FirmWeird
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User ID: 757
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2yr 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
4mo ago
The first step to authoritarianism is creating a climate in which dissent is punished.
Are you going to seriously sit here and post about how terrible it is that people aren't bringing up their political opinions or views due to fear of retribution from Trump, and then claim that this is the start of some creeping authoritarianism? Have you been in a coma for the past two decades? You're describing a kind of pressure and chilling that doesn't even reach ten percent of the pervasiveness of social justice culture as some brand new authoritarian threat, but if you actually took your stated position seriously you'd have been cheering Trump on in the hope that he could smash "woke" culture (if that is the case then I applaud your consistency).
Instead of being afraid, more of us need to speak out for the values of democracy. It is harder to suppress voices this way. And people who are threatened by Musk and Trump especially need to be supported.
"Values of democracy" - could you please tell me what those are? Because your post seems to imply that these values are just "uncontested rule by the managerial class", and I don't think "democracy" is a good word to describe that.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
2yr 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
1yr 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
11mo ago
And I'm not sure why they abandoned them.
There is an extremely obvious answer that jumps out at me from reading the text - discrimination laws. Even if you just want to keep out the riff-raff and the poor, class-based policies like the one you're suggesting are going to be an absolute goldmine for any lawyer who knows what the phrase "disparate impact" means. A policy which keeps out members of the societal underclass is going to disproportionately impact black people, which means it is then going to have the business which upholds that policy wiped out in court if seriously challenged.
Today, we don't do that kind of screening. That's a level of trust that you see, that is manifest, and it is raised, rather than lowered.
I actually disagree - there is in fact less trust. What happened is that the spread of insurance and large corporations mean that the costs of accounting for those problems that you're talking about are simply spread out and distributed across the rest of society and the rest of that corporation. They aren't trusting you or their customers - structural changes mean that there's just not really anything you could do to seriously inconvenience them. If you go into an Apple store and just wreck the entire place, destroying/stealing every single piece of tech in there, the costs of your actions aren't going to be added to the bills of people who shop there - those customers are already paying for that risk and have been for years.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1yr 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
3mo ago
This isn't really a question, but I'd like to announce that I'm effectively retiring from the Motte. I'm not doing this because I don't like arguing or haven't enjoyed my time here, but simply because I've started working on a personal creative project that's going to be taking up the time that I would have spent reading and responding to posts on here. As I'm still working a day job, I don't think I can maintain my presence here as well as pursuing what is effectively a second career. That said, if it proves to be a big success and I can retire from my day job, I'll likely come back - or alternatively if it turns out to be a massive failure and I become a bitter, jaded recluse I'll also come back.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1yr ago
But, still .... how the hell are either of these guys mad about anything?
Most people on the internet find getting into the weeds and dirty details of the various bad faith prosecutions of Trump to be unbearable - imagine having to live through them. I'm honestly surprised he isn't angrier when I picture myself in his position, sitting across from someone who knowingly lied in order to start a fraudulent criminal prosecution against me while threatening my family, reputation and legacy. Throw in the fact that he's now a constant target for mockery in public and in culture, and I can absolutely see why he's angry.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1yr 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
1yr 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
2yr 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
6mo ago
Does Mass Migration Always and Everywhere Lead to Populist Backlash?
Does starting a small fire in a dry forest always and everywhere lead to a forest fire? No - sometimes it rains, sometimes the fire brigade comes and puts it out, sometimes the wind just forcefully extinguishes it before it can get started. But there's no denying that starting an uncontrolled fire in a dry forest full of tinder is almost definitely going to start a forest fire.
It is more accurate to say that mass migration always creates the conditions required for a populist backlash - you can head that backlash off in a variety of different ways, but the consequences of mass migration are the dry tinder required for a populist backlash. Mass migration depresses wages(and eventually salaries) and drives up the costs of housing and other essentials of life. Simultaneously, it has a negative effect on social trust and cohesion (ever read Bowling Alone?), makes people less charitable and less likely to support their community. Of course, it isn't all bad - it makes things better for the wealthy and upper classes, at least for a while. Employers can treat their workers like shit and exploit them to a greater degree than before, and that might lead to some economic benefits (somebody is very clearly making a lot of money off replacing workers with H1B visa holders or illegal immigrants after all).
But ultimately, all of those negative consequences are baked into the cake of mass migration, and all of these negative consequences directly lead to populist backlashes. This doesn't mean that you'll get a populist backlash every time - if you're a globe-spanning empire with the ability to print as much money as you want, you can paper over those consequences with material goods and benefits. At the same time, you can employ a lot of social and cultural messaging to blunt the visible impact of those negative consequences or make participating in/feeding that populist backlash an incredibly bad career move. All of those approaches work, for a time. The only answers to quelling that backlash permanently are rather brutal - there wasn't a populist backlash from the muslim communities after the mass migrations of the reconquista because there weren't any muslim communities left to object.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1yr 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
6mo ago
Fascism is a word that has an actual meaning. I understand that outside the motte it has become a snarl word which basically just means "political ideology I don't like" but I was under the impression that people here actually try to use the word properly. Donald Trump isn't a fascist - though I have no doubt that if he fails to do what his base want him to do his replacement most likely will be. He's already had four years to be in power, and none of the calamities that your crowd promised were on the way ever actually showed up. If you want to look at the actual actions committed by people in government Trump represents the only break from the Beltway consensus in living memory, and that consensus is responsible for so much more evil and destruction than anything Trump has done. Can you actually look at the long history of military interventions undertaken by the US since the defeat of Hitler and tell me that Trump represents some brand new evil that deserves a revolution to overthrow? How exactly is building a wall with Mexico some grand act of fascism but dropping agent orange on Vietnam or using depleted uranium rounds in Iraq to help establish a hardline Islamic theocracy is just business as usual?
But on top of that, if you're actually serious about opposing people using the military to expand their borders and impose second-class citizen status on a bunch of poor people of the wrong ethnicity, why aren't you talking about Israel? They build walls, they set up apartheid, they kill children in terror attacks, invade foreign states, ask the US to invade others and supplied military equipment to all sorts of distasteful regimes. You still get to attack Donald Trump when you do to boot!
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1yr 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
2yr 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
8mo ago
She is against the MIC, the deep state (unelected bureaucrats) and forever wars.
I'm fairly confident these are the actual reasons behind her being attacked so much.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1yr ago
I'll remind you that the vast majority of the actual escalation has come from Republicans.
This is extremely incorrect - the vast majority of the actual escalation has come from the intelligence community. It wasn't the Republicans who set up crossfire hurricane or ginned up the fraudulent Carter Page warrant. Those were the actual attempts at "democracy-proofing our institutions" and they began before Trump even took office.
EDIT:
To avoid duplicating reply chains, I saw you make this comment later on.
The origin of the Trump-Russia investigation is shrouded in bias, just like the investigation into Biden's son was. But in both cases it was clear that there were actual problems there. Not problems that reached up to the highest level, but problems nonetheless.
No, it wasn't! There was no real or serious attempts by the Russians to get Manchurian candidate Trump into office. The only role played by the Russians in that election (apart from posting a few BLM memes on facebook) was to provide the HRC campaign with a bunch of fake dirt they could use (via the Steele dossier) to have the Trump campaign spied on.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2yr 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
4mo ago
How could conscription cause they state to lose "all legitimacy" when the aforementioned crimes against the people barely dented it?
None of the things you mentioned involve those people having to give up their exceedingly comfortable lives. Caring or doing anything about those issues causes you to lose your job, family and entire social life - and if you have any responsibilities or dependents, that means you aren't going to be doing anything to mess up your ability to put food on the table, nor are you going to spend countless hours researching obscure political stories that are heavily suppressed by major respectable institutions. Throw in the trends towards social alienation, isolation, bowling alone etc
Conscription isn't like that. Conscription actively steps into people's lives and completely destroys the comfortable existences they thought they had. In a healthy society where people have real attachments to the nation, trust in its leaders and an understanding that their loyalty to it will be rewarded, this won't be a big problem. But for vast swathes of modern western populations this just isn't the case. Social trust and cohesion are in the toilet, nobody has kids they want to fight for, huge numbers of men don't even have girlfriends to miss and there's even a growing contingent of men who actively despise women and wouldn't want to fight for them at all. Speaking for myself personally I'd rather frag my commanding officer before I even got out of basic training than go die in the Middle East for Israel or in Ukraine for nothing. I don't think I'm alone, and I believe my life is worth preserving (from my perspective, not universally) - when you look at how many people are miserable, lonely and depressed I really don't see conscription working out at all.
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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