DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
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User ID: 180
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
Ukraine as a country isn't particularly important
There is no way a European country of 40 million people can ever be considered "not particularly important" by the Europeans at the very least. It's also of great importance to the countries outside of Europe that used to import Ukraine's food, nevermind the untapped gas reserves that could go a long way towards replacing Europe's imports from Russia. All the fuzz around Ukraine is very much justified.
It reminds me of the flawed 'domino theory'
This invasion is the third domino after Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014. What is there to doubt?
But atheism on The Motte is usually not met with accusations that it is as absurd
The simplest explanation is that this forum is full of atheists.
I always got the impression that the arguments the New Atheist made were never successfully refuted and the whole thing ended with godless heathenry effectively being adopted into the Overton Window of acceptable opinions by the early-2010s, in exchange for them shutting the fuck up about it. But I'm an agnostic atheist myself, so hardly a neutral observer.
Regardless, if you or anyone else wants to take off the kid-gloves and rehash the existential arguments people were mired in 15 years ago, I'll probably be there to respond. I'm one of the few people left who still has some leftover interest in the topic.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
While I appreciate your honesty, I don't recognize your right to dictate what other people build on plots of land that aren't actually in your backyard.
she is a traditional third wave feminist
This might be nitpicking, but I've always understood TERFs as being perceived as a second-wave holdout that survived the post-90s intersectionalization of the movement (that being the third wave).
The fact that these AI models keep getting leaked is giving me a lot of hope for the future. Stable Diffusion was great, now I'm anxiously waiting for an LLM-equivalent that I can run locally.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
there does appear to be a wide scale attempt to infiltrate and subvert Christianity
They said this about the Arians, and the Waldensians, and the Lutherans, and the Fourth Congregation Southern Baptist Communion Restorationists.
Surely this time, though.
I posit that aiding Ukraine is in fact the anti-war position, just as handing a weapon to a man who's being mugged is "anti-mugging".
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
I'm not seeing this discussed much so far, so I'd like to add that the global licensing clusterfuck routinely leaves hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people in the dark. Even living in a wealthy (but small) Western European country, the hand-wringing over piracy has never held any sway with me simply because services often don't reach my location, so this whole discussion often feels redundant.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
Low birth rates are caused by urbanization, this has been well understood for at least a century.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
will have to cope with millions of African/South Asian/Middle Eastern immigrants
Ukraine will? What on Earth are you talking about?
Look up the demographics of any former Iron-Curtain country in the EU and see if you can find even one whose current population born in those region breaches a single percentage point.
This is entirely a choice of national governments, not the EU.
We are at Rome in 410 right now
If we're doing Rome analogies, I find the Crisis of the Third Century to be more apt.
The warrior emperors did not really have a great time in the Dominate era of Rome. Emperor Aurelian took back the seceding provinces in the 270s, sure, but then he was assassinated by the political system he left festering, and Rome was right back into crisis. If you're really intent on sticking to the 5th century, Emperor Majorian was another one of these types. He did basically the same thing as Aurelian in the 450s, and then got assassinated by one of those Gothic warlords you were pining for. So be careful what you wish for.
What truly saves a declining empire is not the great warrior and his army, it's the great reformer who cleans his room. The empire was lucky that Diocletian saved the empire with his pen after Aurelian failed with his sword. Nobody like that came after Majorian.
Foreign wives have thousands of years of history and have birthed such great nations as Iceland.
Are you referring to the Celtic slaves the Norse brought with them during the settlement period? (My country doesn't get brought up much here, so I feel compelled to talk about this)
This is a hotly contested subject in Iceland. It's definitely true that a lot of Celtic women contributed to the gene pool during the settlement era (estimates as far as percentages go are all over the place), but the flow of Celts to Iceland had pretty much completely stopped by the end of the 10th century and Iceland spent the next ~800 years in desperate squalor that regularly shocked foreign visitors.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
9mo ago
Read through a textbook that covers the grammatical basics, install Anki and use it to memorize the most common ~1-2k words (this can be done at work), and read/watch a ton every day.
This is nonsense and you completely lack perspective. I've never owned a car in my life, which is completely normal here, coming from a small European city.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
The US blowing up Nordstream has always struck me as an extraordinarily risky gambit. There may be an economic motive, but if it were uncovered that the US is directly responsible for acts of terrorism on critical infrastructure in the heart of Europe, the diplomatic fallout would certainly outweigh whatever the US would make from the added natural gas exports.
Granted, I don't know how risk-tolerant the US covert-operations apparatus is. I also didn't think Putin would invade Ukraine.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
Depleted weapons stocks go both ways. China has reduced capacity to invade Taiwan because they won't be able to count on Russian military aid. The same goes for China's other allies (North Korea, Iran) because their stockpiles are also being tapped by the Russian war effort.
I find this "give up Ukraine to secure Taiwan" sentiment unconvincing. Had the West floundered on Ukraine, China would likely have launched their invasion of Taiwan months ago.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
The only true pathway to peace for Ukraine is NATO accession, which requires defeating the Russians.
From this perspective, the US is absolutely seeking peace.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
So what gives?
I don't think it's all that complicated. If they lift all restrictions right now, they're looking at a death toll potentially in the millions because their vaccine doesn't work (embarrassing in and of itself), and they're worried that the population will blame the party for this whole predicament (which they should).
The CCP is kicking the can down the road, or digging a hole for themselves. Whichever analogy you prefer.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
One particularly egregious example is that subtitles are under this umbrella.
So you're a pirate if you download .srt files.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
I live among Nordic leftists, and I can tell you with certainty that they legitimately don't believe that mass immigration comes with problems.
Also, Sweden does have a historically-oppressed minority group, the Sami.
IIRC the leading explanation is that kids generally are productive enough on low-tech farms to be at least net-neutral on the farm's balance sheet. Even in the days of kids sweeping chimneys in Victorian England, that just doesn't work in cities. Probably not on high-tech farms, either.
Ah, cruelty carried out on the innocent. My favorite topic.
Go further back in time to Anglo-Saxon England and you'll find my favorite (read: most disturbing) example.
One Anglo-Saxon custom suggests the level of thought about children in earliest times. Thrupp says: “It was customary when it was wished to retain legal testimony of any ceremony, to have it witnessed by children, who then and there were flogged with unusual severity; which it was sup-posed would give additional weight to any evidence of the proceedings.
And this was in a literate society. I get that parchment wasn't cheap back then, but Christ...
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
I should amend my statement, as it's no doubt true that there were plenty of bad arguments made by atheists back in the day. I was more getting at that the core thesis they presented (something akin to "the existence of deities has not been demonstrated and therefore I don't believe") stood its ground as a viable position.
OP seems to see things differently.
The "extreme" way to read this slogan is that the extremely rich should be killed, in which case your indignation would be justified.
The reading that extremely rich people should have their wealth "forcefully expropriated" (AKA taxed) is a position I would consider moderate, and perfectly reasonable in societies with a high enough level of economic inequality.
Oh boy, you hit a pet peeve of mine.
There are plenty of nigh-insurmountable obstacles to terraforming Mars, but the lack of a magnetic field is really not one of them. Solar wind needed hundreds of millions of years to erode Mars' atmosphere to its current levels, you might as well say the Suez Canal was a waste of resources because plate tectonics will close the Straits of Gibraltar and dry up the Mediterranean 600 thousand years in the future.
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