Ben___Garrison
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User ID: 373
Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
Agreed. This forum's meta treatment of Christianity is very goofy. You can call trans people delusional and nothing will happen. You can call people in favor of covid lockdowns delusional and nothing will happen. You can even call people you're arguing against delusional as an ad-hominem and nothing will happen. But call religious people delusional and you should absolutely expect to get warned/banned.
Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
Huh? How snail-brained are 22-34% of these voters? Why would you care if he gets convicted?
The fact you'd say this is a pretty emblematic of how crazy the US (and this site) have become. This might seem like a hot take, but people generally don't want their leaders to be convicted felons.
Well, maybe that would have held more true back before trust in institutions collapsed. Those 22-34% are the last vestiges of that era. The thought is that anyone can lob an accusation, but a conviction carries more weight. Yes, most people understand that prosecutors would generally only bring cases that have a good chance of winning, but they can still fudge around the edges.
Nowadays, Trump could probably murder someone on live TV and a majority of the Republican voters would say he didn't do it. That's basically what the election loss denialism came down to. Why let evidence get in the way of vibes and dunking on the outgroup!
On the use of anecdotes and “lived experiences” to contradict statistical data.
Say for the sake of argument that you’re arguing with a left-leaning individual (let’s call him “Ezra”) on the issue of police bias. You both agree the police has a least a little bit of bias when it deals with blacks, but you disagree on the root cause. Ezra contends this is due to structural racism, i.e. that laws are created in such a way such that blacks will always bear the brunt of their enforcement. He further contends that local police departments are often willing to hire white men with questionable backgrounds in terms of making racist remarks. This inherent racism exacerbates issues of uneven enforcement, and in the worst cases can lead to racist white police officers killing unarmed black men. While you agree that black men are arrested at disproportionate rates, you claim the reason for this is more simple. Black men get arrested for more crimes because… black men commit more crimes. You cite FBI crime statistics to back this up. In response, Ezra says that the FBI data you cited is nonsense that doesn’t match up with reality, but rather is cooked up by racist data officials putting their thumbs on the scales to justify the terrible actions of the criminal justice system on a nationwide basis. After all, Ezra knows quite a few black people himself, and none of them have committed any crimes! And while none of them have been arrested, a few of them have told him stories of run-ins with the police where they were practically treated as “guilty before proven innocent”. In short, Ezra’s lived experiences (along with those of people he knows) contradicts your data while buttressing his own arguments.
Do you think Ezra’s lived experiences are a valid rebuttal here?
Yesterday I made a post on the partisan differences in economic outlook. The three main points were that 1) the US economy is doing fairly well, 2) Republicans think the economy is doing absolutely terribly, much worse than Democrats think, and 3) that most of this perception difference is because Biden, a Democrat, currently occupies the White House. I initially thought I was going to get highly technical arguments quibbling over the exact measurement of data. Economic data is highly complex, and as such, reasonable people will always be able to disagree about precisely how to measure things like unemployment, GDP, inflation, etc. It’s not particularly hard to cherrypick a few reasonable-sound alternatives that would tilt measurements one way or the other. For instance, how much of housing costs should be calculated in the inflation of consumption prices? Rent can be seen as pretty much pure consumption, but homes that are purchased also have an investment aspect to them. As such, the current inflation calculations use “owners’ equivalent rent” to account for this. Most economists think this is overall the better way to calculate inflation on this particular measure, but again, reasonable people could disagree, and getting a few of them on record saying “the current measurements are faulty” is an easy way to throw doubt on data. While I did get a few of these types of comments (example 1 , example 2), they weren’t the majority of the responses by a long shot.
Instead I got plenty of arguments about “lived experiences” which people claimed as disproving the data I cited. These weren’t quite to the level of “Chicken costs $5 more at my local supermarket, therefore all economists are liars with fraudulent data”… but it wasn’t that far off.
Don’t believe me? Here’s 9 examples:
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WhiningCoil says inflation numbers are “literally impossible to square with the lived experience” of housing costs going up, or the prices of staple foods doubling.
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haroldbkny says inflation has been unprecedented in all his “life experience”, and he hasn’t seen the wages of anyone he knows growing to match it.
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Walterodim says it’s “incredibly obvious” that people have “personally experienced much sharper increases in prices” than officials claim, and that officials must be “cooking the books”.
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JTarrou says his personal standard of living went down, and that he’s paying “a third higher to double on most normal expenses (energy, groceries, etc.), and as such my national metrics smell of “statistical bullshit”and that “economic metrics are bullshit statistical lies”.
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JTarrou further claims that economics is staffed by people who “all drank the same koolaid”, and that while anecdote is small data, it’s the only data he’s sure “isn’t horseshit”
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HlynkaCG says he “has receipts” and linked to a 2 year old post where his local price of cheap meat went from $5/lb to $6.75 (a 35% increase) whereas the national meat price index at the time had only gone up by 9.5% over that period.
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SlowBoy says recent economic events have been like “receiving Biden’s twelve inches”, and that the data are all gamed by lying government officials.
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No_one implies people are waking up to statistical lies by linking to a Tweet of someone who went to their local grocery story where the cost of meat has jumped from $10 to $16.
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freemcflurry says he makes more money than he used to, but “things just feel shitty”; the prices of chicken breast as his local grocery store doubled from $2/lb to $4/lb, and there are now masses of homeless people in his city walking around “like zombies with festering sores all over their skin.”
To be clear, a few of these above examples don’t say that their anecdotes prove economists are lying, and are instead using their personal experiences to say how economic conditions feel worse, although they were typically at least ambiguous on whether they trusted their own experiences over economic data at the national level. On the other hand, there were some who were quite unequivocal that economic data is fabricated in whole or in part since the things economists say don’t match with how the economy seems in their personal lives.
Going back to the example of bias in policing that I mentioned earlier, I’d say that the vast majority of people on this forum would say that you can’t really use “lived experiences” to contradict data. Anecdotes aren’t worthless, as they can give you insight into peoples’ perceptions, or how the consequences of data can be uneven and apply more to some locations than others. But at the end of the day, you can’t just handwave things like FBI crime statistics just because you know some people that contradict the data. As such, it feels like a rather blatant double standard to reject “lived experiences” when it comes to things like racism, only to turn around and accept them when it comes to the economy.
The cop-out argument from here is to point at the people preparing the data and say that they’re the ones at fault. The argument would go something like this: “My outgroup (the “elites”, the “leftists”, the “professional managerial class”, the “cathedral”, or whatever) are preparing most of the data. Data that disagrees with my worldview (like the current economic outlook) is wrong and cooked up by my outgroup to fraudulently lie to my face about reality. On the other hand, data that does agree with my worldview (like FBI crime statistics) is extra legitimate because my outgroup is probably still cooking the data, so the fact that it says what it does at all is crazy. If anything, the “real” data would probably be even more stark!”
This type of argument sounds a lot like the controversy around “unskewing” poll results. Back in 2012, Dean Chambers gathered a fairly substantial following on the Right by claiming polls showing Obama ahead were wrong due to liberal media bias. He posted “corrected” polls that almost monotonically showed Romney ahead. He would eventually get his comeuppance on election day when Obama won handily. A similar scenario played out in 2016 when many of the more left-leaning media establishment accused Nate Silver of “unskewing” poll results in favor of Trump. Reporters don’t typically have the statistical training to understand the intricacies of concepts like “correlated errors”, so all they saw was an election nerd trying to make headlines by scaring Democrats into thinking the election was closer than it really was. They too were eventually forced to eat their words when Trump won.
While issues of polling bias can be resolved by elections, the same can’t be said of bias in our examples of racism and the economy, at least not as cleanly. If someone wants to believe their anecdotes that disproportionate black arrests are entirely due to structural racism, they can just go on believing that for as long as they want. There’s no equivalent to an election-loss shock to force them to come to terms. The same is true of economic outlooks. Obviously this is shoddy thinking.
The better alternative is to use other economic data to make a point. If you think unemployment numbers don’t show the true extent of the problem, for instance, you can cite things like the prime age working ratio if you think people are discouraged from looking for work. Having tedious debates on the precise definitions of economic indicators is infinitely better than retreating to philosophical solipsism by claiming economic data is broadly illegitimate. Economic rates of change tend to be exponential year over year, so if large scale fraud is really happening then it’s hard to hide for very long. There would almost always be other data you can point to in order to make a case, even if it’s something as simple as using night light data to estimate economic output. Refusing to do even something like this is akin to sealing yourself in an unfalsifiable echo chamber where you have carte blanche to disregard anything that disagrees with your worldview.
OK, if you want to quibble about what "had their day in court" means, sure, my statement would be more accurate if it read as "were addressed by the courts" (before being dropped/denied/withdrawn).
I'd then turn around and say you're rewriting history by implying these cases didn't get a similar legal treatment to any other lawsuit.
To me the issue that erodes that trust is that the official government structures never bothered to look into the claims that such fraud might have happened
They did though, there were plenty of state level election officials like Raffensperger who went through point by point on at least some of the issues, and many claims literally had their day in court were addressed by the courts. A big problem though was that the election fraud claims were a massive gish-gallop so it was hard both to refute everything, and to take the overall claims of fraud seriously. The people claiming fraud really should have coalesced around one or two of their strongest allegations that 1) were well-evidenced, and 2) could have made a material impact in the results for at least one state.
Ben___Garrison
9mo ago
That Christianity gets treated with the kid gloves here is a blatant double-standard. The modding happens because the Christians don't even bother trying to defend their superstitions since they know they'll get trounced, so instead they fight with oversensitive interpretations of the rules (declaring anodyne statements to be "unnecessarily antagonistic", "bad faith", stuff like that).
Nobody wants this place to become either a platform for evangelizing or /r/atheism.
This forum should be open grounds to challenge any view.
Ben___Garrison
4mo ago
Your comment is a pretty good example of why I've mostly stopped trying to debate people who claim election fraud. It goes something like this
Them: "There was widespread fraud in this election! "
Me: "There's not really any compelling evidence to that effect..."
Them: "Well, OK, but do you really trust them not to commit fraud in some other way? As proof, here's a laundry list of sins my outgroup has committed to prove how biased they are..."
Your comment isn't a perfect analog but it's pretty close. Most specific claims crumble into a generalized disdain of the outgroup upon deeper scrutiny.
But it was “weird” and we shouldn’t be encouraging “weird” elections. We used to count elections within hours of the polls closing. Why can’t we do that again?
Part of this was terrible mail-in voting rules where they only started counting long after the votes had come in, and part of it was an illusion since individual states have dragged their counting in almost every election, it just didn't matter since the elections weren't that close in the first place, so nobody really cared if Obama won Indiana in 2008 on election night since it wouldn't have made a difference.
But I generally agree that elections should be counted a lot faster. It was clear that many on the right fringe saw the delayed count as dead-to-rights evidence that the Deep State (or whoever) was rigging things and were just playing for time. States should do everything in their power to ensure the election can be confidently called within a day.
Ben___Garrison
6mo ago
You seem to be confused by the terminology. "Inflation" is the rate-of-change. "Price levels" are the absolute number. Inflation increases price levels, such that price levels can remain elevated even though inflation has decreased.
High inflation really is the enemy more than price levels. High inflation skews lots of things and eats into purchasing power if wages don't keep pace. Price levels are arbitrary, and all that really matters is how much stuff people can buy relative to what they could purchase yesterday (or 10 years ago). This more important phenomenon usually gets shortened to the term "real income", i.e. income adjusted for inflation. As per the sources in the OP and stuff like this, real income is up.
Ben___Garrison
6mo ago
A deep and enduring “vibecession” – Partisan differences are increasingly dominating perceptions of the economy.
By almost every metric, the US economy is doing quite well at the moment. There are many ways to evaluate economic vitality. The most obvious is the headline unemployment rate, which was used throughout the Great Recession to monitor the (slow) recovery. Today, though, unemployment is hovering near record lows at <4%.
Beyond this, there are somewhat nerdier, more technical measurements that still capture important aspects of the economy. Things like inflation, GDP growth, and the stock market. All of these indicators are somewhere between “good” and “great”. Inflation has come way down and is now around 3.7%. Core inflation, a better measurement of long-term inflation that excludes volatile commodities like gas prices, is even lower at around 2.5%, essentially hitting the Fed’s 2% target. GDP growth is surprisingly high for Q3 at 4.9%. The stock market is also doing fairly well, with the S&P500 being less than 10% off its all-time high at the end of 2021 and being well-above the pre-COVID high in Jan 2020.
Drilling even deeper, at this point you start to get the indicators people and the media can “fish” for in order to find bad news. Things like median wage growth, wealth inequality, and prime-age labor participation rate. The thinking with these metrics is that even if the more commonly cited stats are doing well, they might not paint a full picture. For instance, if the economy is growing but the rich are eating all the gains, then things like wage growth and inequality can show how most people aren’t benefitting. Likewise, if the unemployment rate has fallen because people have become discouraged and just don’t bother looking for work any more, then labor participation can show what’s really going on. The steelman of these metrics is that they can be helpful in painting a fuller picture, although in practice I’ve often only seen them used when people are willing to use motivated reasoning to paint the economy as underperforming (e.g. politicians, doomers, or the media just trying to create a story). That said, even by these metrics the US economy is doing well. Median wage growth is very high and is well-above inflation. Regular Americans are getting richer, and wealth inequality has fallen.. The prime age employment rate is also near record highs.
In spite of all of this though, many peoples’ opinions of the economy remain in the dumps. The consumer sentiment index has recovered only slightly from its record low a few months ago, but is still barely better than during the worst parts of the Great Recession. What gives? Well, there’s quite a bit of evidence that it’s just partisan emotional expression, i.e. “vibes”. There’s plenty of data showing that Americans tend to rate the national economy as being much worse than their own personal financial circumstances. Kevin Drum has some evidence that this national-personal split is mostly being driven by Republicans. 71% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans say the economy is doing well in terms of their personal situation. But in terms of the nation as whole, 58% of Democrats and just 5% (!!!) of Republicans say the economy is doing well on a national scale. So you have this goofy scenario where Republicans across the country say things are going well for them individually, but as a collective things must simply disastrous. Where is this “disaster” occurring? “Well, not here, but it’s surely happening somewhere”. The 5% mark is particularly interesting because it perfectly matches Republican’s approval rating of Biden. In other words, it seems like asking people how well the economy is doing is just a proxy for “what do you think of the current sitting president”. I’d doubt the numbers would correlate this perfectly all the time, but there’d still be a significant relationship. Whichever party doesn’t control the White House will see the economy in much more pessimistic terms.
Currently this is just applied to Republicans being pessimistic, but it’s almost certainly symmetrical. When Republicans eventually take back control of the presidency, it’s not hard to predict that Democrats will suddenly think the sky is falling in economic terms.
Ben___Garrison
7mo ago
The lack of a secret ballot thru mass mail-in voting violates every principle of Democracy. Without violating the secret ballot Trump would have easily won in my opinion.
This is silly. Ballot secrecy serves to stop a specific problem of coercion and bribery when voting, which were a big problem back in the Gilded Age but which are far less prevalent now. Ballot secrecy when voting by mail should be a concern to be addressed going forward, but you haven't provided any evidence it had a major impact on the 2020 election. This argument is like one from those right-wing blogs that assert (without evidence) that 30 million illegal immigrants vote and so we don't have real democracy.
Ben___Garrison
13d ago
is too stupid to be allowed to vote.
Calling people who support Ukraine aid "too stupid to vote" is just "boo outgroup", and if the valence was flipped it would probably be considered banworthy.
Ben___Garrison
4mo ago
Not gonna happen.
Nobody seriously defends the superstitions of Christianity, and while social movements can survive a large amount of inconsistency, all attempts at "cultural Christianity" have basically been failures due to the inherent contradictions. It's just a bridge too far to try to harness the culture of Christianity while ignoring the superstitions that underpin them, while also having people who do believe the superstitions loudly proclaim they're undeniable truths.
Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
I think your thinking is choked with lazy cliches that prevent me from respecting it seriously.
Right back at you.
This is in fact what forcing a TikTok sale is, a meaningless culture war distraction
It'd be a pretty consequential action in the US-China rivalry given how important tech companies are these days. There's a reason CCP propaganda mouthpieces are trying so hard to stop it: because having an easy way to reach US voters is a tremendous asset in sabotaging an adversary, or otherwise getting them to do what you want.
Saying nice things about Russia isn't "proving the superiority of the Russian political system" to anybody. This is a low-effort bad-faith slur to avoid having to think about anything Tucker says.
That's absolutely what Tucker is doing. Going around trying to prove how great Russia is, often with disparaging remarks towards the state of the US. The obvious implicit follow-up is that we should be more like them, i.e. we should emulate their acidic form of conservatism and likely their authoritarianism as well.
Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
Trump opposes TikTok divestiture
We may be seeing the GOP becoming pro-China in real time.
Recently there’s been a bill advancing through Congress that would force a divestiture of TikTok from its Chinese parent to some sort of Western company. Many are abbreviating this as a “TikTok ban”, but that’s not accurate. It’s more of a forced severing of the app from ByteDance in particular, although the precise details following the bills passage remain to be seen.
The TikTok Question
You could list all the typical issues that social media creates and they’d almost certainly be true for TikTok like they are for Facebook or X. But in addition to this, TikTok has two unique issues from being beholden to the CCP.
The first, less pressing issue is data security. China has a law that allows their government to require any Chinese company to give them any personal information they request. ByteDance has been caught a number of times doing bad things with American users’ data. They spied on journalists who criticized the company. The American arm forwarded data to the Chinese arm, which forwarded it to the Chinese government.
The second, bigger issue is of propaganda. Nearly a third of Americans age 18-29 regularly get news from TikTok. This news is subtly and invisibly controlled by a foreign adversary government. Noah Smith summarizes the broader implications:
There’s a concern that through subtle manipulation of the algorithm, TikTok can steer Americans away from topics of discussion that are sensitive to the CCP, and toward CCP-approved points of view.
A new study by the Network Contagion Research Institute confirms that this is already happening, in a very substantial way. By comparing the hashtags of short videos on Instagram and TikTok, they can get an idea of which topics the TikTok algorithm is encouraging or suppressing.
The results are highly unsurprising for anyone who’s familiar with CCP information suppression. Hashtags dealing with general political topics (BLM, Trump, abortion, etc.) are about 38% as popular on TikTok as on Instagram. But hashtags on topics sensitive to the CCP — the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Hong Kong protests and crackdown, etc. — are only 1% as prevalent on Tiktok as on Instagram.
For some of these topics, differences in the user bases of the two apps might account for these differences — for example, TikTok is banned in India, meaning the topic of Kashmir is unlikely to be discussed on the app. But overall, the pattern is unmistakable — every single topic that the CCP doesn’t want people to talk about is getting suppressed on TikTok.
Even if you’re skeptical of circumstantial evidence like this, there are leaked documents that prove the company has done exactly the kind of censoring that the study found:
TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned social network, instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong, according to leaked documents detailing the site’s moderation guidelines.
So why does this matter? Suppressing Americans’ access to videos about Tiananmen Square might or might not sound like that big of a deal, but consider what TikTok would be able to do in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The U.S. would have to make a very rapid, highly consequential decision about whether to come to Taiwan’s aid. Imagine anti-Taiwan videos flooding TikTok, threatening to send the President’s poll numbers plunging. Imagine the U.S. government hesitating in the face of that concerted flood of manipulated public opinion, and thus losing a critical confrontation with its most powerful foreign adversary.
Trump Opposes Divestiture
As a result of the above issues, forcing ByteDance to sell the app to a Western company is one of the few issues that has broad bipartisan support. Well, it did have bipartisan support until Trump did a 180 and suddenly opposed the bill. This was after Trump met a wealthy TikTok investor who promised to support his campaign.
Now, a politician changing his views wouldn’t normally be that much of big deal. After all, voters generally choose people whose views align with theirs, so for a normal issue Trump would usually either be forced back to his initial position or risk a fall in the polls. We recently saw this with his Social Security reform proposals. However, foreign policy is unique in that the public largely takes its cues from trusted partisan elites. This is a broadly replicated finding that basically translates to “the people are sheep”. Most individuals know that foreign policy is really important, but it doesn’t affect their lives that much, so it’s harder for them to get an intuitive understanding of how things are going compared to something like, say, the economy. Thus, they look to people they trust to get their views, and then say they formed their views by “looking at the evidence”.
An example of this is Russia. There has been a pro-Russian undercurrent in the GOP for the past decade or so, but it was mostly limited to a few fringe individuals. It started becoming more mainstream when Trump feted Putin during his presidency, and then it became even more pronounced in 2023 when Trump used Ukraine aid as a cudgel against Biden. Republicans were quite hawkish towards Russia as recently as the 2012 election when Obama told Romney that “the 80’s called, they want their foreign policy back”. Now here we are a decade later, with Tucker Carlson sniffing chocolate cake in a Moscow parking lot to prove the superiority of the Russian political system and how it’s a “bastion of conservative values”. Russian propaganda about the villainy of NATO is repeated as mainstream conservative talking points, and the Republican base largely goes along with it.
Could the same happen vis-à-vis China? I don’t see why not. Granted, it wouldn’t happen all at once, but I believe a gradual shift in that direction is certainly possible. China is an orderly society with a strongman leader. It doesn’t recognize same-sex unions. As an opponent of America, it could be presented as an opponent of vaguely defined “globohomo”. Simply ctrl+c, ctrl+v the standard talking points used for Russia, as most of them fit just as well if not better for China.
Trump has been hot or cold on China just like he was on Russia. He criticized both countries if he thought the democratic president was doing something that “made us look weak”. But then he quickly changed his tune after having a few inconsequential meetings with Putin/Xi. Eventually, the forces of negative partisanship pushed him to become clearly pro-Russia, and presumably it could happen with China as well. Trump’s clout means much of the Republican elites are following him:
• Tucker Carlson has long been against anything that would hurt TikTok, and could very well be where Trump is getting his views.
• Marjorie Taylor Greene is against the bill.
• Elon Musk is against the bill.
• Kim Dotcom is against the bill, and repeats much of the “America is bad” rhetoric previously seen in pro-Russian arguments.
From this, we’re starting to see the base’s opinions change. For instance, a UCLA Republicans group posted a picture of Trump, Xi, and Putin together, praising them as “three conservative patriots”. Something like this being posted unironically would have been a fever dream 10 years ago. The ironic force would have been so strong that it would have reanimated Reagan as a zombie, given him strength to hunt down whoever made it and punch them in the face.
Ben___Garrison
4mo ago
My main argument was that the gish-gallop claims were falling on their own merits. That hasn't changed.
Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
The likelihood Trump wins?
50-50. Biden's currently down by about 10 points from where he needs to win comfortably, but the vibecession is easing and a lot of his low polling is just disaffected leftists who are sad that he hasn't been as extreme as they wanted him to be. They'll almost certainly come around when Trump is in the news more. That said, Biden still has big problems in terms of immigration and his age, so there's a lot of uncertainty.
What will a second Trump term be like?
Somewhat more of the same, but probably moderately worse. If you've read any of the "behind the scenes" books of the Trump presidency, you'll know it was basically a three ring circus between:
- The Establishment: Old neocons who favored things like tax cuts, aggressive military use, and immigration "compromise" (effectively open borders). Examples include Reince Priebus, Gary Cohn, Sean Spicer, Rex Tillerson.
- The Far Right: Immigration hawks and isolationists. Examples include Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, Stephen Miller.
- The Grifters: People who were ideologically flexible and were more concerned about their own advancement rather than any policy. Most of these people came to power through a mix of flattering Trump, court intrigue, and cable news appearances. Examples include Hope Hicks, Jared Kushner, Mike Pompeo, Anthony Scaramucci, Kellyanne Conway, Ivanka Trump.
When Trump's term began, all three rings were fairly evenly matched. But as the years went on, the Establishment was utterly annihilated while the Far Right was cut down and sidelined pretty harshly as well. Towards the end it was mostly just grifters. After J6 there was a fourth ring, The Crazies, who insisted Trump really won the election. People like Giuliani, Mike Lindell, Sidney Powell, and others took the reins in the final days.
If Trump were to win a second term, I doubt he'd bother much trying to reach out to the first 2 groups, and mainly focus on The Grifters and The Crazies. There'd be even less of a pressure to push through immigration reform, and US foreign policy could be negatively impacted.
Ben___Garrison
13d ago
sending most of their men off to die in trenches
This is not congruent with reality. Russia itself claims UA has lost 444k soldiers killed and wounded up to 2/27/24. Assuming a roughly 50/50 split of males:females, this means they have lost (KIA or WIA) around 2% of their prewar male population. And of course that number is coming from Russia, so that's massively inflated for obvious reasons, as well as for reasons unique to Russian reporting statistics. That's obviously a huge tragedy in human terms, and there's also the ~5M mostly women and children that have fled as refugees, but it's nowhere near "most of their men dying in trenches".
On the other hand, Russia's aims have always been transparently genocidal. The "misguided mini Russians" need to be put in their place according to the Russian government, and that's how stuff like Bucha happens, or that video of Russians decapitating a screaming Ukrainian POW, or the various castrations of POWs. Real ethnic solidarity there.
Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
I didn't get banned for it, sure, but I sure did get warned for it. It was back on the old site where I said something along the lines of "Biblical literalism is delusional belief in fairy tales" and I got a warning from one of the mods who told me to use the term "superstitions" instead. I can't find the exact comment unfortunately since Reddit is horrendous to search through.
...try calling atheists delusional, and see what you get. Try saying that atheists are treated with kid gloves, and see what happens.
I just hope there'd be some consistency from the moderators. Outside of the mod team, you'd obviously get flak for being wrong, especially if your implicit belief was that Christianity was the alternative, but that's to be expected.
Ben___Garrison
6mo ago
Both average real incomes and real disposable incomes have beat inflation.
Maybe people are so used to increasing wages and stagnant prices that even mild decreases or wages and prices keeping track feels like a decline?
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.
Ben___Garrison
7mo 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
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
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
9d 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.
I think this forum should disable/remove the downvote button. It's a legacy holdover from Reddit but it really doesn't fit the theme of the motte. Downvoting increases the intensity of heat while doing little for light. Humans are hard-wired to care about the popularity of their ideas, even people very low on the agreeableness spectrum (which I'm sure accounts for the majority of posters here). People who are routinely downvoted are much less likely to post, intensifying the echo chamber effect.
If a post breaks the rules, reporting it is still the best solution.
If a post is just using bad logic, it's much better to refute that logic with a response than to downvote. There's nothing I find quite as aggravating as making (what I think is) a good point, only to be downvoted with no responses. This doesn't happen nearly as often on this forum as it does on Reddit, but it's still a nuisance when it does occur.
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