Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8mo ago
Laptop with Hunter saying dad got paid.
There's no solid evidence that Joe got any money despite Republicans aggressively looking for it for years now.
None of it matters that it’s a strong case you will never convince partisans to turn on their only electable candidate.
Correct. Even if it was a slam-dunk case, it still probably wouldn't matter. "Impeachment" has become little more than a press conference with some adornments.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8mo ago
Not only is the evidence quite good that Joe was involved
Do you have a link from a neutral source about that?
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
I'm pretty far-right when it comes to gender discussions, but it's hard not to basically agree with this response. From men's perspective most women are vapid and a bad investment, but it's very easy to turn it to women's perspective say bad things about men too. It's not fair to simply demand one gender change their behaviors; any lasting resolution would need to come from compromise like somehow reinstituting traditional marriage structures.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8d ago
If illegal immigration got worse after Biden undid Trump's policies, why can't Biden just redo them?
Again, he could redo them. He could (and should) reimplement Remain in Mexico to at least reduce the current surge somewhat.
But they're mere bandaids because they don't address the root issues, the most major one being the asylum loophole. The best long term fix would be to remove the asylum loophole, which Trump tried to do but failed since he wasn't willing to do more than executive orders on immigration. Remain in Mexico would be better than the status quo, but it would still be subject to periodic legal challenges, as well as Mexico deciding they don't want to keep all these people and helping them enter the US.
Illegal immigrants!
Sure, illegal immigrants. The point is that calling them things like "animals", or saying they're "coming from shithole countries" is needlessly inflammatory if the goal is to pass substantive policy.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
26d ago
I believe there are malicious, intelligent, competent agents which plan for humiliation and elimination of large masses of populations, because, respectively, social status is zero-sum and material resources are finite.
This is a silly position to hold. The world is positive-sum given that scientific advances in productivity combined with returns-to-scale have allowed us to make humanity richer than ever before. I presume you are right-wing but this horseshoes pretty well with the leftist idea that European civilizations only got rich by plundering brown countries, and that whites will forever be tainted by this until reparations enforces equity upon all nations (and perhaps not even then). It's utter tripe.
That bill would have enshrined minimal allowable amounts of illegal immigration into law before the proposed countermeasures kicked in, and would have transferred great authority over such enforcement to the discretion of DHS. It was a bad bill that deserved to die.
It did no such thing. It had trigger clauses that would allow the USFG to take measures above and beyond what they're currently capable of doing. The DHS authority is to get around the court clog of the DoJ, which is currently responsible for one of the main loopholes via missing court dates. Here's a good primer. It was the most conservative immigration bill in a generation, and Trump ensured its death for purely self-serving reasons. It makes sense, given he was basically no better than Obama when it comes to actual illegal detainment numbers.
Ukraine is not getting Crimea back, and probably not much of anything else they've lost. The only question is how long it will take for everyone to accept this reality.
Crimea would have been an easier target than the original breakaway republics in Donetsk and Luhansk. Had the UA offensive succeeded in pushing to Azov, they could have plausibly disabled the Kerch bridge, and then the entire southern front would have been a redo of Kherson. If UA retakes the imitative then that's still plausible, although the modern situation so heavily favors the defense that it is indeed pretty unlikely even if the UA does fix its medium term issues.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
5mo ago
Downvotes don't refute BS to any meaningful degree. Most trivial BS can be refuted by knowing basic fallacies, and prolific BS'ers will get modded for low-quality posts.
Downvotes in practice are just like people writing "You're wrong" without elaboration.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
6mo ago
No because hyperinflation is typically devastating for an economy and can have impacts that take years to resolve. 1000% is Zimbabwe tier.
After several years of regular 2% inflation though, things would mostly get back to normal, minus societal trust issues that 1000% inflation was ever possible in the first place of course. This is assuming that people's incomes mostly kept track with inflation, which usually happens unless there are other economic shocks.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
6mo ago
Real incomes have gone up, not down. Inflation was high but there was also a corresponding increase in wages. Total wealth is also up.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
6mo ago
The US is about to get dragged into some middle eastern conflicts by Israel.
Very unlikely. Biden got us out of Afghanistan which is something Bush, Obama, and Trump all should have done but failed to do. He also ensured no American troops got involved in Ukraine. It's very unlikely that he'll decide to go on a rampage in the Middle East.
our economy is hanging on by a thread
It's pretty much the strongest it's ever been. Unemployment is <4%. Stock markets are near all time highs. There's inflation, but that's cooled off significantly to being basically on-target.
our weapon and oil stockpiles are depleted
Not even close. Some factors (like artillery) that the US doesn't use much of are pretty low, but new shells are always being created. For most other things the US is the same as always since we're not sending them anywhere.
The SPR has little to do with domestic consumption of oil.
our reputation is dwindling
The opposite is true. It took a big hit after Iraq, then another moderate hit during Trump, but Biden + Ukraine have gone a ways to repairing it. The chorus of "America is an evil empire" is slowly being drowned out by "America isn't great but the alternative is so much worse".
our allies are weak or disappearing
Both Germany and Japan are rearming. Europe is weaker relatively speaking compared to history since it's been basically just living off its inheritance, but it still has a significant economic footprint.
Nothing except China's actions or a possible civil conflict in the USA would do much to change these things. Certainly not Israel, Palestine, or Iran.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8mo ago
"Neutral" was probably the wrong word. "Not right-wing" would be better. Really just anything established that's not on the same tier as Infowars or Breitbart. NYP is... alright I guess.
Almost all of this list is Hunter himself selling access. I don't like it, I wish it wouldn't happen, and Joe should probably kick Hunter to the curb over this stuff. But the access seems pretty limited (typically just a meeting), and Kushner was absolutely doing this sort of thing during Trump's tenure way more egregiously. Major policy decisions actually came from Kushner's doings. If you ever wondered why MAGAworld seemed weirdly obsessed with Israel to the point of exhausting lots of political capital on the topic, that was basically just Kushner.
The one area where this exceeds "just a meeting" would be if Joe got money from one of these deals, as that would skirt close to "bribery". There was the thing over "payments for the big guy" but I've never heard of much evidence supporting it, and it hasn't gone anywhere.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
Doing a lot of personal research and writing articles about a topic you're interested in is great! But obsessing about a particular author simply because they're the ones making the argument, isn't. In fact, it's pretty much anti-rationalist to attack the author instead of the argument. Spamming posts with hyperbolic clickbait headlines like "Scott Alexander has WOUNDED Rationalism with his Ivermectin article!!!" does little to improve Alexandros' actual argument.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
The future of Ukraine is Somali and Bangladeshi migrants working on farms owned by American financial institutions and managed by HR women educated in the US
Nonsense. Wokeness and high immigration is not enforced top-down by the US, it's a decision that each nation makes independently. Japan has been under more intense US occupation than any other country, yet it's far less woke than most of Europe.
Hard disagree. I think the Souls games and Elden Ring are all pretty mediocre. They're fine at some baseline quality, but they're only remarkable because of the arbitrary high difficulty that breeds elitist protectionism that this post is a good example of. Sekiro is the only title I'd unconditionally qualify as "great". Never played Bloodborne.
Basically any game can be made much more difficult through challenge runs or speedruns, and they'd confer just as much intrinsic pride for beating them as a Fromsoft title would at equivalent difficulty. But those challenges would lose the extrinsic motivator of one being able to pretentiously lord their gaming superiority over others, since e.g. saying "I completed [game] in the any% hitless category in under 14 minutes" is a lot less legible to people who don't play it themselves. Conversely, plenty of people know about the reputation of the Souls series.
Even if you personally enjoy that extrinsic motivator, it's undeniable that it creates other problems. Discussions of the game become worse in a lot of ways, with plenty of obnoxious policing on how you're "supposed" to play the game (e.g. "you didn't really beat Elden Ring if you used Ash Summons" or "you didn't really beat DS if you used ranged/magic"). Then there's the people who are so overprotective of difficulty that they'd say any change that would make the game better but also slightly easier is automatically bad. Think the game craps the bed when fighting 2+ enemies? Git gud. Do you think enemies attacking through walls when the player can't should be fixed? Git gud. Think the terrible grab hitboxes should be adjusted to more closely match the enemy model? Git gud. Fromsoft games are the only series I've seen people unironically defend framerate drops as something that shouldn't be fixed since they "add to the difficulty and atmosphere of blighttown".
Apart from the peripheral issues, the core of the game itself is degrading as From runs along the difficulty treadmill, trying to make ever more difficult enemies that are almost certainly made as hard as they are to preserve the series' reputation for difficulty as opposed to any compelling gameplay reasons. The later bosses in Elden Ring are a good example of this, and are something that Joseph Anderson has gone into at length here.
As for the easy mode discussion itself, I propose a hypothetical to you. Say the challenge runners and speedrunners took control of the development of the series and decided to massively increase the difficulty so it appealed to them personally, but you were now excluded. Your first instinct would probably be to retort with "I'd just get better, adapt to the challenge, and enjoy the game even more!" But let's say this wasn't an option. Say you were either hard-limited on your skill such that you couldn't progress, or that the amount of time it would take you would be so high as to be unreasonable. You'd now effectively be locked out of a series you had greatly enjoyed up until this point. An optional easy mode could fix this and allow you to enjoy the games, but oh wait the speedrunners have decided they don't want to do this. They give some half-hearted excuse answers about "developer vision" as to why they say they don't want it, but you know that at least a big part of the reason is because if they implemented an easy mode, then they couldn't be quite as smug when they say they've beaten the game on discussion forums.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Is there not a lot to criticize? Only in a very binary thinking is criticizing the US some nefarious act and proof of bad will.
I feel like you're being deliberately obtuse here. Of course you can criticize the US or the way that things are done here. But you don't have to go to an adversary country to do that, nor hold them up as an example of where it's supposedly done better. Tucker's examples were bad for other reasons, e.g. cherrypicking and just being wrong about basic facts like Russian inflation being less than the US's. But beyond that, Tucker has had a pro-Russian bent for a long time, so it's a motte-and-bailey to say there was nothing else going on there. He could have taken examples from friendly countries like Japan or Europe, but he didn't. He also could have added caveats explaining how he didn't think the US should be like Russia in most ways but that clean subways were an exception, but he didn't. His entire trip was done to delegitimize the West and hold up Russia as a better alternative. It's why he went and asked softball questions to Putin, giving the leader of an enemy country a high-profile platform to say whatever he wanted to Western audiences.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
3mo ago
Obviously Trump sacked Bannon, who was one of his most prominent populist advisors. Stephen Miller, who was in charge of immigration, started strong but kept getting undercut by Trump in a number of ways, although he personally still had some sort of seat at the table. Peter Navarro himself was basically shipped off into a hidden office where he had little access to Trump after a certain point, although the tariffs he helped initiate did go through. Navarro would eventually regain favor, but only by joining the Crazies and insisting the election was stolen.
US foreign policy will be damaged because, uh, lots of people believe the election was rigged in Georgia.
This is not what I said at all.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8mo ago
There is none, unless you want to throw capitalism under the bus for this, which is maybe sort of justified?
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8mo ago
Do you have a link from a neutral source going over Joe Biden's connection?
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8mo ago
I haven't really kept up with the Hunter Biden stuff. My surface-level understanding is that Hunter himself has been involved in bad shit, but there's little proof it goes up to the president himself. I heard Hunter got a suspiciously good deal at first, but again this doesn't really implicate Joe.
The J6 stuff has just been glacial legal drama.
Not sure I get the analogy to Eurovision. The president absolutely does matter quite a lot in the US's system since he has a ton of power concentrated in his hands. Some of it is sapped by Congressional deadlock and much can be reversed by a successor, but it's still very important. The fact that Trump barely did anything lasting besides SCOTUS stuff is more of an indictment of him than it is of the institution.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
9mo ago
The two words can be used interchangeably in some cases. Most atheists are agnostic by design, while most Christians are gnostic. It's usually Christians making the first claims.
You specifically are not oikophobic since you don't live here, but it'd still be bad to say the West is indistinguishable from wokeness, and thus to wish death upon it. Wish for the rejection of the ideology, not the death of the collective nations or peoples.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
Russia is transitioning from authoritarianism to totalitarianism, which typically increases corruption, not decreases it. At the same time, Russia is devoting more resources to fighting the West, so it's entirely plausible that it's becoming both more dangerous and more corrupt simultaneously.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
People aren't "projecting forward", they're just parroting what their biased media consumption tells them. The fact that 80%+ of Republicans were positive about the economy in 2019, but then <20% of them were positive in 2023 is a pretty good indicator. They'll overwhelmingly point to inflation being disastrous and wiping out peoples' earnings, yet official data shows real (i.e. inflation adjusted) wages are up since then. When confronted with this fact, they'll then give very thin evidence trying to say the official statistics are all made up, even on a relatively more rigorous site like this one.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
6mo ago
You shouldn't. Stasis is ignorable for now, but it has huge costs across society that we'll have to pay one way or the other, either through direct payments for debt or future wars, or indirectly from stifled development.
Both average real incomes and real disposable incomes have beat inflation.
Perhaps, although the second point of the post was that the noticing is inexplicably much, much more severe by the party not occupying the White House.
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