FirmWeird
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User ID: 757
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1yr ago
My take: while Fox is certainly useful for presenting facts that other sources don't, it's made factually incorrect claims that remain uncorrected. Those would make it difficult to use as the only source for a claim, and if you can't do that, what's the point.
Wikipedia is a nakedly political organisation and has been for some time. "Made factually incorrect claims that remain uncorrected" is not the criteria being used by Wikipedia - if it was, then you'd be unable to rely on any mainstream/"reliable" source of information. I have a long enough memory that I can recall discussions during the gamergate period where wikipedia editors made it clear that even if there was direct proof that a reliable source was lying, the reliable source was to be the viewpoint presented in the article no matter how much evidence there was to the contrary. Wikipedia has already been politicised, and has been for a long time - I would prefer it if they were just honest and flat out said that Fox was being banned for political reasons.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
My personal understanding of the situation is that while influence-selling and corruption have been going on for quite a while, there was generally a level of discretion involved - the system may be incredibly corrupt and deeply compromised by both vested interests and foreign powers, but they do their best to maintain the appearance of good behavior, because that image does actually matter to the public. Hunter Biden is unique simply because he has been so incompetent, careless and nakedly corrupt that the human machinery of the state is revolting in protest. Taking money from Russia in order to approve uranium exports or taking money from tax preparation software companies in order to make sure taxation stays arcane and convoluted is just business as usual... but there's enough plausible deniability that they can make a case for their innocence which stands up to the incredibly anaemic scrutiny provided by the media.
But Hunter Biden is a level beyond that. Not hiding his crack addiction at all, not hiding his corruption or influence-trading, getting super high and drunk and just leaving laptops with mountains of incredibly incriminating evidence at repairshops and ignoring the calls about it... he was just incredibly sloppy, and he was incredibly sloppy on camera. While the media doesn't dare report on it, when you think about the actual implications of the content that's on the laptop it becomes clear just how severe a breach this is. Why would someone take a bunch of photos of them doing crack and having sex with prostitutes in China, photos that make their identity crystal clear? I've been to some pretty wild parties, but I can't think of any innocent reason as to why he took the pictures he did. Rather, I think that there's a very plausible case to be made that those photos were Hunter's copy of the blackmail material he provided to his foreign partners.
There's just so much evidence of wrongdoing, and the sheer amount of fingers being planted on the scale to make that mountain of problems go away is egregiously offensive to a lot of the human infrastructure of the state - which is why we're getting so many whistleblowers on this case. The administration and DOJ want to make it go away, but the corruption and influence-trading here is so on-the-nose and blatant that even democrat-aligned government workers are coming forward and whistleblowing. Hillary at least had the sense to make sure her corruption was murky, hidden and plausibly deniable - but anyone who can post on this site can go stare at the photos of Hunter Biden staring into the camera as he measures out a precise amount of crack, smokes it and then fucks a prostitute, all the while reading about how multiple former business partners have come forward and spoken about how the Bidens screwed them over while selling influence. The system can tolerate a lot of corruption, but Hunter has just been so incredibly sloppy and his corruption is so undeniably blatant that it represents a bridge too far for a lot of people.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
My theory as to the reason why they have this weird hate boner is exactly because he trimmed the fat and bloat at twitter. A lot of that bloat consisted of cultural commissars who made sure to keep Twitter on the Right Side of History. Once you fire all that dead weight, their equally useless companions in other companies and organisations start getting nervous - if one person can just dump the diversity officers and experience no problems, then that's an existential threat to all the diversity officers and social justice consultants employed at other places. As a result, those other diversity officers are now using their position and influence to punish him and make an example of him to prevent anyone else from getting the extremely profitable idea that you don't actually need to pay a bunch of diversity officers to sit around and work on dismantling white supremacist values like being on time, completing work and using mathematics.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
5mo ago
people on the left who hyperbolically opine in outlets like Newsweek and The Economist about how a second Trump term would “end democracy” and “poses the biggest danger to the world.”
These people are correct from their own limited perspective. Remember that "democracy" to them just translates to "rule by the managerial class" - this is why Donald Trump being democratically elected by a majority of the voting population would be a defeat for democracy (FBI agents arresting the winner of the election and announcing the Hillary Clinton caretaker government would be a victory for democracy in their view). At the same time, he would pose an incredibly big danger, but to their world rather than the world as a whole. Term 2 Trump would absolutely represent an end to the world that these people live in and know (as has been pointed out by some other commenters) - when your entire worldview is based upon being part of the elect, the class of managers who optimise society and tell people what to do, what happens when the people you consider your workers/underlings tell you in no uncertain terms that you're worse than useless and they want to listen to a person diametrically opposed to you and everything you stand for?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1yr ago
I can understand the opposition to student loan forgiveness, but I think it would be possible to achieve the same goals in a way that would seem (to me at least) a bit more just - and that is to make sure that the universities and colleges which took in all of this money pay the price. I find it hard to get too angry at people who fell for what is essentially a scam when they took what was actually a fairly rational action at the time.
I think that student loans shouldn't be forgiven, but instead transferred to the colleges and universities that handed out those dud loans. That's where the real anti-social behaviour is, especially when institutions like Harvard have utterly obscene endowments. If a university or college took an extraordinary amount of money in exchange for giving someone a worthless education, they should absolutely pay the price. You'd need to have some checks and balances, but leaving higher education bodies responsible for non-performing student loan debt would give them skin in the game and align their incentives. Forcing them to carefully decide whether a given loan would actually be paid off would have all kinds of positive consequences. It would have a lot of negative consequences for my opponents in the culture war, but that's a price I'd be willing to pay.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
24d ago
But the idea that these Swedish charges were a trumped up excuse just to get him into the hands of the Americans doesn't pass the smell test for me.
Thankfully, we don't have to just use our noses for issues like this - we can just go look at the actual facts of the matter. To quote a fairly well credentialed expert on the matter, Nils Melzer...
https://medium.com/@njmelzer/response-to-open-letter-of-1-july-2019-7222083dafc8
Second, as far as SW is concerned, her police report states that, after Assange woke her up trying to initiate intercourse, the two had a conversation in which she asked Assange whether he was wearing a condom and he replied he was not. She then said he “would better not have HIV” and he replied that he did not, after which, she “let him continue” (lät honom fortsätta) to have unprotected intercourse. There are no indications of coercive or incapacitating circumstances suggesting lack of consent. Accordingly, Chief Prosecutor for Stockholm Eva Finne stated: “I do not think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape” and closed the case on 25 August 2010 concluding that the “conduct alleged by SW disclosed no crime at all”. Having examined all the evidence before me, I agree with her. My position, like Finne’s, is not that SW’s account is not credible, but rather that the conduct alleged does not constitute “rape”.
Third, as far as AA is concerned, even the Swedish prosecution never suggested that the conduct alleged by her could amount to “rape”. In a Twitter-message of 22 April 2013, AA herself publicly denied having been raped (jag har inte blivit våldtagen). AA also stated in a tabloid interview that Assange is not violent and that neither she nor SW felt afraid of him. While I agree with the prosecution that AA’s allegations, if proven to be true, could amount to sexual assault other than rape, the fact that she submitted as evidence a condom, supposedly worn and torn during intercourse with Assange, which carried no DNA of either Assange or AA, seriously undermines her credibility.
Fourth, according to their own accounts, neither AA nor SW ever alleged to have been raped, and neither of them intended to report a crime. Rather, evidence shows that AA took SW to a police station, so SW could enquire whether she could force Assange to take an HIV-test. There, they were questioned together by an investigating officer who knew AA personally and ran on the same political party ticket as AA in the general elections three weeks later. When superior investigators insisted on registering SW’s enquiry as a report of “rape” and to immediately issue an arrest warrant against Assange, SW reportedly refused to sign her statement and became so emotionally distraught that the questioning had to be suspended. While at the police station, SW even texted that she “did not want to put any charges on Julian Assange” but that “the police were keen on getting their hands on him” (14:26); and that she was “chocked (sic shocked) when they arrested him” because she “only wanted him to take a test” (17:06). Once Chief Prosecutor Finné had intervened and closed the case, it reportedly was again the police (not SW) who “revised” her statement lodged in the police system to better fit the crime of “rape” before it was resubmitted by a third Social Democrat politician to a different prosecutor who was prepared to re-open the case.
Your position directly contradicts the statements of the people actually involved in this case, and I think that the actual supposed victim's testimony is substantially more reliable than your nasal sentiment.
His game plan seems to have been to hole up in the embassy and then whinge about being a 'political prisoner' and 'held without trial' while doing everything in his power to avoid any trial, even on apolitical charges.
You haven't been paying attention to the case - Assange and his lawyers made multiple offers to testify and participate in a trail as long as there were guarantees that he would not be immediately extradited to the US. He also offered to testify remotely from the embassy, and these requests were denied as well. Assange and his legal representation clearly had substantial reason to believe that arrest in Sweden would lead to US extradition almost immediately, and he was more than willing to participate in the trial if there was an assurance it wasn't an excuse to just immediately send him off to the US. The Swedish prosecutors notably refused to provide any of these assurances, and so he didn't do it despite making multiple good faith attempts to actually have the trial! Your post is riddled with factual errors, and while I don't think everyone has to unconditionally love the man, I think you at least owe it to yourself and the rest of the motte to make sure your opinions are informed by the actual facts of the matter.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
4mo ago
All of the “economic efficiency” is just going to go to the very wealthy,
This is the entire reason - the very wealthy are the ones inviting politicians to their parties, paying for legacy media to broadcast their opinions and convincing people to go into huge debt in order pay money to go to university and become enforcers of their ideology. But if you want to disagree with them that's really uncool and lame and potentially even bigoted - yeah sure you're signing your children and grandchildren up for immense misery and deprivation, but you wouldn't want to look like one of those dirty truckers, would you?
Immigration has always functioned like this in the modern world - a weapon used by the very wealthy against the rest of society in order to entrench their advantages at the cost of society's longer term stability, functioning and prosperity.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
4mo ago
This has all been obvious for some time, and people do need to come to grips with it instead of telling themselves "it can't happen, so it won't".
This has been far from obvious. Actually going ahead with the prosecution and sending Trump to prison, i.e. letting his entire voting base know that they aren't allowed to pick their representative and their votes are worthless, is not going to be a decision without serious consequences. Most people believed that they wouldn't go through with it not due to some opinion on the matter of the law, but the political and societal consequences that would ensue. My personal belief was that the whole point of these prosecutions was to hamper his campaigning efforts - and the dates they chose for the trial were as close to confirmation as I thought possible barring another wikileaks incident. I didn't think they would actually send him to prison simply because that would be so good for his re-election chances, but if they actually go ahead with it I'll be extremely surprised. To quote a joke made by another poster, maybe he could use the time in jail to write another memoir about his political struggles.
DC is an overwhelmingly democratic voting jurisdiction, but you would need to be cynical indeed to think there is no chance that even one Democrat juror would refuse to imprison a political opponent on obviously baseless charges
Have you read the news anytime in the past two decades? Are you high? I unironically cannot model the mind of someone who believes that a motivated prosecutor and judge couldn't round up twelve people willing to convict Donald Trump, a man who most members of the blob consider to be worse than Satan, on charges that don't quite hold muster. They were already willing to bend the law much further than allowing a lying democrat into a jury pool with the crossfire hurricane investigation and the bogus Carter Page warrant - they've already gone well beyond what you seem to believe is plausible, and that was in 2015! You have a comical level of faith in an institution that has already been demonstrated as helplessly corrupt - how can you possibly look at the prosecutions of SpaceX for failing to hire enough illegal immigrants for a job they're forbidden to work under law, or the soft-walking of Hunter Biden's countless, impeccably documented felonies, and think that the legal system in the US is actually functioning on legal principles?
You can believe that it's outrageous to deprive people of their democratic rights or you can believe that conspiring to deprive people of their democratic rights isn't a "real crime", but it's incoherent to claim both.
Yes, and there isn't actually a contradiction here - they don't believe that Trump was actually conspiring to deprive people of their democratic rights (rather that he was attempting to thwart a conspiracy to do so by others).
This is the logic of terrorism. Give us what we want or there will be blood.
I'm not going to deny that's one way of phrasing the message being sent. But a more accurate one would be that they believe the government and the democrats are defecting from the political and democratic order - that they're corruptly using their current authority in order to prevent the opposition from gaining power. Functioning democracies generally don't lock up and arrest the leaders of the opposition party! When the social contract that stipulates democracy and a peaceful transfer of power is torn up, why should they continue to bind themselves by rules that their opponents are clearly not respecting? They're saying "If you don't play by the rules, we won't play by the rules either." - which is not exactly the kind of terroristic threat that your interpretation implies.
he knows he is fanning the flames of their resentment and putting the thought of violence in their heads.
I don't think you've seen much recent conservative social media activity. Do you really think the Trump base needs Tucker Carlson to put the thought of violence in their heads? If the Biden administration announces that the Republican party doesn't get to contest the next presidential election, I don't think the republican base would just sit there and go "Aww shucks, guess that's what the law says! Nothing we can do." if it wasn't for Tucker Carlson whispering in their ears.
All, one presumes, so he can maintain his position in the GOP media ecosystem. What a worm.
I think that he is absolutely a true believer when he makes that claim, no matter his feelings towards Trump the man. I think Trump is flawed, albeit not as flawed as he's often painted to be, but even if I passionately hated the man I would still have no trouble believing that his incredibly passionate base would get extremely violent if they were told that they weren't allowed political representation anymore.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
4mo ago
As someone who considers themself an environmentalist, my view on this entire phenomena is that it is western financial powers using the environment as an excuse for further profiteering. There's nothing at all in this proposed mechanism that would actually ensure good stewardship over the environment, but plenty of opportunities for the financial class to make a bunch of easy money.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1yr ago
Show me the man who averted his eyes from porn because it featured a promiscuous woman.
This comment makes it clear that you don't understand the argument being made by the other side.
If you did, the question you'd actually be asking is "show me the man who withdraws commitment and resource-provision from a woman when he discovers her promiscuity" - and that's a question that can actually be answered a lot more thoroughly.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
I find this very surprising, because I consider myself a fairly strong HBD believer and none of this matches to what I actually believe.
This believe is in turn used to justify opposition any cultural or social intervention that isn't explicitly configured along racial and intersectional lines.
I've found that the HBD "position" on issues like this is more that as g is unevenly distributed among population groups, that it will naturally manifest as a difference in outcomes even in the absence of explicit racial discrimination. It isn't that teaching black kids to read is a waste of time, but more that recognising that as a group they're going to need different environments, teaching styles and expectations to thrive - and that any plausible interventions that are designed to bring them up to the same standards as another population with a different g distribution curve are going to fail. This can definitely lend support to the argument that black people and white people should have separate education systems, but not that "teaching black kids to read is a waste of time". The closest I can come to seeing that argument in HBD is to use it as a justification, i.e. "It's going to be expensive to educate a separate, low-performing population with differing requirements and aptitudes, so why not just not have that separate population instead and save money?" - but that's not really the fault of HBD itself.
HBDers dismiss pro-social behavior as stupid and counterproductive and when this leads to poor outcomes,
This one really mystifies me - unless you think that pro-social behavior consists of affirmative action, diversity officer sinecures and well-meaning but fatally flawed rectification efforts. HBD doesn't really have anything to say on pro-social behaviour, and the closest I can come to understanding your position here is "HBD says that certain interventions are useless, but I don't think they're useless, ergo HBD is bad".
What we are seeing in South Africa now is a failure of basic civic structures and trust, this has fuck all to do with skin color but it does have a great deal to do with social cohesion.
I don't think that's actually the case. To the best of my knowledge, the HBD position on South Africa would be something along the lines of "Many of the economic and governmental mechanisms, frameworks and bodies set up to manage and organise SA society require a certain baseline level of g in the population, alongside certain heritable qualities in temperament (differing levels of MAOA-L alleles etc). When the administration of society was handed over to a population which did not meet what are effectively the human capital prerequisites, the result was a slow disintegration of the prosperity and social capital accumulated by the prior administration." That matches incredibly well to the outcomes we're seeing, and it isn't a particularly novel view either.
You're right when you say that there's a failure of basic civic structures and trust, and this does technically have fuck-all to do with skin-colour, but that's because skin-colour isn't actually what HBD cares about. In fact your position there fits very neatly into the HBD framework - I feel very confident saying that if you gave the entire black population of South Africa the Michael Jackson skin-colour treatment, the outcome would be identical in all the ways that matter.
Personally I think that they're just not using democracy in the same way that most people understand it. To the best of my knowledge, "Democracy" when used in these contexts essentially means rule by the global professional managerial class. If Donald Trump won 85% of the popular vote and was elected in a perfectly functioning democratic election, that would be a defeat for democracy - and at the same time, if the FBI intervened and announced that actually electing Trump would be illegal and Hillary Clinton was to be installed as president instead, that would be classified as a victory for democracy.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
3mo ago
He didn't build the wall the first time, why would he do it now?
Trump's first presidency was hamstrung by multiple factors, some of them explicit (Crossfire Hurricane and the Mueller investigation it turned into) and others less visible (entrenched resistance from the deep state and republican party). The last eight years have seen substantial shifts in the GOP, with many more pro-Trump individuals getting involved in the actual political machinery of the republican party, and he's going to have a lot more leverage in a second term.
- Personal Loyalty: This is close to the Richard Hanania theory. Personal loyalty would make sense if Trump was loyal in turn to his supporters, but he isn't. How many of his lawyers have gone to jail? How many orange-blooded Trump fans lost their jobs or got arrested for believing in him too hard on January 6? He could have pardoned these people, but he didn't. Orange Man good because Orange Man good.
The moment Trump pardoned the J6 protestors he would have been impeached by the Republican party - the threat was even made explicitly in the media IIRC.
- Perceived Injustice: Yes, Trump has been treated unfairly by the media and the Washington establishment. Lots of people have been. I can understand why this would be seen as a necessary condition (e.g. "nobody liked by the 'elites' could ever be a good president"), but why would this be a sufficient condition? Surely electability and general competence matter more than an extra standard-deviation worth of grievances against the media.
Every single person who has been trusted and liked by the media/Washington establishment has immediately abandoned the particular policies that Trump-voters want and support once they get into office, and it isn't like this is an accident - the only way to be liked by the media/Washington establishment is to preserve and extend the same policies which they like and the Trump base hates. This is also why Desantis and Nikki Haley were immediately rejected by the base - they're just more representatives of Conservative Inc who want to return things to business as usual, and business as usual has gotten utterly intolerable for a lot of the people supporting Trump.
- Hatred: I'm not talking about "Hate™". I'm talking about a genuine desire to see one's political enemies suffer. It's not even clear to me that Trump would be better at this than other Republican candidates, but I feel I would be missing something if I didn't put it on the list.
Have you been paying attention to how much weeping, moaning and gnashing of teeth even the prospect of Trump getting back into power has caused? Nobody's writing lengthy thinkpieces about how the election of Nikki Haley would mean the end of democracy/sunlight/good things in the world.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1yr ago
I don't think that "do it yourself or convince someone to" is actually going to be possible - if I tried to make an earnest, good faith effort to fix the inaccuracies and politically slanted representation of the articles that concern me, I would just be banned within short order. And while I appreciate the offer, I do not believe you can actually meaningfully do anything to correct the "political lean" of the sort that I'm alluding to. Are you going to single-handedly remove a bunch of admins and institute sweeping reforms to the culture of Wikipedia? I don't see any other way to make articles like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower_meeting present a balanced and accurate picture of events as opposed to what they show now.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1yr ago
I don't think you have an accurate picture of the other side's grievances in this case - hell, I don't think you even have an accurate picture of the post you're replying to. Did you actually read parts 2,3 and 4?
was never "no there aren't"
Yes, that was the response. Kotaku said that there weren't any and put out an article saying as much.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
6mo ago
That would indeed hamper Trump's efforts to campaign, but I honestly think they would prefer it if he was ostensibly free yet unable to actually talk or campaign. I think putting him in prison and actually sending him to gaol would be too big of a boost to his campaign - a lot of swing voters find things like putting the opposition candidate in prison for spurious process crimes while ignoring serious corruption and malfeasance committed by your son to be somewhat offputting.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
6mo ago
Discrediting witnesses is harder to draw a clean line on, because again there's a gradient between discrediting and intimidating
This is actually even worse than it seems. "Reasonably foreseeable witnesses or the substance of their testimony" could include a vast number of people - what's to say Chutkan can't come down on him for even the mildest political attack ad by saying that Biden is a potential witness for the prosecution? The entire point of this prosecution is to hamper Trump's efforts to campaign, and this is just one of the tools they're using to achieve that goal. The legal theory doesn't actually matter at all, because the point is to hurt Trump's campaign and it doesn't matter if their every decision is immediately revoked upon appeal because they will have hurt Trump in some way. It's not like there could be any reasonable restitution Trump could receive afterwards either.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
7mo ago
Charging for any install is just so transparently abuseable that anyone should be able to see how much of an obviously bad idea it is.
Actually they clarified - you're wrong, they are charging for any install. Go read the thread on their official forums. It is in fact so transparently abuseable that anyone should be able to see how much of an obviously bad idea it is.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
4d ago
I don't think this is necessarily true.
I do not believe for a single second that anyone in the history of the entire world has ever said "I have a great, on-topic and timely post to share with this reddit community, but my account is too new. I'm going to purchase an account with a pre-existing history so I can share this incredible post with a community that I have no pre-existing engagement with."
Spotting accounts like this harvesting karma is like spotting people who are in the middle of getting their robbery tools ready - the only purpose for what they're doing is so that someone else later on can break the rules while making them so money.
Reddit has a lot of silly or dumb rules... that's part of why this site decided to separate in the first place!
No? The Motte tried to actually avoid breaking the rules of Reddit, and we split because we knew that not actually breaking the rules wasn't going to be a defence against the eye of Sauron making sure that there weren't any visible communities of people talking about how lightning strikes seem to appear before the thunder - or at least that's how I recall it.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
3mo ago
I did not say lets also become an authoritarian dictatorship at the same time.
Do you think authoritarian dictatorships announce themselves as authoritarian dictatorships and democratically ask the people to vote on their takeover? The privacy warriors in the US are looking over at places like China, Russia and the UK and seeing almost exactly the things they were warning about being implemented, and you're calling them paranoid when they take umbrage at US politicians talking about how great those things are and wanting to bring them here! One of the major arguments made by the privacy warriors is that even if you give the government this power now because you trust it not to become an authoritarian dictatorship, it is impossible to tell when one of those is coming down the pipe. Yes, it sucks that the one pedophile who was capable of using encryption perfectly to hide his crimes got away, but that's utterly insignificant when compared to the danger posed by our current panopticon if it were to fall into the wrong hands, and there is no way of making sure that it does not fall into the wrong hands. Both sides of politics believe that their opposition will use this power corruptly, and I'm honestly not sure either of them are wrong.
Your argument is essentially saying that it is fine to not have seatbelts because you personally haven't crashed your car and don't think you're going to crash it in the near future (yeah sure other people get into car crashes but you're built different), and the people saying "hey you should wear a seatbelt" are just paranoid, low-status losers who shouldn't be listened to.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
5mo ago
Are they secretly true believers but just don't want to say?
I don't talk about trans surgery issues not because I'm a true believer, but because I enjoy not being fired, being able to talk to my extended family and not having unhinged weirdos stalk me and people close to me while trying to get me fired and censured. You can absolutely motherfucking bet that a lot of these people are going to make sure their kids don't end up as trans, but for many of these people trying to speak up in public is nothing more than an invitation for a bunch of fringe weirdos to get involved with your life in ways that reflect terribly on you even if you're doing the right thing. Who the fuck is going to blow up their entire social life, inflict huge amounts of annoyance on their family and potentially jeopardise their ability to keep their own children fed in order to take a stance on a political issue that affects a vanishing minority of people?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
6mo ago
It’s definitely not almost zero chance. There is a ton of antisemitism going around. You can’t just forgive everyone for being a dumb kid who did antisemitism by accident. Someone is pulling the strings.
There's zero chance that this was an antisemitic dogwhistle. Greta is an individual whose political inclinations and beliefs have been broadcast all over the world and none of them line up with antisemitism. I don't think you understand politics well at all if you think that left-wing opposition to Israel is motivated by antisemitism. The limit of her antisemitism is owning an innocuous plush octopus toy. Nobody is "pulling the strings" to make a slightly autistic (not an insult, she has claimed this about herself) young girl buy a small plush toy. Children routinely purchase stuffed toys all over the world.
And Greta is fairly high up decision maker in this food chain.
Greta has no decision-making authority beyond her own personal statements. She is not some big leader - she was a symbol because she expressed political motivations at an extremely young age. She isn't some well respected guru or thought leader, she's simply a prominent activist. Do you really, seriously think that she'd have any influence at all if she decided to come out publicly and say "Hey everyone, I just saw a really well made /pol/ infographic, turns out I was wrong and the nazis were right - gas the jews now!"?
I fail to understand how you just accidentally use a Jewish dog whistle
The plush toy of an octopus is not an antisemitic dogwhistle, it is a small toy purchased by a child. 4chan has been breaking new ground in discovering and developing new antisemitic dogwhistles (like the OK hand sign and drinking milk) but not even they have managed to get to the point of calling CHILDREN BUYING SMALL PLUSH TOYS the new sign that they're antisemites who are already goose-stepping and heiling Hitler in their heart of hearts. This is utterly paranoid conspiracy-theory thinking that sees vast amounts of meaning in incredibly inconsequential acts.
directly calling for Jewish genocide.
Huh? Where did Greta do that? Can you show me the example of her talking about how Hitler was right and the jews need to be gassed? The sign she was actually holding in reality said "STAND WITH GAZA" - and there's actually a big difference between saying "I stand with Gaza" as opposed to "All the filthy juden need to be exterminated". Remember, people on the left think that it is actually possible for different ethnicities to co-exist, so saying that she stands with Gaza doesn't actually mean that she wants every single jew killed first. Indeed, the girl next to her in that picture has a sign saying THIS JEW STANDS WITH PALESTINE - if she's actually an antisemite who is directly calling for a final solution to the jewish problem, why isn't she trying to murder the girl next to her?
She’s almost 21 now. At some point your not dumb kid and you just don’t accidentally do genocide promotion.
She did not accidentally promote genocide. A small plush toy was inflated into a fictional dogwhistle in order to discredit Greta after she supported the other side of an incredibly fierce argument in the public space. There isn't a single serious thinker in the world who thinks that Greta Thunberg is a secret nazi.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
7mo ago
I would absolutely love to be a fly on the wall in the meeting where they tell Nintendo that not only are they are going to have to pay them a 20 cent fee every time a Unity game gets installed on a Nintendo platform but that Unity is going to be using their own proprietary way to determine those numbers. There are actually even more layers of broken stupidity to this decision than it seems at first glance.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9mo ago
Evidence of a lab leak could cause a political backlash — understandably, given that COVID has killed almost 7 million people — resulting in a reduction in funding for gain-of-function research and other virological research. That’s potentially important to the authors or the authors’ bosses — and the authors were very aware of the career implications for how the story would play out;
Not just a political backlash - a personal backlash. Peter Daszak was heavily involved in both the cover-up efforts and the initial funding that lead to the GoF research performed in China. If the lab-leak theory became prominent and publicly accepted, those seven million deaths and all the liability can be pinned very squarely on a few people.
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698#ack
Here's the GoF research paper produced at the Wuhan institute of virology, where they had a look at bat coronaviruses and did some gain-of-function research to see if they'd be dangerous in humans. Now even at first glance this paper looks extremely bad for the natural origins crew - it looks like the Wuhan Institute was actually performing GoF research on bat coronaviruses, the exact type of research that could lead to the creation of COVID-19 if an accident happened. But while that's an interesting datapoint, the reason I bring it up is that if you have a look at the funding of this paper you're going to see some of the people who are directly responsible for COVID if the lab-leak theory is true.
Funding: This work was jointly funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (81290341, 31621061) to ZLS, China Mega-Project for Infectious Disease (2014ZX10004001-003) to ZLS, Scientific and technological basis special project (2013FY113500) to YZZ and ZLS from the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDPB0301) to ZLS, the National Institutes of Health (NIAID R01AI110964), the USAID Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) PREDICT program to PD and ZLS, CAS Pioneer Hundred Talents Program to JC, NRF-CRP grant (NRF-CRP10-2012-05) to LFW and WIV “One-Three-Five” Strategic Program (WIV-135-TP1) to JC and ZLS. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
So, contra to certain public statements under oath, the NIH actually did fund GoF research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan. You can look up the specific grant in question too, and what do you find? https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_R01AI110964_7529 It went through the Eco-Health alliance run by Peter Daszak, who was also credited in that paper for providing funding.
Remember when they put out a statement in the Lancet talking about how we need to stop talking about conspiracy theories related to the origin of the virus? https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30418-9/fulltext Great statement... but hang on a second, one of those names in the author list looks familiar - Peter Daszak! The person who was in charge of getting US government money spent on gain of function research on bat coronaviruses in the Wuhan institute of virology was a prominent figure letting everyone know that the idea that the US government funded GoF research on bat coronaviruses in the Wuhan institute of virology could have accidentally produced and leaked the exact kind of modified bat coronavirus they were studying is a baseless conspiracy theory.
None of this amounts, as many COVID skeptics are calling it, to research fraud; I'm not even sure it fits most definitions of academic misconduct. But that's mostly because the publication didn't have enough numbers or analysis to need to actively lie: this paper has no pixels to check for signs of photoshopping, nor specific population numbers to hit with GRIM. Silver has joined calls to retract the paper, but Nature's staff have already said that "Neither previous out-of-context remarks by the authors nor disagreements with the authors’ stated views, are, on their own, grounds for retraction." It ain't happening.
I totally agree on that point - this doesn't fall into the category of research fraud. They didn't do a bad, fraudulent study to back up their claims, they just didn't do any study at all. But much like saying that I didn't commit perjury when I said that I was 12 feet tall because I wasn't under oath, making it clear that you didn't commit a specific type of deception doesn't mean that you were being 100% truthful. It wasn't research fraud, but there was absolutely deceptive behaviour taking place, the exact kind of which can't be figured out until the non-published conversations they had when they realised the conversations were being recorded are published.
They went looking for an excuse to avoid the obvious answer that was staring them in the face because that obvious answer meant that they had fucked up in a massive way. If you're one of the people who put your name on this research and made it happen, that means that a lab-leak is potentially your fault... and I think that people are willing to go to an awful lot of lengths to avoid considering themselves responsible for (and appearing responsible for to the public) a number of deaths that's on par with the holocaust. For the record, my view is that all of this cover-up and perfidy surrounding the origins of COVID constitutes the greatest piece of evidence for the lab-leak theory - where's the motivation for lying under oath and dragging the name and reputation of science as a field through the mud if natural origins was actually correct?
I find it utterly incredible how little self-awareness is on display here and this single article and the point you've demonstrated has actually lowered my estimation of the scientific community and Nature especially so. Even beyond the comically stupid and obvious immediate failure that you've pointed out, a study like this should be raising gigantic flashing alarm bells in the minds of anyone concerned with science as a field. They have here a sign that descending into the muck of partisan politics renders them less trustworthy and damages public faith in science, one of the worst possible outcomes for both science as a field and individual scientists. And their response is to double down?
These are the first steps on the well-travelled road that leads to Hypatia's fate.
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