Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
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User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
I wouldn't say you aren't a liberal on ethnicity however. My impression is that you seem to oppose ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them, but oppose the liberal tribe for supporting it. So you are more consistent than them on that, but still take an ideologically more left wing perspective.
If I understand you correctly, your claim is that:
- Progressives support 'ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them.' I assume, specifically minorities.
- Liberals oppose 'ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them'
- Inferring from the fact that you don't think FC is 'right-wing' on this issue but rather liberal, true conservatives/'right-wing' people also support 'ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them.' I assume for white people?
Is this accurate, or would you like to correct my interpretation?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
Tens of millions of people care what conservative media thinks, and they vote accordingly. A conservative judge couldn't be pressured into recusing themselves by the media.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
The dysgenics is trivial to solve with embryo selection
IVF costs 10-30k per cycle, with a success rate of around 20-30%. There are around 3.5 million births per year in the US. Even discounting sequencing costs (you want whole genome? Just a SNP chip?), assuming I'm understanding you correctly, won't your program have a roughly hundred billion/year budget? Not to mention that many women don't want to do ivf.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
Thanks for taking the time to explain.
It is both moderate and right wing to think that white people have legitimate ethnic communities too. But in terms of identification, it tends to attract people who identify more as right wingers in certain countries. But is in fact the moderate position.
What, concretely, do you mean when you say white people have legitimate ethnic communities? As in, there are physical communities in the USA that should be able to exclude non-whites? Or even non-physical communities/cultural...events, or what-have-you that are necessarily white rather than race-blind mainstream American?
To lay some cards on the table, what you're arguing seems to be that most conservatives are some flavor of white nationalist. I assume at the mild end of the spectrum you describe, this is less blood and soil rhetoric and more 'it's okay that my tabletop game club is made up entirely of white men' or 'the president should be white as the USA is a majoritarian white country.'
While to oppose nationalism only for white people should count as the extreme far left. No matter how many people who identify with this want to frame their perspective as moderation.
I just don't think it is true that progressives or liberals oppose nationalism specifically for white people. Japan may be a fargroup for progressives in the US and as such doesn't receive much attention, but I've certainly heard people express discomfort at their attitude towards foreigners/non-Japanese and a national identity built on race. Any kind of nationalism built on race makes progressives and liberals deeply uncomfortable.
Furthermore, I don't believe that conservatives writ large support carveouts and national-identity/community building based on race. Perhaps I'm typical minding, perhaps my mental model is wrong and you're right - I'd honestly encourage you to tighten up your argument to something more concise and write a top-level post to see what people think so we can get more data.
If most conservatives do explicitly believe in nation and community building based on race, would you agree with progressives that call them white nationalists? And your argument is simply that being a white nationalist isn't a bad thing, because to you progressives are black/asian/hispanic nationalists?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
8mo ago
For those of you who are parents, what were your favorite experiences/things to share with your children? For those of you who aren't, what are your most meaningful memories of things your parents shared with you?
I'm thinking of books/movies/tv shows, camping trips, activities, sports, video/board games, puzzles, family stories, hobbies - anything you can think of that was meaningful.
Thankfully, hlynka is routinely wrong by multiple orders of magnitude so I think I'm still safe.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
Consider instead that they don't arrest him with the information they have. Six months later, he blows himself up in a mall and takes a dozen people with him. Headlines scream: 'Mall Jihadist on FBI radar and they did NOTHING,' whichever political party not in control of congress spins up an investigation and media frenzy to score points in the next election, people hate the FBI anyways.
It's easy to just say the spooks are doing shady things again, but probably harder and more valuable to think about the systemic incentives we've given them to behave that way.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
They probably fear that if they don't, they'll be hounded. They don't want to be associated with Bad People so they go out of their way to make the distinction even in the midst of mourning.
It's Havel's Greengrocer: Family Tragedy Edition.
Is it really so difficult to believe that she might just be a good person who genuinely cares enough about doing what she believes is the right thing despite her grief? You may typical mind her to the point that her speech and feelings can't possibly be genuine, but not everybody processes their emotions in the same way as you.
Tell me, when Fox News regularly interviews families with children murdered by illegal immigrants are you similarly disgusted? Do you cringe and berate them for giving speeches on national television rather than grieving alone at home? How about Trump giving a panel with Bill Clinton's victims?
Most people are fundamentally good and want to do the right thing. I think she's deserving of at least as much charity as you're willing to extend to your tribe.
As an aside, is this comment:
Honesty is alien to the Arab, Chinaman, Indian, etc. They have a difficult time imagining a world in which you can look to a man as your equal and take what he says as a sincere expression of his beliefs. I think Americans have been somewhat orientalized in this regard.
So unremarkable that nobody here even bothers to point it out? I know, don't feed the trolls and all, but that tweet is just funny and self-sabotaging to the point of satire. Not to mention the followup tweet 'Hitler! Hitler! Hitler!'
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
You're going to have to cite your sources if you want to make blanket statements about American announcers being terrible, especially when Hockey Night in Canada featured the grating Jim Hughson for so many years.
Source: Me, after living and breathing hockey for a decade and a half growing up and then moving to America as an adult. Maybe things are different in Pittsburgh, but watching games for the local team in one of the smaller hockey markets (i.e. outside the original 6 and the midwest) was excruciating. Announcers were explaining relatively basic rules, clearly had no grasp on the strategy, positioning or how the game is played and just shoutcasted goals.
Even in Boston, if you go to a Bruins game the presumably CTE-riddled fanbase seems to operate on two principles: if a Bruins player has the puck, yell SHOOT THE PUCK at the top of your lungs. If the other team has the puck, yell HIT HIM. If the Bruins lost, it's probably because they didn't shoot the puck enough.
I grant that things may have been better in Pittsburgh.
As for Fox and the glowing pucks, I wasn't a fan of them either, but it wasn't because they thought Americans were incapable of keeping up with the game.
I mean, maybe I just fell for the Canadian 'hurr durr America dumb' propaganda, but it sure seems a lot of people talked about it that way:
In 1994, Fox won a contract to broadcast NHL games in the United States. David Hill, the head of Fox Sports at the time, believed that if viewers could easily follow the puck, the game would seem less confusing to newcomers, and hence become more appealing to a broader audience...The FoxTrax system was widely criticized by hockey fans, who felt that the graphics were distracting and meant to make the broadcasts cater towards casual viewers; sportswriter Greg Wyshynski stated that FoxTrax was "cheesy enough that it looked like hockey by way of a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers production budget",[5] and considered it "a sad commentary on what outsiders thought of both hockey and American hockey fans". Acknowledging that Canadian-born journalist Peter Jennings (who was interviewed as a guest during the 1996 All-Star Game that introduced the technology) stated on-air that Canadians would "probably hate it", Wyshynski suggested that FoxTrax was an admission that American viewers were "too hockey-stupid to follow the play" or "need to be distracted by shiny new toys in order to watch the sport."[2]
Edmonton won't win a cup in the foreseeable future because they haven't figured out that you can't put your superstars on the same line. Especially when one of them is a center.
I watch far from every Edmonton game, but I'm pretty sure they've experimented with splitting up Draisaitl and McDavid a few years back and I don't think it went well for them. At that point, you can trade Draisaitl for some depth I guess - but man would it take some massive balls to try and explain why you traded one of the top scorers in the league and one half of the most productive duo in the NHL for some solid second-line players.
Kane and Nugent-Hopkins should be able to match Geno on paper. But maybe I'm too deep in the hopium. Perhaps McJesus was the false prophet all along and Brock Boeser will bring Lord Stanley's cup back to the motherland.
There's a reason the Pens won three cups — when you have Sid on line 1 and Geno on line 2, it doesn't matter if you're feeding the puck to Chris Kunitz or Ruslan Fedotenko or fucking Max Talbot.
The Pens won three cups because they had a hell of a lot more than Crosby and Geno. Letang and Fleury were pretty damn good too, and Kessel was on an eldritch hot-dog fueled rampage just to spite the Leafs (which I fully approve of).
The rest of the team is scrubs and has-beens. Defense and goaltending are decent but not stellar. They might make the conference final, but overreliance on offensive firepower killed many a team. This is why the Penguins traded John Cullen in '91 and Mark Recchi in '92.
Dude, their defense and goaltending are ass. They averaged over 3 goals against this season with a franchise record winning streak. But they're also fucked by cap space; how are they going to improve their back end without trading their stars? See comment above about massive balls required to trade some of the best scorers in the league.
All that said, I'm just a meathead who played a lot of hockey growing up and beer leagues as an adult. I have no idea what makes a good NHL team, but thankfully, that seems to be fairly universally true. See the Golden Knights for the entirety of their existence, somehow this year's Canucks.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
In context I'd defend it as 'freedom not to have one's children indoctrinated into the state religion'
Indeed; mask mandates are also pro-liberty as they give people the freedom to not worry about getting COVID in the train. Censorship gives LGBT and minorities freedom from hate speech. Jailing Donald Trump will give us freedom from fascism and neo-nazism.
Censorship is inherently illiberal however you try and dress it up. That doesn't make it bad. There's such an aversion to censorship that when we actually decide we want to engage in it we have to lie to ourselves and dress it up as some freedom or another.
school is mandatory and funded by all sides of the political spectrum after all.
Better argument for the curriculum. Bad argument for book bans. Nobody is forcing your child to look at those books any more than anyone was forcing the other high school kids to go to that party.
I don't think it's unreasonable to demand a neutral curriculum
Whew. Good luck with that one, man.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
The daycare situation is a perfect example of what is wrong with Canada.
What system are you contrasting it with, the United States? I'm curious if you know what the situation there is like.
Sure, the supply is (mostly) there. In my corner of the US, I was on waitlists at somewhere between a half dozen and a dozen places and I started inquiring about 8 months before I'd need it. I was offered a spot at maybe three of them, and two were larger corporate style ones that were significantly more expensive. So definitely not close to Quebec tier where people wait years, but it's still non-trivial to find a spot.
Meanwhile, the prices per month that were quoted to me are 2500$-4000$. On the one hand, it's great that labor women have been doing forever is finally recognized as being valuable - a modern SAH parent of two is essentially providing labor worth ~70k per year. On the flip side, small comfort to the laborer making 50-75k a year and trying to raise a family who would probably appreciate Canadian daycare prices (if they could get them).
Similarly, you could make a parallel argument to the one that you made in your OP that the public Canadian healthcare system incentivizes risky behavior and overconsumption of resources because what the heck, it's free. And yet, somehow Canadians have longer life expectancies. People broadly agree that the American healthcare system is broken, although it seems likely to me that there are just different tradeoffs.
All this to say that most (all?) Western nations struggle with the things you describe. Or if they don't, I'd be fascinated to hear your counterexample of a developed nation with a functioning and cheap childcare system as well as an explanation of how they achieved it. Someone smarter than me will have to explain why this is the case; I'd assume much higher labor costs/CoL in general and higher standards. Modern daycares are strictly regulated in terms of capacity (teacher/child ratio) and safety whereas in the past (I assume) we just had gaggles of near-feral children roaming the streets.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
And the NYT have 10 million subscribers out of hundreds of millions of american citizens. Guess conservatives overestimate the impact of the Times as well. I doubt very much that conservatives in DC ignore what Hannity and the rest of them think, given how they stumble over themselves for endorsements. And Clarence Thomas could participate in a case that affects someone who owns his mother's house without any consequence whatsoever.
I won't able to comment on most of your post objectively for obvious reasons, but I'll at least try to answer some of your questions.
Downtown Montreal is full of taller buildings, but definitely seem like they stopped building after 1970s. Seemed to coincide with the first French language laws?
It coincides with with language laws as you note. It also coincides with a terrorist group kidnapping and murdering government officials and a couple dozen incidents of bombs in mailboxes in Montreal. Then the two independence referenda in 1980 and 1995 really drove the nail in the coffin, with the second referendum to separate from Canada failing by 1% of the vote (50.58% remain versus 49.42% leave). The voter turnout was a shocking 93.5%. It's pretty wild to imagine how different history may have been if that vote had swung another half percent in the other direction. The premier went on television after losing the referendum to say the following:
"It's true we've been defeated, but basically by what?" Mr. Parizeau asked in his concession speech. "By money and the ethnic vote."
But I suppose I'm veering into dangerous territory. Back to the story.
The 60s and 70s were a boomtime for Montreal, when they had the world expo as well as the olympics resulting in a lot of new major infrastructure like bridges, the metro system and an artificial island/amusement park. Probably other things I'm ignorant of.
The factors mentioned above also led to a steady bleeding of educated anglo professionals. It's difficult to get exact numbers, but about 250,000-500,000 seems in the ballpark]. This isn't insubstantial in a province with a population of 8.5 million, and the impact is again probably heightened by the fact that these were many of the wealthier residents.
Which brings us to the next point...French people were probably right that Anglos fucked them over economically for decades if not centuries. Some of my family members in my parents generation would casually make comments about how they were too stupid/uneducated to perform the better-paying jobs anyways. They were dismayed that my school was teaching me that the French had been subjugated, but as far as I can tell, it was true.
Which brings me to my last point, it absolutely has been a rather gentle ethnic cleansing. Most of my family and friends have left, myself included. Those that remain speak french professionally. The laws that were passed would 100% be unconstitutional in the US, hell, they're unconstitutional in Canada too but when the Supreme Court struck them down Quebec basically said fuck you and nothing happened. I guess they didn't want to [deploy the army again] and/or spark another referendum. Francophones scoff and say anglos are just whining about having to learn French, when after all, they need to learn English. But it's more than that - it's feeling distinctly unwelcome at every level of government and society, it's an inability to integrate into social groups as you point out, it's the French Karens who report you to the language police for speaking English in the workplace (if you have a public facing job).
All that said, if this was the cost of national unity, I'll still take it. It seems to have worked; desire for independence is much lower in the younger generation.
You mentioned the schooling language thing. Seemed like you either have to prove you already got anglo schooling or go private school to avoid French schooling. Seemed like more choice before.
You can only go to an English school if your parents went to an English school in Canada. There used to be a loophole where private schools were exempt so that all the French elites could send their children to English prep schools, but it was closed relatively recently. The Anglo school boards are bleeding students hard and downsizing, closing or giving half their classrooms to French school boards. In other 2-3 generations I expect they won't exist assuming nothing else comes along to kick over the game board. McGill could have been a great college if they hadn't been repeatedly kneecapped by the French government trying to promote UDM and UQAM.
From a self preservation aspect for their Francophone culture, language, and identity, these policies all seemed to work. And Im impressed they work so well...Overall: impressed by the choices made there and the results. Seems like something other places that wanna strengthen their cultural identity can learn from. It would probably work if they have the will to enforce similar cultural / language rules and the unity to endure the economic costs.
Quebec is propping up their population with immigration. Back-of-the-envelope math seems like it's 2-3 times the rate of immigration in the United States, although not sure how illegal immigrants change that picture. You're conflating culture with language, however. Quebec seems worse at assimilating immigrants than the US - they may speak the language, but I don't think most of them share values and they largely stay within their ethnic groups.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
Again Trump was indicted for correctly sniffing out the corruption of the Biden’s and using government power to bring it to the forefront. How was what Trump did harmful to US policy? Is that really the only standard?
That's not what Trump was indicted for.
We are now stating “presidents or vice presidents can accept bribes as long as it doesn’t harm the US?” I don’t believe you really believe that.
Then maybe if the idea that I'm making a pro-bribery argument beggars belief you should consider that your interpretation of what I'm saying was flawed.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
- How often do you use generative AI, and is it for leisure or work?
- How are you using it, and how deep down the prompt engineering rabbit hole have you gone?
- What is your favorite model?
Sadly, in my workplace, use cases in descending order of frequency are: Generating funny images for powerpoint slides > generating funny names for things > asking scientific questions. I subscribed to Chatgpt4 and have been using it a fair amount over the last several months, and while it is quite helpful, it's far from accelerating my work in a largely meaningful way. I'm curious whether people have any recommendations for other models or specific prompts beyond 'take a deep breath and answer step by step' or 'my grandmother will die if I get this wrong.'
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
The system isnt failing the people, the people are failing the system.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
In the same way that withholding maternal/infant care wouldn't cause the human race to go extinct, withholding HIV medication wouldn't cause the extinction of the gay community. Clearly OP means 'dependent on medical care' as shorthand for 'dependent on medical care for a relatively normal healthspan/lifespan,' not 'dependent on medical care for the group to exist, period.'
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
Hardly. YIMBYism is gaining steam and as doglatine points out, it sure seems like the pendulum is swinging back towards law and order among the left. Perhaps there's a lack of self-awareness in failing to say 'wait a minute, wasn't there a group of people telling us 20 years ago that restricting housing supply/being lax on crime was a bad idea?'
But the question in my mind is, what does updating look like to you? There are no more leftists as we come to Jesus and everyone updates to your narrow slice of the overton window? Do we just set up a new political spectrum shifted far to the right? Or do we update by discarding failed policies while keeping the gestalt intact?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
The main argument against repealing the Civil Rights Act is that if people have the option to discriminate against racial minorities in jobs, housing, and school admissions, they will do so.
What is the main argument in favor of repealing the Civil Rights Act?
In order to know if this is true, we would need to look at a country that has a similar racial mix to America, but no anti-discrimination laws, then compare the life outcomes of Africans or other historically oppressed groups in America to their life outcomes in that country.
I can guarantee you the general population has absolutely zero interest in this fact. Maybe it would help you win some arguments on the internet. That's likely why this isn't a priority for Libertarian think tanks, and if it is, is probably symptomatic of their general ineffectiveness.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
Not something I would normally listen to, but maybe I'll give one a try to see how demented he is! As far as I can remember he pretty much always talked like he does in your clips -- maybe it's a sort of Trumpy thing where you need to be on his wavelength?
It's true, I played one for a minute and he didn't sound half bad.
My record of listening to Cherry is pretty sporadic. He seemed much more coherent in some of his older legendary rants I've listened to, but I definitely wasn't a tune-in-every-week kind of guy.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
Too bad they couldn't influence the election in 2016, for all their power. Or supreme court shenanigans. Or rampant gerrymandering. Or protect abortion rights. Turns out running the OWG and pulling all the strings in the American government isn't all it's cracked up to be.
to create a people. Not to destroy one. These people are not only losing out in demography but also they are losing the soul of the nation. Their spirit will not survive a Gazan genocide.
It's remarkable to me how often the comparison to 9/11 has been made here and in the broader conversation, yet nobody has ever bothered to carry that thought through to it's conclusion. Yes, the direct analogy where hundreds/thousands of Americans/Israelis were murdered by terrorists in their home countries is obvious. But why stop there and leave out the fact that the next twenty years saw a massive belligerent overcorrection and self-destructive wars abroad? Wars that nobody, even conservatives who presumably voted for Bush twice and raked Obama over the coals for being soft on terror/homeland security, will currently defend? It's all too easy to see a future where Israel will regret the actions it takes over the next few months as the entire nation is baying for Palestinian blood.
The local growing consensus around what is effectively genocide is also a mistake. Your personal DR pro-HBD/white supremacist bubbles are blinding you to what the normies think. If Israel 'does a genocide,' as people here have been saying, they're finished in the eyes of normies for at least a few decades. Not to mention the rank hypocrisy inherent in a nation and people who spent decades saying 'never again' will have changed their tune to 'never again, to us.'
The funniest thing about this entire debacle has been the overnight dissolution of the standard battle lines. Suddenly pro-Palestine leftist protestors flashing swastikas at Jews are shoulder-to-shoulder with stormfront White Nationalists. Center-left/center-right politicians and normies are largely united in condemning Hamas, hypocrisy around military aid and foreign interventionism be damned. Even here, there's a consensus that 'the media' is biased trash written by subhuman retards who were too low-IQ to code or do STEM in college, but half the comments claim they're bought and paid for by our Jewish overlords whilst the other half accuse them of institutional capture by pro-Palestinian leftists who will propagandize every civilian casualty due to a righteous freedom bomb dropped by the IDF. Neither bother to do a cursory check of the NYT cover page which would largely falsify both claims, but there's also nobody left to push back or call them on it.
Lest I be accused of being a dirty Muslim-loving commie anti-semite, I made the conscious decision to do my best to ignore Israel/Palestine over a decade ago after watching protestors rage at each other on a weekly basis at my college campus. Obligatory Hamas bad, rape and murder of civilians bad, what happened to innocent civilians in Israel was an atrocity, by all means go decapitate Hamas. But be careful in how far you go in the heat of the moment.
Western Jews are assimilating into the PMC deracinated blob at a breathtaking pace. They are losing the set of assumptions that motivated them to identify with their kin in Israel, and they are losing the power that comes from ethnic favoritism.
Good. Why should I shed a tear for the passing of ethnic favoritism in my home country? I'll take national unity over sinecures and in-grouping based on religion anyday.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
In the most pithy form - is retirement just plain immoral?
If you're retiring in your prime, maybe. More Boxer less Napoleon.
The path of least resistance for talented people is DINKing your way to FIRE at 40 and maybe getting a golden retriever or a couple of cats. Playing video games, smoking weed, phoning it in at your job (if you have to work) and taking a couple months of vacation a year.* I know an unfortunately large number of people who fall into this bin.
This is very much not the behavior we want to incentivize. We need people to do the hard work of having children and raising them well - or perhaps more realistically, decreasing the financial and social burden, but that's another story. We'd all be poorer if Elon Musk had spent his 20s/30s blitzed in Ibiza doing lines of coke off hookers, or whatever it is fun people do at raves. The American frontier wasn't tamed by childless, unemployed scions of wealthy families, good times create weak men, insert your preferred aphorism about rich, lazy fucks here.
*I'm not so tedious as to argue that vacation itself is immoral, but c'mon. Everyone should try to accomplish something worthwhile with their lives, everyone should see what their body is physically capable of in their prime and we need to cultivate a sense of ambition and civic responsibility.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
8mo ago
Hilary had all of those as well and lost just the same.
Define democrats winning in a 'walkover' and conditional on Trump being the republican nominee I'll take the other side of that bet.
Fair enough. Although to a large extent, it's just bad luck that HIV is so difficult to vaccinate against/treat paired with much easier anal/i.v. transmission versus vaginal. In a world where HIV was cured with a round of antibiotics similarly to syphilis or gonorrhea I suspect CD would nevertheless hate the gays.
Speaking of self-inflicted diseases necessitating medical intervention, I hope he isn't obese. You could level his argument at more or less the entite developed world and diseases of affluence.
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