FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
19hr ago
Sure, but if you're a local business, you sometimes need things from the state government in a way that you don't from Washington. You need a relationship with your local state rep and your governor/AG/commissioner of such and so, you need a functioning state government to pass laws and do things for you.
Texas business interests can't just sit out the next however many years and wait for Republicans to come back. They're going to have to form relationships with Democrats.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
19hr ago
Texas Dems flipped the state house.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
19hr ago
OpenAI? Anthropic, which on its website says of itself "AI research and products that put safety at the frontier. AI will have a vast impact on the world. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation dedicated to securing its benefits and mitigating its risks."? Deepseek: "DeepSeek is an AI research company focused on building world-leading general artificial intelligence."
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
20hr ago
Good on you, brother. I broadly agree with a lot of your points here.
Obviously, Iran is very unpopular. I still accept Trump's judgment that it was the right thing to do and I still believe that the war is (plainly) a military success. (Call me crazy!)
Accepting that you aren't crazy and that it was the right thing to do and is a military success, how do you feel about the procedural aspects of how the war was started? The war effort lacked a congressional declaration or any kind of approval, but even writing that off because we don't declare anything anymore, it lacked a significant public effort to sell the war to the public in advance. Maybe I'm an optimist about the voting public's sophistication, but I think that some of the disapproval of the war stems from the failure to seek even a fig leaf of any kind of democratic legitimacy and approval. Which raises my question to you, as an intelligent pro-war interlocutor: if a successful morally correct war is launched in a way that is illegitimate, what is the correct punishment to inflict on those who started it? If it's "Nothing, it worked out" then the idea of democratic legitimacy is a dead letter and the president has plenary power to declare war, that seems untenable.
I don't think people think through those procedural questions, but I do think the way the war was started and executed ("We won!" "we're about to make a deal" "We're about to end Iranian civilization forever") left a lot of people confused and maybe a little miffed, and dragged down the approval rating. You appear to be correct at this point that the strait of Hormuz is mostly useable for commercial traffic, with a mildly increased risk tolerance. But the repeated announcements have ruined presidential credibility.
A lot of my friends who were loyal Trump guys are crashing out now. I do think it's still too soon to call this the death of MAGA, and there is no going back to the old establishment Republican consensus.
A good guide here is the trajectory of GWOT-PATRIOT Act-Neocon consensus between 2006-2008. Everyone said that the voters rejected Dubya and the wars, but Obama kept most of it in place, and it became part of core American governance. Elections have consequences. A lot of MAGA is going to absorbed into the core American synthesis, for both parties. MAGA might die, the same way "Hipsters" aren't around anymore. But MAGA stuff is everywhere, like how I can go to a local microbrewery on my way home and pick up beer.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
20hr ago
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
20hr ago
I understand the domain names are a fun way to extract rent for nothing, but are they really that important in any structural sense? Especially in an internet that is dominated by social media, and then even more when it is dominated by AI itself, domain names feel more and more secondary to one's experience of the internet.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
22hr ago
SI is nice as a tell you're dealing with a cultist, a moron, or someone arguing in bad faith. Like neopronouns or land acknowledgements.
It's insane that this is the broad consensus, because to me what she said was obviously good advice and they're punishing her for telling them the truth.
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