Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
No bio...
User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
My righteous policy of AR-15s for self-defense versus your policy of open air drug markets that permanently break people's brains is a Straussian conjugation if I've ever heard one.
Your description of both 'policies' or platforms is massively lacking in nuance and accuracy, and in both cases ignores the tradeoffs involved. Pretending that gun ownership is an unalloyed good while being soft-on-crime is an unalloyed ill is just silly.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
I miss Julius Branson. If only we could coax him back instead of the boring trolls.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
After Mandela, things would get much worse. Thabo Mbeki, the next President, denied the link between HIV and AIDS, and the number of South Africans suffering from the disease skyrocketed to a quarter of the population.
Hey, all these people were saying the US was following in the footsteps of Brazil and South Africa, but I never believed it until now:
In the fifth chapter of the book, titled "HIV Heresies," Kennedy writes several times that he is neutral on the whether HIV causes AIDS. "From the outset I want to make clear that I take no position on the relationship between HIV and AIDS," he says at the beginning of the chapter. Later on, though, Kennedy says in a parenthetical passage that he believes that HIV is "a cause of AIDS" and there are numerous mentions throughout the chapter of HIV infection not being the sole cause of AIDS.
Despite assertions that he is not taking sides, Kennedy spends much of the chapter on HIV presenting arguments made by Peter Duesberg, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and perhaps the most influential HIV "denier." Duesberg has argued that HIV does not cause AIDS but is a "free rider" common to high-risk populations who suffer immune suppression due to environmental exposures.
In "The Real Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy sums up Duesberg’s theory as follows:
“Duesberg and many who have followed him offered evidence that heavy recreational drug use in gay men and drug addicts was the real cause of immune deficiency among the first generation of AIDS sufferers. They argued that the initial signs of AIDS, Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), were both strongly linked to amyl nitrate—poppers—a popular drug among promiscuous gays.”
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
The Libs of TikTok saga was poorly executed on my part but was motivated by precisely the same thing as my FAA reporting and this: a deep-running frustration at people's willingness to spread and cheer convenient falsehoods to advance their causes.
As the joke goes, you can build the pub, you can build the pier, but ya go and fuck one goat...
Your sin was goring the wrong ox, not trolling in the first place. If you had gotten the NYT to publish a positive story about furries insisting on eating out of dog bowls in school cafeterias, the majority of these people would be singing your praises. I don't recall the Texas abortion bounty hunter trolls provoking any real outrage.
At the end of the day, no matter how much investigating reporting you do to embarrass activists on the left, you'll still be the goat fucker my friend. IMO, stop apologizing and double down.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
I've attached a reply from Gemini 2.5
Consider this a warning; keep posting AI slop and I'll have to put on my mod hat and punish you.
It uses patsies or useful idiots to assemble a novel pathogen with high virulence, high lethality, and minimal predromal symptoms with a lengthy incubation time. Maybe it find an existing pathogen in a Wuhan Immunology Lab closet, who knows. It arranges for this to be spread simultaneously from multiple sites...This doesn't require superhuman intelligence that's godlike. It just has to be very smart, very determined, patient, and willing to take risks. At no point does any technology that doesn't exist or plausibly can exist in the near future come into play.
Do you really think you can do that with existing technology? I'm not confident we've seriously tried to make a pathogen that can eradicate a species (mosquito gene drives? COVID expressing human prions, engineered so that they can't just drop the useless genes?) so it's difficult to estimate your odds of success. I can tell you the technology to make something 'with a lengthy incubation time and minimal predromal symptoms' does not exist today. You can't just take the 'lengthy incubation time gene' out of HIV and Frankenstein it together with the 'high virulence gene' from ebola and the 'high infectivity' gene from COVID. Ebola fatality rate is only 50%, and it's not like you can make it airborne, so...
Without spreading speculation about the best way to destroy humanity, I would guess that your odds of success with such an approach are fairly low. Your best bet is probably just releasing existing pathogens, maybe with some minimal modifications. I'm skeptical of your ability to make more than a blip in the world population. And now we're talking about something on par with what a really motivated and misanthropic terrorist could conceivably do if they were well-resourced.
I'm still voting against bombing the GPU clusters, and I'm still having children. We'll see in 20 years whether my paltry gentile IQ was a match for the big Yud, or whether he'll get to say I told you so for all eternity as the AI tortures us. I hope I at least get to be the well-endowed chimpanzee-man.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
The subreddit is full of yuppies who live in Mount Vernon or Fed Hill or one of the 5 other safe clean neighborhoods in the city, who will insist up down and sideways that they actually like the city. The food is great! There's so much to do! It's vibrant! There's an art scene! Bullshit. All of it.
I've spent over a decade living in the northeast, bouncing around a few cities while making what most here would consider poverty wages until recently. I've never lived in Baltimore specifically, although I have spent a few years in multiple places with similar demographics and reputations. Maybe your experience is colored by your proximity to the courthouse or something, maybe it's a pre/post-COVID thing but...I've just never encountered things like that? I'd routinely go out every Friday and Saturday night and walk/bike a couple miles through the downtown area to get home at 2-3am completely hammered and nobody ever bothered me. Do you all go out of your way looking for trouble? Do things change when you're significantly older and look like an easy mark? I didn't think I was particularly intimidating, but who knows.
In the last ~2 years there has been a noticeable uptick in the number of homeless people (the opioid epidemic making itself felt?), but they were at first largely confined to the homeless encampment (our equivalent of SF's mission district I suppose). Once that got cleared, they all moved to congregate in a public space which honestly hasn't been any better. At some point, people will get sick of it and I imagine they'll clear it out more aggressively and institutionalize the homeless at a significant cost. In the meantime, my quality of life and lived experience haven't been affected in the slightest - never been mugged, never had anything broken into, never had my bike/car stolen, never been harassed or attacked. I've enjoyed all the cities I lived in and don't have any desire to move elsewhere.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
I don't particularly have an interest in getting dragged into an argument where I'm forced to defend Biden or the DNC, but:
I've been listening to Pod Save America and Ezra Klein in the same spirit in which I listen to Blogging the Boys after a devastating Cowboys playoff loss: schadenfreude watching arrogant people I hate fail.
Ezra Klein is one of the few people on the left who publicly pushed for Biden to step aside and for an open Democratic convention since at least February. Of all the people who could be said to have failed...he must be pretty far down that list?
Biden's candidacy was the result of a concerted ratfucking campaign against Sanders in 2020, as Bernie seemed bound to win the nomination the centrist Dems all agreed to drop out and endorse Biden to keep Bernie out. This despite the seemingly obvious fact that Biden was going to be 80 when he ran for a second term, which many people pointed out at the time.
Bernie is and 82 year old who had a heart attack in the last 5 years. I haven't heard him speak lately, but I doubt the dems would be in much better shape were he their candidate.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Your complaints about GWOT are motivated reasoning, GWOT was quite successful for Israel at least.
Why is it motivated reasoning? My impression is that the GWOT is fairly widely regarded as...not the most successful foreign policy, no? Or are you trying to make the argument that the US state department is competent, but got played by even bigger-brained Israelis?
The US has been able to grow its economy extremely rapidly through Chinese industrialization, without that your, as marxists say, Internal Contradictions would have likely brought about a protracted recession already.
The confidence you have in stating these counterfactual alternate histories is just astounding to me, but I guess there's no stakes when nothing is falsifiable. I won't pretend to know what the world would look like had China failed to industrialize, but I'm also not buying your interpretation offered with the barest of rationales and no evidence. I could just as easily argue that a world where China failed to industrialize is one in which glorious America land still stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world with no real peers, and the only way to settle the argument would be the floridity of our prose and our imaginations.
Don't forget that in 2008, it was China that bailed you out.
Ah, that was very generous of them. I'm sure self-interest played no part in it, and it's not even clear what you mean by that - buying treasuries? If so, they bought treasuries throughout the early 2000s at a rate not that different from 2008 - was that also for altruistic reasons?
1970s-2023, I'd say. Your safe and prosperous world is a product of an overall competent policy. Just continuing and improving on Biden's program could have been enough. See the success of CHIPS act, for example.
Vietnam war and Afghanistan/Iraq were competent policy? What about the inflation of the 70s and early 80s? All the NIMBYist policies that birthed our housing crisis and inability to build anything, falling birth rate, crumbling infrastructure? Contrary to some of the blackpillers, I won't pretend that the last 50 years have unilaterally been failures, but all the available evidence points towards relatively normal people muddling along rather than a cabal of puppetmasters making the rest of the world dance. All the problems that put us on the path to being peers of and/or eclipsed by China were born during the golden age you're gesturing towards.
Like owning the biggest consumer market in the world
How do you propose to leverage this? Tariffs?
most of the world's most prized IP
Indeed - Thankfully, China also has a robust track record of respecting those IP rights.
having military presence in all corners of the world.
Maybe.
I'd say you left out immense natural resources (even more so if you include the 51st state), vast oceans on both flanks and (I laugh while writing this) the ability to appeal to talented immigrants from around the world, and integrate them into the social fabric.
I recall I did predict a long grinding war after like a week of it.
I'll take your word for it. Would you agree that the vast majority of people have gotten it wrong, over and over again? Including (I'd guess we can infer) the US and Russian state departments?
What did you say at the time?
I kept my mouth shut because I at least have the self-awareness to know that I know fuck all about Ukraine and Russia.
Sorry, this sounds very much like Russian “we haven't even started yet” narrative to me.
Hardly. It's an argument that we were undeniably the most powerful country in the world and, while we caused plenty of misery, our reign was fairly benign.
I'm under no illusions that America in 2025 is the superpower it was in 2000, or that China is a nation of rapacious peasants riding the coattails of the Master Race to success. There's a fair chance that China destroys my industry the same way they destroyed western manufacturing, with your prized Tsinghua graduates grinding 996 for poverty wages to fuck me in the ass.
But you have a susceptibility to grand, romantic narratives where small numbers of people can leverage their brilliance into enormous influence on the course of history rather than human matters largely being emergent phenomena. If you think I'm wrong, make some concrete predictions about how China will bring about America's ruin in the next three years - should be plenty of time for a couple of Tsinghua galaxy-brains forged in the fires of the gaokao to run circles around some retarded Orange Man sycophants, no?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
Yes and no. I'll see if I can paste the conversation:
I ask it if the amazon kit I want to buy has everything I need to replace the bracket:
Final Verdict: This kit looks 90% complete for threaded bottom brackets (square taper, Octalink, Hollowtech II, etc.). If you’re running a press-fit BB (BB30, PF30, BB92, etc.), you’ll need a press and possibly an extractor tool too — but those are specialized and not usually in multi-tool kits like this one.
Want me to help identify your BB type before you order the kit? A quick check of your bike model or a photo of the BB area can tell us a lot! 🚲✨
It piqued my curiosity by asking for a photo.
If I upload a photo you can tell what kind of bottom bracket it is?
Reply:
Yes — if you upload a clear photo of the bottom bracket area (where the crank arms meet the frame), I can usually identify the type of bottom bracket you have.
Here’s what to focus on in the picture:
A side view of the crankset and bottom bracket area.
A close-up of the crank arm connection to the BB (is it square, splined, or hollow?).
Any visible markings or labels on the bottom bracket shell.
Once I see the setup, I’ll figure out whether you have a square taper, Octalink, Hollowtech, Press-fit, or something else — and confirm if that tool kit covers it all. 🚲✨
At this point I'm cracking up as I'm now a slave to the machine, running errands for my AI overlord. I trundle outdoors and take a photo of my chainrings.
Looks like you’ve got a square taper bottom bracket — I can tell from the square-shaped spindle poking out where the crank arm attaches. This type is super common on older bikes and some modern budget models.
Here’s what you’ll need from that tool kit:
✅ Crank puller — To remove the crank arms (make sure it supports square taper). ✅ Cartridge BB tool — For unscrewing the bottom bracket (a splined tool like the Park Tool BBT-22 or similar works for most square taper BBs). ✅ 8mm hex key — For the crank bolts. ✅ Grease/anti-seize (not in your kit) — Good for keeping things quiet and preventing seizing when installing the new BB.
Once you’ve got the tools, the steps are:
Remove crank arms using the crank puller.
Unscrew the bottom bracket (left side is usually reverse-threaded on English-thread bikes).
Clean the shell, grease the threads.
Install the new BB, making sure it’s the right spindle length and shell width (e.g., 68mm x 113mm).
Reinstall the cranks.
Do you want me to help figure out the exact size BB you need too? You can either measure the old one after removal or I can guide you based on the crankset type. 🚲✨
A few messages back and forth (omitted for length considerations) before it asks me for a picture of the crankset.
Got it — from this new photo, I can see the crankset more clearly. It looks like a Suntour XCM or similar vintage-style triple crankset, which often pairs with a square taper JIS bottom bracket.
Given that it’s a triple crankset (3 chainrings):
Bottom bracket shell width: Likely 68mm (common on road/touring bikes from this era).
Spindle length: Typically 113mm or 118mm for triple cranksets like this.
For a Suntour setup like this, 113mm is usually a good starting point — it keeps the chainline more centered. If you want a bit more crank arm clearance from the frame, 118mm works too.
👉 Recommended bottom bracket:
68mm shell width x 113mm spindle length (square taper, JIS)
Brands like Shimano (UN300 or UN55), Tange, or Token are reliable options.
Would you like me to find a compatible bottom bracket online or walk you through the installation next? 🚲✨
We'll find out this weekend whether we're one step closer to AGI or I wasted 50 bucks on Amazon.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
Obviously a bit late for your current trip, but the HelloChinese app works pretty well for picking up some basic conversational Chinese. Learning characters is a whole different story, but you can ignore them and just focus on the pinyin. Duolingo for Mandarin is terrible, imo.
I probably understand about 30% of what my in laws say, although in my defense, their pronunciation isn't great and they keep mixing in Hokkien and other dialects.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
I am but a humble biologist, and know little of warfare, politics and economics. But I'm surprised to see nobody has mentioned that the majority of US aid to Ukraine was spent with US arms manufacturers. Many Trump supporters (or at least democrat-haters) bemoaned the atrophied state of US/European arms production when Russia was producing more shells than NATO per month. China can kick our ass in drone production. Setting aside all questions of morality (which I obviously find more compelling than your median Trump supporter), why not use the conflict in Ukraine as an opportunity to re-arm? So to answer your question...pretty much anything and everything that we can make that wouldn't enable Ukraine to steamroll the Russian army and march on Moscow. No NATO troops, no air support (just intel), no nuclear umbrella (for now).
As an aside, isn't domestic spending to onshore manufacturing a key goal of the Trump administration? Why the monomaniacal focus on tariffs and not industrial policy more broadly? And particularly tariffs on our allies...but I suppose that's a different discussion.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6mo ago
They only way for them to make more money is to let the cost of everything skyrocket, raise premiums sky high, and then keep 20% of a much larger pot. Which is more or less what has happened the last 15 years since the ACA was passed.
Do you have any data to support that argument? I'm not an expert, but 5 minutes on google makes it look like premiums have been increasing in a straight line since at least the late 90s.
See figure 1.12 and also this reference.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
Good. There should be consequences for advocating for political violence. It has ever been thus, and some social consequences are better than being (literally) tarred and feathered.
This isn't even a problem as far as free speech is concerned. The Gestapo didn't kick down her door and drag her off to a reeducation camp, a private corporation fired her because it thought her opinion beyond the pale. Free speech doesn't guarantee that you can say whatever you want to whoever you want without consequence.
As an aside, this is hilarious considering that less than a week ago people (@Jiro et al.) were still pulling the LoTT is a powerless private citizen compared to the checks notes cathedral juggernaut that is Social Text. At some point the fig leaf of 'punching up' just isn't going to work anymore when LoTT is getting people fired like that.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
Ironically, claiming that Watergate was the CIA running a coup on Nixon probably has less bipartisan support than the consensus view that it...wasn't.
Not to mention Nixon was so far in the past that he doesn't even map as Republican or Democrat to me, I'm broadly unfamiliar with his policies and those of his contemporaries, and just used Watergate as the most salient presidential scandal of the last 50 years. If you have an approved nonpartisan example to replace it with, I'm all ears.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
I mean, I'm not trying to be deliberately obtuse. As I've already stated in this thread, I am myself pretty ambivalent about immigration, insofar as it (A) tends to benefit me, personally and (B) tends to economically benefit nations, on average. But when immigration yields a specific, horrific crime against the indigenous population and people get upset about that, telling them to weigh the overall positives against their negatives seems like a non-starter, argument-wise.
You could replace everything in this argument with the case of George Floyd. When policing yields a specific, horrific crime against black Americans and they get upset, telling them to weigh the overall positives of policing against their negatives seems like a non-starter, wouldn't you agree?
And yet, I don't recall you ever making that point five years ago. Perhaps you were just silent, perhaps I don't have Gattsuru's eidetic memory and you'll correct me, but I think it much more likely that you'll split hairs about how the UK rioters are morally justified while BLM was not now that the shoe is on the other foot.
I'm personally ambivalent. What you say is true, and the statistics people give about police brutality and immigration are also, presumably, true. It's not particularly surprising for people to react this way, but at the same time, western democracies need to find a way to adapt to the viral nature of the internet, social media and ubiquitous cell phone recordings without sliding into chaos or authoritarianism. Violent crime has decreased significantly since the 90s in the USA, but it certainly doesn't feel like it given the constant sensationalism in social media and news feeds. And yet, any centralized effort to block production or consumption of viral news is antithetical to our values. Millenials and boomers are probably screwed; maybe the zoomers will become sufficiently desensitized to snuff and viral videos that we'll return to equilibrium after people born before ~2005 die off.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
12d ago
Happy to, conditional on:
- You bothering to write more than lazy, snarky, single sentence replies to minimize the asymmetry of effort between us.
- Define outgroup.
- Define good faith.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
It was after this paragraph that I decided to just stop reading.
Sad. You'll never get to experience my devastating counterargument. Best of luck to you - I'm eager to see how all the predictions shake out, although you haven't shared many here.
But my argument here was not that China Good: solely that allowing Chinese development in the first place, instead of pursuing a more negative-sum strategy, was not a blunder or a betrayal of American self-interest. America actually can benefit from global growth (eg by getting bailed out in a crisis, after having become a pillar of global economy). Chinese growth prior to this phase of conflict is, therefore, not evidence of American Deep State being incompetent.
I think you should expand this take into it's own post for discussion of the group. It's...an interesting one.
For the contrary example, look no further than the EU and Canada. They have comparable population quality, are at the same stage of development, and share many of your natural advantages. How have the last 20 years been for them? Are they famed for their Deep State? I rest my case.
This one too. Can't speak for the EU, but the argument that Canada would be as powerful as the US (or I imagine you'd retreat to a motte of achieve comparable GDP growth rates to the US given that you haven't actually specified any metric by which to compare them over the last 20 years) if they only had a more competent deep state is a hilarious take.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6mo ago
If you see someone on tiktok who never shows you concrete evidence of any of the symptoms above and claims to have EDS, be skeptical and say social contagion.
If I can show you that loss-of-function mutations in collagen or collagen-related genes lead to a syndrome characterized by defects in collagen (i.e. joint hypermobility, esophageal issues, frequent dislocations, weaker blood vessels and organ tearing) with a very high penetrance and that tracks in families, if I can compare mutant and wild-type forms of those proteins in in vitro functional assays and show a difference, if I can either knock those genes out or induce the same mutations in various animal models and show the same syndrome and you're still skeptical of the existence of EDS I'd say you're an [expletive redacted].
If I can't show you a genetic mutation for a subset of patients that still have many of the symptoms above, well, sure, some people may be lying. But...you understand this is true of many diseases, right? Like, do you not believe in lupus? Clinical depression? Rheumatoid arthritis? Many (possibly the majority, or all) diseases have extreme monogenic forms and milder polygenic (we assume) forms. Similar to Alzheimer's patients with mutations in PSEN, APP, etc. who get an aggressive, familial form of the disease in their 30s versus most Alzheimer's patients who show up ~60-75.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
What do you mean? Of course it's rigged. Every election Trump massively outperforms his polls; what other explanation could there be besides Republicans stuffing the ballot boxes?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
Watch your tone or I'll ban you too.
The joke is that I'm not a mod. He is.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
The context of the Yarvin quote is that democracies are weak and feckless so we convert to a dictatorship, not that Trump is a particularly ineffectual president. My point was that presidential elections probably won't affect any of us all that much. I would, and have, made the same point about democratic administrations. Is that what you were referring to?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
I'm aware of the temporary workers. I don't think they return. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I doubt I will.
I have no idea what will happen, but is your position based on anything beyond vibes? Do you live in Canada, or spend a lot of time there? Why do you believe the things that you do?
This article claims that only one in three that have arrived since 2010 have received permanent residency. There seem to be a number of articles claiming that 1.2 million visas are set to expire in 2025; how many will actually leave versus try to claim refugee status or just stay illegally, I don't know.
And, yes, the trendline was there pre-Trudeau. As I mentioned, Conservatives went along for the ride because they too believed the myth that migration was good for the economy. I believed it too! They were wrong. I was wrong.
So...why is it Trudeau's legacy? Are you saying that it will be because people never bothered to put the least amount of effort into researching the topic, and will just say liberals bad? Are you saying he deserves it? But then, according to you, it's your legacy as well as the last 30-40 years of Canadian politicians as well? At that point, it seems nonsensical to pin this on the scapegoat du jour for continuing the status quo.
I don't follow Canadian politics in any meaningful way, and I don't have real contacts with anyone on the ground. From what I can tell, Trudeau wrecked his legacy with scandals, stupidity and bad luck. But come on, your initial take was absurd and poorly researched, no?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6mo ago
Nobody will choose to harm the outgroup "as much as possible" if that means literally as much as possible regardless of the harm to themselves in the process. What they will do is harm the outgroup as much as they can without too much harm to themselves...You've also thrown a few things in there that don't even harm the outgroup; a January 6 style protest against Trump winning the election wouldn't harm anyone in the outgroup (and the actual January 6 didn't harm anyone either, it was just an excuse for a left-wing crackdown).
Okay; explain to me why left-wing protesters can't simply have George Floyd level riots and burn DC, NYC and every other major US city to the ground in response to Trump's election? You believe that sympathetic AGs in all of those very blue districts will fail to prosecute them, correct? What harm will come to stochastic terrorists, when I've been assured that it's very easy to do this kind of damage to infrastructure and hard to track the perpetrators? As far as I'm aware, no public health official has suffered legal other major professional consequences, so what harms did they personally suffer to make them stop pushing lockdowns and vaccines?
Perhaps I'll add, why didn't democrats rig the 2024 election given that nobody suffered consequences for rigging the election in 2020?
When you say 'without too much harm to themselves,' you've essentially watered your argument down to democracy/populism, given that most of your proposed consequences come from the ballot box. Or at least given yourself enough of a loophole to drive a George Floyd-style riot through. At which point, if my model of the world is that elected officials largely try to do things that are popular with the electorate (at least when those actions are legible to the public), and that a majority of Americans aren't particularly motivated by harming the outgroup, please give me concrete examples where our predictions about the world would differ?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
Then please enlighten me
I'm skeptical of my ability to do so, and loath to try.
But firstly, I'll note that we were discussing:
Berkeley polyamory cult doing drugs in a shitted out bus in somebody’s yard.
The link between this and open-air drug markets is tenuous to non-existent (was he buying his drugs at one of your markets...?) at least as far as I'm aware of the story of David Depape, though I can see how discussing drug markets rather than sticking to the example the OP gave is much more convenient for you. As far as Democratic policies go, do you want the cops to round up and jail polyamorists for life? Anyone who uses something harder than marijuana? People living in old buses? And that failing to do so means that when David Depape reads a bunch of conspiracy theories about the Jews and pizzagate on facebook, well, the Pelosis just had it coming? As well blame Republicans for not being willing to censor obvious disinformation that sent him off the deep end, both positions are equally stupid.
Not even mentioning the fact that Democratic politicians are elected on these 'soft on crime' platforms, and are presumably executing the will of the majority - particularly in the aftermath of Floyd. It's not clear to me why they should be murdered by drug addicts because their constituencies support 'soft on crime' policies.
But whatever, you don't want to talk about that, right? You want to score points. So no, I don't support 'open-air drug markets,' you are correct, but also nobody has a pro-drug market position. I assume you mean people are 'soft on crime' or against prosecution of drug offenses, and the mess in SF/Philly is the byproduct. But the tradeoff of cracking down on crime will be more citizens incarcerated and paying those costs, more fatherless households, more Rodney Kings and George Floyds (and associated riots) which you may not care about or even see as a good thing, but most of your fellow citizens disagree with.
It's clear the pendulum has swung too far in one direction and a correction is coming/already here. But America is not Singapore, and (this is conjecture on my part) I believe that most Americans value freedom and liberty such that they're willing to allow some level of crime and homelessness. Pushing your argument to the extreme means that any politician that isn't pro-social-panopticon deserves to be murdered by the criminals for their soft-on-crime policies.
Last April, you said:
...
...
Do you think this was wrong? If so, how did you learn/update from the last 7 months?
You have also repeatedly predicted WWIII as well as a major civil war with >1,000,000 dead in the United States following the election. While you still have 50 odd days left for some assassination scenario or Biden to nuke Moscow, do you think the lack of violent protests (or serious protests at all, really) or the general acceptance of Trump's victory mean this was also a bad prediction? Is the point to be edgy clickbait or...do you genuinely believe the things you write?
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