives besides, myself included) believe that extrajudicial prison violence is an embarrassment on the US prison system anyway, so that’s not a specific enough argument.
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