DradisPing
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User ID: 1102
DradisPing
5mo ago
Singer's argument isn't going to attract much of a response even in the best case. I think it comes off as lazy.
It's not a new issue. I'm sure there has been plenty written on it before. If Singer had done the obvious reading then he should be presenting the common counter arguments and rebutting them. He's not doing that, so he's either hiding them or hasn't done his homework.
He's got to at least make a cursory comment about zoonotic disease risks to be taken seriously.
Twitter's format does favour quick emotional responses so it's not really a good format for a charged discussion.
DradisPing
6mo ago
The lack of support in Europe is more of a symptom of declining Christianity. When Jodan was in charge of the west bank they didn't allow Chrstian pilgrims, and that dispute goes all the way back to the crusades.
DradisPing
7mo ago
That's not true, peace offers have been well documented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_negotiations_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
Russia wanted independence for Luhansk and Donetsk, recognition of Russian control of Crimea, and neutrality from Ukraine (eg no Nato, no arms along the border).
The US and UK convinced Zelenskyy that Nato weapons would allow him to win the war and take back Crimea, so here we are.
DradisPing
7mo ago
I think it's about food safety. Eating at a strange restaurant is inhernently a risk.
The US traditionally got around this by having diners for travellers serve a lot of mildly flavored food (eg maynaise & white bread) that won't hide the tast of spoiled meat. After food inspectors became common, spiced food became lower risk.
Asian tourists can safely eat at restaurants by the same nationality by checking for tells of high conscientiousness. Lazy restaurant owners who cut corners on food safety are generally lazy elsewhere. Looking to see if they follow all of the small rules their culture expects about decor is a strong signal. Also they can scan the other customers to see if they have appropriate standards.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Image hosting is straightforward, jpeg decoders are well established and safe.
They can be easily generated by taking a screenshot.
Bundling text and images together into a safe format that works in different screen aspect ratios is a surprisingly difficult problem. You're introducing a lot of complexity in generating them and safely displaying them.
DradisPing
1mo ago
The strong version gets pretty crackpotty, but in a fun way. It's a guilty pleasure to read.
However there's a weaker take. Astronomy of the solar system was developed before electricity was understood and assumes that everything is electrically neutral. The argument is that electric charges are important with things like asteroids and planetary weather can be affected.
They predicted the first astroid lander would fail due to a difference in charge and sure enough it failed due to a mysterious flash. The one that succeeded orbited the asteroid for a few days, which would have given the charges a chance to even out.
In terms of atmospheric effects it's not a well respected theory because it hasn't developed any predictive models that work on that scale.
DradisPing
2mo ago
Reddit was founded in 2005, so the shared hosting php servers at the time were quite a bit slower than they are now. Also phpBB has probably added some javascript to avoid the full page refreshes on each click.
DradisPing
8mo ago
The electors aren't fake either way. They are proposed alternative electors, which is how past elector disputes have been done. There was never any conspiracy to present them as the primary electors.
DradisPing
27d ago
Islam is fargroup to the blue tribe, so they don't see it as any threat. Whatever Muslims do is excused under the "no enemies to the left" policy. Progressives generally assume that all domestic Muslims will convert to proper progressive values in short order and ignore all evidence to the contrary.
In places like prisons in the UK it's popular to convert to Islam because it grants you protection from both the Muslim gangs there and the progressives running the prisons.
The progressive - Muslim alliance is quite old at this point.
The Toronto District School Board was letting Muslim students use the cafeteria as a gender segregated prayer room back in 2012, https://torontolife.com/city/allah-in-the-cafeteria/
Also the TDSB logo is cleverly an apple, an Islamic crescent, and a communist sickle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_District_School_Board#/media/File:Toronto_District_School_Board_Logo.svg
So protection from progressives is the major thing driving Islamic conversions and their growth in culture. It'll grow until they are powerful enough to turn on the progs.
DradisPing
1mo ago
I'm a moderate believer in the electric universe theory, to the degree that I think it can explain a lot of strange celestial phenomena. eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over_Nuremberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Los_Angeles
Combine those with the fact that it's hard for people to judge the size of things in the sky without knowing what it is. The limit of stereoscopic vison is about 215m. After that your brain just making an educated guess about the size.
DradisPing
4mo ago
Either we trust Patton and drop the retrospective moral justification for the war in the garbage, or distrust him.
Patton had been fighting the Nazis for years and respected them as opponents.
Seeing Jews coming out of the camps in terrible shape triggered his disgust reflex.
An ideal person would have reflected on that. But he was an Army General, not some humanitarian leader.
DradisPing
6mo ago
Can you elaborate on this? What does "foreigner" mean here such that black people are foreigners but whites aren't? There have been black people here approximately as long as white people.
It's part of a broader movement to find excuses to destroy the monuments of the population that existed prior to the 1965 immigration act. Black people are just being used as the excuse here.
DradisPing
2mo ago
I think the model of conspiracies is that for every n people in the know, you need n^2 people willing to cover it up. So a conspiracy of 3 people only needs 9 friends and family willing to turn a blind eye to anything suspicious and give the occasional alibi.
So a small conspiracy can exist. A large conspiracy can exist in something like the military where there are secret projects everyone in a large org agrees to hush up.
But a medium sized conspiracy where like 50 people need to know has problems, because it 2500 supporters is a lot.
In the case of the lab leak, if true then humanizing and enhancing respiratory viruses is clearly too dangerous. It should be banned completely. That implicates and damages a whole lot of people in universities, governments, and medical companies.
DradisPing
7mo ago
I think that there's an understated risk to reading a lot of fiction. Because it's all made up it can teach false lessons and prop up self serving narratives.
Non fiction has the advantage that you can learn true things from true events, even if the author is completely out to lunch.
DradisPing
17d ago
Ukraine has a conscription problem. El Salvador has 100,000 gang members in prison that they don't know what to do with.
I see a solution to both problems.
DradisPing
9mo ago
The State Department and the CIA aren't really separable in this context, CIA agents use State Department covers at embassies and they coordinate with State Department staff.
It isn't some formal policy, it's the DC dinner party circuit. DOS/CIA employees have been dropping sly hints about using the cartels to look cool at dinner parties for years. A movie comes out about how their cartel friends are sexually exploiting children. They respond by going on a tear to any reporter who will listen about this evil Q-Anon conspiracy movie.
The movie you linked to doesn't seem to involve the Latin American cartels and only made $20k at the box office, so I imagine there wasn't much discussion.
DHS isn't one of the "cool" agencies. ICE agents don't get invited to the good parties to tell stories.
Disney using their PR staff and entertainment reporter contacts to attack their competitors hardly seems like some far flung conspiracy I need to prove. SOF's success is an embarrassment not just for Disney but for all of the big distributors. The number 2 film for July 14th weekend is distributed by Angel Studios. That undercuts the perceived power of the major distributors.
However Angel Studios lacks the skills and connections to defend the movie.
Arguing about revenue at the time of the article isn't a good metric. Disney has people monitoring other movies and using various metrics to predict their success.
Disney had a whole lot invested in Indy 5. Wikipedia lists it as the 13th most expensive film ever made and there are rumours that Kathleen Kennedy has been playing with the books because the real cost is even higher. It's the first LucasFilm release since Rise of Skywalker in 2019. It was expected to gross over $1B.
And it came in behind Sound of Freedom in it's third week at the box office.
Disney is struggling. They may have to fire Kennedy over that.
Disney attacking the movie out of anger and desperation, not because it's an effective strategy.
DradisPing
6mo ago
Wagner recruits from prisons, service for freedom. Civilian volunteers may get more sympathy.
DradisPing
4mo ago
I've always wondered if it was possible to rent a goat for a couple of weeks in the spring. Have a back yard petting zoo. Return it when all the plants are trimmed.
DradisPing
5mo ago
I think "wokeness" is the wrong way to think about what's happening.
It has more to do with women who have worked their way up in the entertainment industry with the help of some affirmative action and are now in important decision making positions.
As they approach the end of their careers they want to be remembered as groundbreaking feminists and give talks at women's conferences and that sort of thing. But they can't get much attention for that sort of thing if they are producing content that's mostly popular with males.
There are other contributing factors. Advertising driven TV networks produced content mostly aimed at women. Women make most household purchasing decisions, so they are what advertisers want. Subscriber funded content naturally has a more even male-female split. However the back catalog is more female focussed.
So the marketing numbers tell them to produce more male focussed content. The lady execs resent that and push back. It feels wrong to them.
There was that famous quote from an Amazon exec who complained that if they based their decisions on focus group results they'd make nothing but movies about white men with guns.
Which strikes me as false. I'm open to other races. I'm sure they could find an American Chow Yun-fat.
Sci-fi / fantasy genre content has another issue. Making content nerdy men enjoy feels low status. After a few comic con panels they want to try to attract young women.
There also seems to be a thing where men who have daughters start wanting to make their content more appealing to young girls. However they overestimate the crossover appeal of their stories and end up producing things no one wants.
DradisPing
6mo ago
There are a lot of up front costs with responsible gun ownership. Gun safe, range membership, knowledge of local firearms laws.
So the marginal cost of additional guns is relatively low. Plus if you're putting in range time then guns are officially one of your hobbies. Might as well get more guns.
DradisPing
6mo ago
I think you're focussing on Mossad too much, the Epstein conspiracy theory focussed more on US intelligence with connections to other allied nations.
DradisPing
9mo ago
I'd suggest using the FPS templates in Unity or Unreal Engine. You'll be able to do that without any coding.
DradisPing
11mo ago
I'd say that in most cases hyperbole is the point. They are sick of arguing and just trying to insult you by likening you to something unambiguously bad.
DradisPing
10mo ago
But I would expect people on the right - and I mean all those talking heads, think tanks and high-flying politicians - be interested in figuring out whether DIE actually makes the army stronger - and if not, pushing that fact hard. I don't think I am seeing this.
One of Biden's first orders was to implement political purges in the military to establish firm left wing control. So the right isn't so keen on having a functional military at the moment.
The red tribe has been refusing to sign up since that announcement was made.
The right already lost much easier cases. Women in combat. Women on ships. Trans soldiers on hormone treatments know to cause suicidal thoughts. Female soldiers don't have to meet the strength standards men do and have to find men to help them move heavy equipment. I've heard of navy ships crippled from having to send home large numbers of pregnant women.
It's forbidden for officers to have sex with women under their command, but pregnancy tests are never done.
The immigration fast track for services isn't obviously terrible, so the right has no chance of winning the fight.
Also I believe it's actually an expanded version of an already existing program. I remember hearing about it circa 2012 or so. It's possible it was just being proposed.
First here's a map of The Emerging US Mega Regions
The Northeast is the home of America's traditional ruling class. During WWII and after the Great Lakes region was getting rich and powerful. Unfortunately the Great Lakes region (GLR) is in road trip distance of DC and NYC. The North-easterners didn't like seeing them drive up in nice cars throwing money around. They saw them as uppity. So various federal policies were put in place to economically devastate the region.
One of them was encouraging companies to offshore the GLR manufacturing to China. China made sure the Northeast elites got rich off of the deal in various ways.
So the elites see China as a nation of obedient factory workers who know their place and pay tribute to the right people. Things like the 2022 visit to Taiwan by Pelosi were about sending a message to Xi Jinping to stay in line.
Of course that doesn't really line up with China's plans for itself. But admitting that destroying the GLR manufacturing base was a colossal fuck up is too much for most of the elite's egos to handle.
Hawks and Doves is probably the wrong way to think about it. The "Hawks" see China as an economic rival, there's no appetite for violence. The "Doves" are the ones more likely to use military force to keep China in line.
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