EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
I know what you're here for. What's his bias? Politically I at least like to think of myself as a true moderate, maybe (in US context) slightly naturally right-leaning but currently politically left-leaning if I had to be more specific.
User ID: 1043
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
What is the CRA?
But more importantly I’d love to see an actual data-driven claim that a) “adding new citizens” is common enough to b) be the primary driver of left wing parties winning (or maybe the weaker claim of conservatives losing?) and c) that this has actually happened.
Because last time I looked into a claim like this, which was the claim that the 1980s amnesty flipped California, I found that it was mathematically very unlikely to have eg impacted any presidential race.
I’m also a bit confused as to why you think conservatives in America are fettered so much when the Supreme Court, the literal last word in our constitutional system is so plainly conservative (to the extent that those labels apply)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
What do you mean by millions of new Hispanic voters specifically?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
Biggest loser? Individually? Might actually be Elon Musk. He’s about to get investigated, hauled in front of Congress, bro wasted a half billion dollars almost on one of the worst losses in recent GOP history, tons of people hate him, and Trump is almost certainly NOT going to bail him out either
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
Paxton’s corruption record is almost as bad as it can be in practical politics, maybe just short of the gold bars dude.
Mostly though? Texans fucking HATE high gas prices. Despise, more like.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
I’m pretty sure it would be first Black person winning statewide not ever, but since Reconstruction, though that’s still a ridiculously long time
Still Mississippi being too close to call was NOT on my bingo card
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
Haha, my phone autocorrect didn’t think Clause is something usually capitalized (…which is true)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2d ago
There’s probably a world where he gets removed due to some kind of dementia (seen some early signs but even if you think they aren’t there, it can always happen quick) and we get Vance as president.
I think there’s also a world where a Dem House manages to pull off an investigation into his finances and gets him dead to rights on the Emoluments Claude, but I find it extremely unlikely since the time would take (barring some extreme leak like Deep Throat or whatever) is long enough that we’d be right up to the end of his term anyways.
Otherwise? Very little chance. Even if Trump is guilty of something impeachable, it’s probably counterproductive politics to pursue it.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2d ago
Hello from the line everyone! This is a college town mostly, about 20 minutes from campus for this nearest voting site, but the line is skewing pretty young even so.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
17d ago
My theory - disclaimer being I watch almost precisely zero NFL outside of the Super Bowl, and just my own college team - is more that the QB 'funnel' specifically happens too early. Kids are selected for their arm talent before their run-an-offense instinctual and/or intellectual talent becomes clear enough, so the kids who would have become great QBs either play other positions, swap to other sports, or drop out. Heck, maybe height too (again, you can be excluded from the funnel if your height peaks at the wrong time). It's my understanding that it's much more rare than it used to be to swap into the QB position, which is worth emphasizing too. To be clear, I'm talking late middle school to high school timing, not really applicable to already-in-college players.
It's also a unique position that doesn't really have a very clear equivalent in other sports so it's hard to draw lessons from other sports there too. IMO, a quarterback talent crisis and a general football talent crisis are distinct potential issues, and the first feels like it has a bit more evidence than the second, though neither I'm super certain of.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
28d ago
The genius is also way better at self regulation and has less need for strict community based rules to apply to them, hence they can engage in stuff like polyamorism/drugs/etc other hedonistic activities with less risk.
I’m sorry, you lost me right away. This is not true. Visible geniuses (many of them) have good self regulation, but that’s selection bias all the way down. A ton of geniuses are badly dysfunctional outside of their “domain” (and some even within it). It’s also a bit self-contradictory in that “self-regulation” and following community rules often go together far more often than the opposite.
If you’re positing that successful (very) smart and high status people don’t ruin their lives with drugs as often as stupid people, that is hopelessly confounded (eg social support is a big factor and so is money) so we might have to settle for opinions. But my opinion is that excessive hedonism insofar as it leads to substantial QoL degradation is fairly independent of intelligence and tends to hit humans pretty equally.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
What about modern society gives you the impression that it is capable of working on that scale? The Amish elder in question almost certainly knows their families personally. And he is quite literally in a position of responsibility (even if informal). It’s not some abstract thing. This is virtually never the case for the examples listed in the OP.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
There’s an interesting staff writer at The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper, who among other things is a sort of rare left-wing Black critic of left-wing academia (a sort of “origin story” here). When interviewed about said piece, and touching also on his opinions about the Arday scandal and aftermath, he was posed this question about not playing into the hands of conservative critics of left-wing academia (and left-wingers more broadly):
Gutkin: One of the reasons people might be unwilling, in general, to make hay about these incidents is that they perceive them as feeding into a right-wing campaign against the sector. You’ve been accused of that.
Harper: A lot of my politics and a lot of my writing are centered around a rejection of what I call state of emergencyism, an attitude where you say, “Look, some of these things might be right, but we’re in an authoritarian state of emergency with the Trump administration. Fascism is on the rise in America. Now is not the time to air our dirty laundry and make these institutional critiques. Those critiques need to be deferred to the post-emergency period.”
The problem, of course, is there is no post-emergency period. We’ve been living with rising right-wing authoritarianism in the United States for the better part of a decade, if not longer. This idea that we can defer institutional self-care, to use a woke idiom, until some imagined future date in which the tides of authoritarianism have been beaten back — that’s a fantasy.
This is not just a problem within academia. State of emergencyism is a brainworm that infects almost all liberal politics and liberal institutions today. I write a lot about the problems within the Democratic Party, and when I was writing about Biden’s very obvious senility, a critique I would get all the time is: “Look, obviously his brain is mush, right? But you can’t say that now.” I firmly reject that. We are where we are today in liberal institutions — whether it’s the Democratic Party or higher education — because we have constantly deferred the act of self-criticism to some imagined future date, and we’ve used Trump as an excuse to do that.
This had me thinking about “emergencyism” more broadly. I’m kind of coming around to the idea that this particular brainworm is, at risk of “both-sideism”, a pretty fundamental and widespread issue. On the left we have the above position. On the right we have a parallel idea that Republicans and Trump specifically only might have this small window of time to ‘correct’ and even avenge mistakes of the past, so they need to be thorough and extreme in order to punish those who allegedly schemed against them, abused institutional trends or structure for years, or implemented anything vaguely woke-sounding. Potentially even moderates, maybe they vote in low quality but comparatively “harmless” candidates for office too much (especially in the primary phase, to count).
Emergencies of course are dangerous, historically speaking. While there’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem, we still note examples as classic as the Reichstag fire and associated “emergencies”, Sulla in Roman times, various military juntas; we have Japanese internment, post-9/11 AUMF abuse (especially post-Iraq), assorted Cold War surveillance abuses, etc locally. At least top of my head, IRL they are legion. Real emergencies, abused.
Yet emergencyism as depicted is actually about moral or political panics, and the lowered self-standards that can accompany them. We’re talking here about witch trials, McCarthyism, satanic panic, Iraq WMDs, super predator fears, so on.
Harper himself I think feels a bit extra jaded because in his telling, excessive and even immoral racial justice drives occurred simultaneously with him getting tenure as a university professor and also the university’s unionization drive failing (crushed in part by the same firm Amazon used to suppress their own).
Properly, emergencyism seems to be a subset of a type of blatant partisanship, which is interesting because most of the advocates likely don’t think of themselves as partisans. Potentially it’s also downstream of bad-faith politics. However I tend to think that that’s too convenient an excuse. Most people aren’t actually thinking about things in terms of game theory. And ultimately this is not about “the other side” - it’s about YOU. What are MY morals? Obviously morals are cheap until challenged, and aren’t worth much if they never survive a challenge. It takes courage for a political group to embark on a course of self-betterment even in the face of dastardly opposition. Right?
Or are we totally in a post-moral political hellscape where might makes right and morals are dead?
(And more topically - do you agree that emergencyism is a thing on the left, and do you think it’s a thing on the right two, or that’s the wrong lens to use to make sense of the Trumpist blob?)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3mo ago
Thanks, I thought it was only the double return, that's helpful. Though I went back and forth if I wanted it listicled or not.
My instant CTRL-F: Max Martin. Neither list has him. Honestly, as such, I consider at least the 100 list to be objectively wrong, but I also consider the critic list to also be wrong. I'm not surprised exactly since readers really don't pay attention to songwriting credits, just the actual singers, but it's still pretty impressive when the wisdom of the crowds fails so badly. But you'd think expert critics wouldn't have that issue and would be more aware?
Okay, I'll admit that I'm a bit more of a fan of pop music than some out there - a lot of people don't seem to want to acknowledge that something poppy and high-charting is therefore "good", even though that's kind of the obvious suggestion. However, this man literally has the record!! And it's not just one era, this man has a 30 year career.
Martin has written or co-written 30 Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles; 28 of which he has produced or co-produced, an all-time record for the chart as of June 2026
If you expand it just a bit to top 20 songs and allow co-production only? "Since 1995, Martin has written, co-written, or co-produced 121 Billboard Hot 100 top 20 hits." One hundred and twenty one!! You may recognize a few of these, and I'll bold unique artists so it's clear that although he leans on a few, he's been all over the pop scene:
1998 – "...Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears
2000 – "It's Gonna Be Me" by NSYNC
2008 – "I Kissed a Girl" by Katy Perry
2008 – "So What" by Pink
2009 – "My Life Would Suck Without You" by Kelly Clarkson
2009 – "3" by Britney Spears
2010 – "California Gurls" by Katy Perry featuring Snoop Dogg
2010 – "Teenage Dream" by Katy Perry
2010 – "Raise Your Glass" by Pink
2011 – "Hold It Against Me" by Britney Spears
2011 – "E.T." by Katy Perry featuring Kanye West
2011 – "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)" by Katy Perry
2012 – "Part of Me" by Katy Perry
2012 – "One More Night" by Maroon 5
2012 – "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" by Taylor Swift
2013 – "Roar" by Katy Perry
2013 – "Dark Horse" by Katy Perry featuring Juicy J
2014 – "Shake It Off" by Taylor Swift
2014 – "Blank Space" by Taylor Swift
2015 – "Bad Blood" by Taylor Swift featuring Kendrick Lamar
2015 – "Can't Feel My Face" by The Weeknd
2016 – "Can't Stop the Feeling!" by Justin Timberlake
2019 – "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd
2021 – "Save Your Tears" by The Weeknd and Ariana Grande
2021 – "My Universe" by Coldplay and BTS
2024 – "Yes, And?" by Ariana Grande
2024 – "We Can't Be Friends (Wait for Your Love)" by Ariana Grande
2025 – "The Fate of Ophelia" by Taylor Swift
2026 – "Opalite" by Taylor Swift
2026 - "Hate That I Made You Love Me" by Ariana Grande
It's like not including Warren Buffett in your list of greatest living investors, or Spielberg from your list of greatest living directors, or Agatha Christie from greatest authors, you know? The man literally holds the record, judged by commercial success, for being the greatest songwriter of all time, let alone the "living" restriction. I honestly cannot wrap my mind around it.
But no, these songs are too... what? Too catchy? Too popular? Lmao. I know "greatness" and "popularity" are not really quite synonymous, but surely quantity has a quality of its own. How can he not even make the top 100? It's frankly bizarre. It's not like he's one of those parasites attaching his name to a ton of things either, by all accounts he's actually responsible for some of the most famous hooks himself.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3mo ago
Heh, I was about to comment the same thing. Still, I wish there were more sorta-reddits out there, but there just aren't as far as I can tell.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3mo ago
I think the awkward collision here is that college sports are almost explicitly identarian in nature in a way that few other sports are. At least traditionally, you have a certain style of play, a famous coach, you keep players for a few years, you get to see them grow and develop and flourish, and then (again traditionally) often never even had to see them show up at a rival school, because they'd either age out or "graduate" to the pro leagues. All on top of the inherent local nature of many state colleges, which is statistically quite strong, and then you also have personal connections in the alumni base which simply isn't present in pro sports (you occasionally get a "native son" or daughter who is praised to know end but this isn't actually all that common). So yeah, the NIL/transfer era is truly tragic, almost everyone is feeling this way. I say this doubly so as a college basketball fan, where you are almost extra aware of the players since teams are so small.
The upshot is that college sports had something to lose, and find themselves in a weird spot where no one's sure how much to care about representation. Nowhere is this more visible in my personal opinion than my own alma mater, BYU! Not only is there a strong cultural component, there's also the desire to have the athletes represent the values, which is still strong but at least slightly in conflict with a desire to win as still relative newcomers in the high-profile Big 12 conference, plus the desire for good PR for the underlying church. I think they are threading the needle slightly better than most, but there's no denying that things are decidedly strange.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3mo ago
One of these days I keep meaning to do a sort of mini-review/effortpost of a Harvard Law Review article that comprehensively talks about the 'slippery slope', but it's far more dense and intricate than the issue first appears. However, I will say that as a rough overview, the author categorizes "cost-lowering slippery slopes" and "attitude-altering slippery slopes" and "boiled frog/inattentive slippery slopes" and "political power/momentum slippery slopes" as all distinct from one another.
Of course slippery slopes can be real! But I'm inherently a bit more suspicious of the attitudinal slippery-slopes in particular, even if they appear at first to be the most convincing types (and may well be most powerful in the long run) because of how weak the evidence or proposed mechanism tends to be about their occurrence. So my criticism of your take would be more along the lines of you seem to be presenting this as if it were an attitudinal slippery slope when I'm not really at all convinced that's the most proper framing for what's going on here in Canada (at least, without more details).
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4mo ago
[Meta] The gish gallops need to end
There’s a post below discussing Governor Shapiro and his state booth, Reflecting Pool liner need, and USAID funding death estimates. I think there’s a temptation here to look at all the upvotes (24, solidly above average), the length of the piece, etc and call this a good post. It isn’t. This is just the conservative equivalent of one of those gish gallop posts with dozens of news links pointing out every bad thing Trump has done, with the veneer of thoughtful debate. For those not familiar, Wikipedia here but all you really need to know is that the idea is asymmetry: drop a lot of stuff all at once that can’t possibly be responded to comprehensively. The live debate equivalent is perhaps Spreading? To the credit of the poster, the arguments aren’t necessarily weak per se, but the end impact is like a firehose, and that’s what I take issue with.
Functionally, I think these posts are bad for the community. There is no through thread at all that I can see beyond cute one sentence transitions like “it’s not a question with millions of lives on the line” which is the type of transition I’d be super impressed to see in a high school essay for its fluidity, but am super disappointed to see in a place like this.
Not only is there no common thread between three full length posts slapped together beyond perhaps a trivial thematic “my team is right and yours is full of liars”, there is not even a concluding paragraph that attempts to tie them together.
Why is that bad? The length is not healthy for discussion and debate; the whole point of a thread setup is for somewhat distinct topics to be somewhat distinct. Set up and packaged like this, it incentivizes a “war of worldviews” which might be fine if the point of the post is to discuss worldviews, but it isn’t - the post is all object level or one step up on the topic ladder. So I feel like this goes against the spirit of the site.
If you have three different topics with something substantive to say, you should post three different comments.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4mo ago
It’s not all that bad if you don’t mind it looking a bit more matte over time. Just have the installer wax it really well the first time and it should still be fine.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4mo ago
In this subject it’s way easier to be against something than it is to be for something. Both on a wider level and the details!
Epistemically it’s interesting that someone presents a relatively cogent view and you say “but that’s not what I’m mad at”.
My point is not a criticism of you though. It’s that this works in the opposite direction as well, and creates a lot of confusion. What you depict or want to depict as a monolithic and coherent gender ideology is also best understood as being “against” a caricature of conservative/religious gender ideology.
As an example you might say “there are two genders” or “two sexes” and they might get all worked up and excited since there are all of these edge cases both historically and individually.
It’s actually my observation that there are very loosely two camps: one says that gender is a social construct, and this should be ignored since people can do whatever they want. And individuals can and should be able to discard the baggage on demand since that’s an inherent right/is just. The second says that yes social constructs are real but we need to modify said social constructs in order to better represent the true underlying diversity of things. This camp believes that the constructs are stifling or harmful and need to be consciously expanded. In a way you can see that these don’t actually fit together very harmoniously.
Layered on top of this are various attitudes towards individualism and its sorta-opposite (however you want to phrase it, but the idea that societal or economic or other macro forces are overpoweringly strong). That’s why you see such a disconnect between the libertarian approaches and the other more “oppression” based narratives. The “gender ideology” camp as you describe it doesn’t actually care about reconciling these, since as long as you externally talk about your opposition to the conservatives you are usually going to be accepted.
And this works in reverse as well. You see everything from “gender dysphoria isn’t real” to “gender dysphoria is real and should be treated X way” with varying X’s to “gender dysphoria is ‘real’ but misunderstood or misinterpreted in Y way” and varying degrees of prescriptivism. “Defined” mostly as being in opposition to something.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4mo ago
Old World is the best Civ-like bar none. Very creative with its solutions to common civ gameplay issues and works well.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4mo ago
Why that kind of vinyl floor tile, just for looks? Hopefully you are aware that while durable, it also requires occasional specialized maintenance? VCT actually requires more maintenance overall, not less, despite its use in hospitals and schools, at least if you want it to stay nice visually.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4mo ago
I mean maybe sticking to the UK is the point but as an American with a distorted sense of scale the idea of not nipping over to Ireland or France or Netherlands or something in a two week period seems odd to me, it’s not like those are that far
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4mo ago
It’s literally just the very first shot, I think it primed people
Almost universally, real authors basically say that to get better at writing, you just need to write a lot (and fail). They also say that almost always your first book doesn’t turn out, so if this is your true passion novel/magnum opus unfortunately you’re “better served” by setting it aside, writing a different fantasy novel or maybe novelette or short story, and then coming back to it. Or maybe just write a deliberate side story, same universe. So I’d say your expectations might need adjustment; 15k words is not that much, to be honest. For example over on Royal Road a lot of successful series have maybe 3k-word chapters or so? And you almost always need something like 30+ of those to really be going somewhere.
Like sure, you can make it a bit more efficient by listening to or reading the many author resources out there (Sanderson’s lectures being an easy low hanging fruit example, though not all advice is universal) but I am not kidding when I say literally every single author I’ve ever heard talk about it has said the key is just to write, and write lots.
Even if you’re the rare author whose first work hits (eg Eragon, written by an author who started at 15 and was 18ish when published?) you’ll notice that a) it’s still 130k words or so of finished product and b) I’m pretty sure the author has said the writing is pretty immature with retrospect. I want to emphasize that he’s the exception in a sense, again most good authors basically have to write a mostly-complete but highly-flawed full novel and only then are they capable of producing something decent, after (and for many it takes longer)
I hope this doesn’t sound discouraging; in fact I think it’s mostly encouraging in the sense that it’s very possible to get better as a writer and there’s a clear ish path to do so, but I think it might be helpful to get a sense of scale - at least in my personal opinion, 15k is too small a sample size to conclude anything major. None of this should be taken to mean that you shouldn’t bother getting better at writing dialogue, but it should be taken to set expectations that dialogue doesn’t get better overnight with one easy trick. Writing is hard. I admire a lot anyone who does it - you included!!
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