JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Sure, the left has gotten way too "open borders" recently, but have been historically consistent about believing immigration is a net good
Dems have always (well, if we talk about recent times, not ancient) made the difference between legal, limited and controlled immigration and no holds barred open borders. This was a long time union position too (no need to expand on where the unions political affiliations go). It has all changed recently - now Democrats basically reject any need for immigration law or citizenship pathway. In fact, illegal migrants seem like their preferred category, getting policy preferences not available to regular citizens.
I don't think threatening colleges with cutting their foreign studies is a Democratic position.
Colleges are, as we already discussed, fully captured by the Left. Places like Harvard or Columbia are the major engines in propagating and supporting leftist causes. So, obviously, they would come under attack from Trump. My point is not that everything Trump is doing now is part of Democratic agenda - of course not, he's on the opposite side of the war so he'd do stuff to wrestle control from them. My point is that Trump's political positions before he became the leader of the MAGA had been very close to Democrats' positions before the Great Awokening. Including, btw, abortions - Trump never cared too much about it and had been vaccilating here and there for years on the question, he had not been a passionate pro-lifer. Of course, when he became the head of MAGA movement, that came with some necessary policy adjustments, but RvW had always been a major target for the Right - especially due to the Left's complete unwillingness to reach any European-style compromise and the insistance that only full unrestricted abortion until - or even after - the birth is going to work. That question has been way beyond Trump and for it Trump was the one who had to fall in line, not drive it. In general, if you look at Trump's historical positions, there are preciously little of them that could not come from a pre-Awokening Dem politician. Again, I am not talking about Trump's actions now, when he's the head of MAGA and second-term Republican president, but his positions when he was starting up with his journey.
I covered this with my point that firing people for any reason was always available
It wasn't "any reason", it was very specifically and clearly a particular reason - the reason of doing right-coded things. It's not impossible to survive in Hollywood while being right-coded, but it is very, very, very, very hard. There's no problem being a Communist in Hollywood though. That's the point - there's a huge difference in risk profile of being open leftie and open rightie in a huge number of institutional settings, and the former's life is overwhelmingly much easier than the latter's. I already quoted the numbers how massive the difference is in places like academia - it's nowhere near neurtal or symmetrical.
Here, the terror has no defined point of origin. There is no evil empire.
True, there's no single hierarchical structure - at least, not yet. Instead, there is a distributed network of semi-independent agents, which semi-autonomously work towards the common goal. Some of the nodes of this network - like teachers unions and academia - ensure there's always new people coming into the network, some - like journalists and entertainment - ensure ideological synchronization and agenda pushing, some - like judicial and politicians - ensure the agenda is enforced on the groud. Etc. etc. One could probably write a lot of books and make a dozen of sociology PhDs just studying these networks. I hope one day somebody will.
There's a mob that forms whenever some story pops up and gets embellished enough.
Those mobs are surprisingly well financed, supplied and coordinated. Often, if you bother to dig, with taxpayer money. And covered for and protected by government officials. It's not random, it's a system which is distributed enough that people fail to make connection between different aspects of it, but there's one. Woke professors, woke AGs, woke NGOs, woke antifa soldiers, woke CEOs, woke actors, woke judges, woke journalists, woke bureaucrats - they all part of the network. It's not as comprehensive as the totalitarian state, but it's powerful enough now to exercise a lot of control over the society. It's not social media's fault. The social media just makes it easier to coordinate and to find foot soldiers, but it's a tool, not the reason.
My problem with this is the right is going about it almost exclusively via government
That's not correct, the right has the ground game too, and finally is pushing back on the culture war. But given the amount of capture of the governmental and government adjacent institutions, some governmental action is required. If the left's NGO network is financed by taxpayer's money, cutting of or reducing this stream requires government action. If DEI has been pushed for years by government action, undoing this would require government action too. Some things could probably return to its natural state without any intervention, just by removal of external coercion, but that would take a lot of time. And a lot of time is not something the right really has - if the left wins the next election and continues with its strategy of eliminating the right from every institutional space, flooding the country with infinite amount of migrants, setting up leftist NGO networks to feed from the budgets forever and making the elections unverifiable - the right does not have much chance for survival without pushing back fast. Which, unfortunately, means also using governmental action where it may not strictly be necessary.
I don't think all sex ed is porn.
The problem is not what you think. The problem is the left thinks what the parents think does not matter, and they - the left - own the kids and are free to feed them porn whether you like it or not, and if you disagree, you are a domestic terrorist. If the question was "I don't think book X is porn so I would like to show it to my kid" and the other person would say "no, I think this is porn so I won't show it to my kid" then this would be a normal difference of opinion. But that's not where we are. Where we are is "we will show your kids what we want - and make no mistake, what we want is porn, gay porn, trans porn, whatever we can think of porn, and we are not ashamed of it! - and if you think it's porn then fuck you fascist, we'll take your kids away from you". This is not normal.
"some property destroyed during a mass protest."
"Some people did something" makes a comeback! Some property is billions dollars of loss, multiple businesses and governmental buildings destroyed, full city blocks made unlivable, etc. The problem is not even that per se - though it is extremely bad - but the complete acceptance and normalization of it from the leftist elite. The worst problem is not even that a mob torched a disctrivt court - but that everybody on the left are taking it as a normal, and sometimes encourageable event, and working very hard to ensure nobody is going to be prosecuted for it. And it's continuing now - the left is consistently rejecting the obvious reality of crime and decay in Democrat megapolises (even though the normies, even the leftist ones, are well aware of it on their own day to day experience) and are consistently opposing any effort to make any improvement in it, declaring enforcement of the laws "racist" and "fascist". This is not normal.
For instance, the left plays it up but are you going to confidently tell me that people highlighted by LibsOfTikTok don't sometimes get harassed
Yes, of course, people are harassed on both sides sometimes. But there's a difference between getting a bunch of hateful tweets and being declared domestic terrorist by the FBI. Between having some online talking head talk shit about you and having US banking system refuse to do business with you. Between getting on some bloggers "bad people" list and getting on TSA's no fly list. Between somebody in your club shunning you and IRS stomping on your organization. Between being criticized on social media and having the government shut down any mention of you on social media. Between somebody not going to your talk and a violent mob setting a building on fire to not let you talk. Yes, people highlighted by LibsOfTikTok sometimes get harassed (even though they always had published the content they get harassed for on their own volition on social media) - but that harassment if very different from the harassment one who has crossed the institutional Left is subjected to. One is annoying, the other can seriously ruin your life.
sound more malicious than a warped idea of helping
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
Must everything be so over-dramatic? Berlin is not burning.
If by Berlin you mean the culture and the fabric of the society ("first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin"!), then it's definitely burning at the full blaze. At least for me - a regular middle class guy who wants nothing more than being left alone to grill on my backyard - it certainly feels that way. And I am not alone in this.
Trump is not the last hurrah of the right.
No, but Trump is there because of that feeling. He's not even "the right", for Heaven's sake - he's pretty much bog standard moderate Democrat, by the standards of times before Democrats went bonkers. Just watch what people like Biden, Obama, Clinton (either of them), etc. said before the Great Awokening. The difference between them and Trump, if you filter out all the bombastic rhetoric, is minimal. But the right had no choice. It was either Trump, or total destruction.
Your usual leftists on Reddit and some websites
Nope, nope. Remember the case of Gina Carano? She was booted from highly acclaimed role in a successful franchise because she said something right-coded. Reddit didn't cancel her. Reddit wanted to, but Reddit wants to cancel everybody to the right of AOC. No, people with much more power - people who contol billions of dollars - decided that. And now they are settling with her and talking about "looking forward to future cooperation". Did I vote for that? Hell yeah! One small example, of course, but it's everywhere.
I work for a woke company you've heard of.
I work for "maybe a tiny bit woke" company you probably never heard of (unless you're kind of professional that has to, then you did) but probably indirectly using something it did, maybe every day. It has DEI department, and some of the HR training had a little cringey tones but overall is pretty bog standard "these are ways in which you're not allowed to be an asshole" which didn't change much since The Great Awokening. No mandatory diversity kowtowing or pressure. Some people are explicitly woke but most keep it in their pants and don't bring it to the workplace. I am happy to be at this level because it's probably the best one possible in the US outside of tiny startup where everybody are buddies and HR does not exist. But I know that's not the situation in all companies.
Whether he was lying or all professors do, I can't tell you. I'm making the argument that life is often pretty banal
I've lived in Soviet Union (a long time ago). I know how people in evil empires work, and that not all of the storm troopers even want to shoot the rebels. Most of them don't care, they just want to get the salary and the pension. Some of them would purposedly miss or forget to lock the prison cells if they can get away with it. But that does not cancel the existance of the evil empire, and it always has enough troopers to maintain the required level of terror.
Supposedly the students are more woke than many of the professors.
88% of students lie about their politics to get better grades: https://x.com/bumbadum14/status/1957743796357329334 Take one guess to which side the lying goes. I clandestinely suspect that non-zero number of the professors aren't even woke, but they are so terrified to be cancelled they are pretending to, and thus their studends have to pretend in turn. A nice academic freedom the left built for itself, eh?
Billionaires tend towards the woke when it doesn't notably affect their bottom line. They aren't rushing to implement socialism or raise the minimum wage.
Are you sure? New York's Mamdani is financed by a billionaire heiress. Maybe she doesn't expect him to take all of her billions (and he, alone, now, probably can't) but she certainly contributes to the cause. And it's not unique - for example, a lot of rich Russian magnates supported Russian revolutionaires. We all know what happened next.
I think the right is becoming the party of nothing but political grievances and emotional overreactions in much the same way
That's not true. The right has a lot of the positive agenda. Just to advance this agenda, the right needs the ability to rule, and that requires taking control back from the left. If the right wins an election, but the Left continues to control everything in the country - as it happened in the first Trump term - nothing is getting done. Destroying the death grip of the left in virtually every institution of the country is a prerequisite to restoring the equal footing, this is the minimal necessary condition. Note I am not saying destroying the left - the left wants 0% right-wing people in every space. I am fine with certain percent - maybe even 50%, though I personally would prefer less, but I do not prescribe any specific number - of the left in any space they want to be, provided the right is also allowed the same. And yes, for this certain amount of power that the left has now must be destroyed, but while to them it may look as "revenge" and "overreaction", it's just returning to normal.
"Burn the institutions and salt the Earth!" is cringe and could possibly cost you the normie vote in future elections
The right doesn't want to burn the institutions and salt the Earth. The right wants the institutions that do what they are supposed to do. They want the politics be normal again, and so do a lot of normies. I remember the time where politics were about shoudl taxes be 25% or 28% and should minimum wage be $7 or $10. Now it's about whether it's ok to introduce port to kids in kindergarten, whether we need to let somebody to talk them into cutting of their genitals without even notifying their partent, we hear arguments that putting criminals in jail is racist and that deporting a violent gang member with dozen-page rap sheet including murders is fascism, we hear that mass rape and kidnapping is legitimate political tool, and that this kind of politics must be brought to the US, we see cities burned down and any semblance of rule of law eliminated, and we are told that if you are against any of that, you are nobody but a literal Nazi. Yes, we need some pushback to get back from this to what used to be normal, and if Trump can do at least part of it, then I am happy to let Trump do it. So far I haven't seen any better option, and I don't see how not doing it is an option anymore.
Free Speech can mean both the willingness to tolerate opposing ideas and the freedom to choose not to deal with other people.
This is very different for the right and for the left. For the right, not dealing with other people means ignoring them. For the left, at least institutional left, it means destroying them, grinding them into the fine dust and throwing it to the winds. The left has this power - at least had it before 2025 - and they weren't shy to use it. It didn't always work, but they always wanted to. Yes, the right has its history too, with porn in particular, a battle that they lost and will keep losing, and probably in other aspects too. But the left has been much more efficient in this game. Compare what happens if somebody in academia dares to say one of the words proscribed by the left and what happens if they say America must be destroyed and white people must be put in camps.
In a country of 350 million, you can find no shortage of idiots even if they don't matter at the end of the day.
The problem is those are not some lone idiots bloviating on a sopabox. There people are Congressmen, Senators, mayors, governors, prominent politicians, famous actors, academia managers, they control trillions of dollars and command vast power. And they are not shy to use their powers to achieve their goals. Which are diametrically opposed to mine. So I, as a voter, have no choice but to give my vote to somebody who can push back on them and at least slow down the descent to madness. Maybe, if we are extremely lucky, even reverse some of it. What other choice do I have?
JarJarJedi
5d ago
Whereas Strateg says Putin is intentionally disarming Russia for a NATO invasion.
This is hilarious. But I hope whoever that fine specimen of humanity is, he's not in Russia, or hides well, because Putin's oprichniks does not care which place you criticize it from, be it from the right, from the left or from the depths of derangement only accessible to a devoted Lovecraftian. The mere fact of criticizing the Boss is enough. Girkin got how much, 4 years I think? I am not sure I will be sad when that specimen is declared Foreign Agent and shut down too, but I would probably prefer it to continue to exist - somewhere far, far away from me - as a proof that the Universe is capable of producing more wonders that I would ever be able to comprehend.
All in all, if the war is fake theatrics
Anything can be derived from a false premise.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
Orwell was a communist. He wrote about what he knew and observed directly. This lends him the ability to describe the bleakness more realistically. Though he was a Western communist, so he hadn't experienced the full measure of what totalitarianism could do to a person and a society.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
the right frames the last 20 years as if the left sat in a war room and planned out a list of slow coordinated encroachments
Oh no, "encroachments" stage was decades before. The last 20 years was "the walls are breached, time to burn and pillage!" stage. Unlike many preceding stages of the campaign, this one doesn't really require careful coordination - just letting your foot soldiers do their worst works fine. Does each foot soldier realize they what they are collectively doing? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it doesn't matter because it is happening anyway.
but there are certainly places that ban left-leaning opinions
Like what? Let's take the inventory. The mass culture is about 90%, it's not that right-coded entertainment doesn't come out, but it comes out maybe once a year or less, and is always a huge controversy. Woke is the default and considered normal setting. The academia is thoroughly cleansed - lone celebrity professors that can't be cancelled are profoundly isolated and kept around to demonstrate "here, we have all kinds!" but on non-genius level, if you're not woke or at least pretend to be, you don't have a chance. Teaching the teachers? Thoroughly woke. Teaching the lawyers? Mostly woke too. I'm not talking about history, sociology and pol-sci - there's probably no right-wing professor left there in the nation, and the "moderates" there see Sanders as a dangerous right-winger. The press is absolutely woke on the "official" side of it - even the dreaded Fox News is at best "center-left company which tolerates some of the right hosts" (for a time). Of course, there are independent bloggers and radio, but as far as institutional press goes, it's very heavily left leaning. I'm not talking about such powerful institutions as government bureaucracy or the unions - their leftist sympathies are predictable and expected. Other cultural institutions? I can't go to a museum now without encountering at least several woke exhibit - and sometimes the whole exposition is subsumed by the woke and it's no longer about art but about social justice or climate change or some other woke cause like that.
What we have left - big business? More and more major companies come out as woke, and very rarely the reverse - that is mostly small to mid-size independent businesses. Banks are glad to debank right-wing figures - but did any of them debank prominent leftists? Not that I heard of. Billionaires tend to the woke side (understandably, they can buy power there) - for one Musk, there's three Cubans, Soroses, Simonses and so on. The army now has pride parades and features soldiers in furry costumes. I'm pretty sure the officers who authorized that are not inclined to listen to any contrary opinions.
Now, which prominent places ban leftist opinions? Internet forums? Local gun enthusiast meetups? Which cultural institute, comparable to what I described above, is excluding the left-leaning opinions to a measure comparable to exclusion and persecution of the right-wing ones? If we can't find any, or can't find a list as comprehensive and powerful, then demanding the right stops fighting back - without any history of prior consistent and prolonged demand to do the same from the left, at least - can not be read as anything but telling the right "why can't you just lose quietly so we all can stop this unpleasantness?". It is not hard to see why the right wouldn't look favorably on such approach.
Surely the left would tell a similar story about how they were all for free expression until the mean old right wouldn't leave them alone
And that's true. They were, when the right had institutional power and tried to shut down all kinds of leftist speech. And lost (mostly). The famous "fire in crowded theater" maxim was pronounced specifically against the leftist anti-war speech, and was overturned as a grave mistake later (99% of leftists aren't aware of either of these facts). Now, when the leftists have the power, they have no need in free speech anymore, and it's the right's turn to fight for it. But that turnaround wasn't caused by the right going "too far" - on the contrary, it was caused by the left seizing the institutional power and no longer needing the feeble "free speech" soapbox when they can use the powerful platforms provided by the institutions they captured.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
They think they're going about their day doing boring and uncontroversial things like protesting for trans rights
That does not compute. Protesting is by definition controversial - if it weren't, it's not a protest, it's at most solidarity march. The whole point though is that the left has been actively in search of culture war since the civil rights movement largely achieved its initial goals (legal equality and high legal barriers to deter any attempt to discriminate). Gay rights, trans rights, BLM, immigrants, vaccines, abortions, whatever it takes. And to crown that, in modern US culture you don't call your opponent a Nazi if you want to hash out policy differences. Everybody knows what you do with the Nazis - you destroy them. So there's no doubt what this framing means.
The right is in full "We're aiming to crush you" mode.
Gee, maybe that's because the Left has been calling them Nazis and promising to crush them for a couple of decades now? May that be where they got the suspicion? I'm seeing the "Nazi bar" metaphor repeated daily on virtually every corner in the left discourse, and they never even explain it - everybody in their audience already knows what it means, they are just confirming, yes, we can't tolerate even the slightest sign of anybody on the right being allowed in the spaces we control. And we can't tolerate any spaces we don't control because all those are "Nazi bars". The right is in this mode because they are aiming to crush the right. Only now, finally, the right starts to wake up and wonder "oh, they are trying to crush us, maybe we should push back?" And then we hear the complaints "how undignified, you are fighting back, people would think you are the same! They will reject you for stooping so low as to fight back! You should just roll over and take it, then you'd have all our sympathies - everybody loves losers!"
JarJarJedi
9d ago
This looks like a very fishy (ba-dum-tss!) situation. I'd agree it looks very much like somebody mishandled a radiation source and the contamination went into the food supply, which is horribly bad. And for FDA it may be nearly impossible to find how it happened, because there are so many moving parts, and people would not be very forthcoming given it's a really bad fuckup. So FDA has a case on their hands where something is obviously very wrong and they can't fix it. So they do "something" because something must be done - they kill the messenger, i.e. recall the slightly contaminated shrimp, because that's the only thing they can do, and if later it turns out the source is found, they could say "we did all we could!".
JarJarJedi
9d ago
Why we can't have a single group that has stable, high-IQ people in charge advocating for basic civic decency, responsibility, and functional society is beyond me
We really tried. Politicians were supposed to be that (that's the whole point of having representative republic instead of direct democracy). They are obviously nothing of the sort. Journalists were supposed to be that. They sold their mission for clicks and ideological peer adoration. Academia was supposed to be that. They sold their mission for grants and ideological power. We don't have it because - collectively, as a society - we tried it and we fucked it up. We don't have currently any institution that is interested in doing that.
That said, anti-immigrant sentiment is nothing new. It has been about the Irish, about the Germans, about the Chinese, about the Japanese (US people literally put them in camps!) and so on, and so forth. Cross-cultural encounters will always produce people that reject the other culture and hate everything and everybody that has to do with it. It can be worked through - provided that there's a working integration process. Multiculturalism broke that process though because it's ideological premise has been that integration is evil, demanding newcomers to adapt to the host culture is evil, the host culture is by default oppressive and guilty, and must go out of its way - including throwing out the rules that apply to the members of the host culture and hold it together - lest the newcomers feel inconvenienced or sad. The result has been a predictable disaster everywhere it has been tried. If the right wants to recover from this disaster, they need to formulate a coherent integration policy, and build a clear ideological wall of separation between anti-immigrant sentiment (which will not go anywhere, it is an inevitable consequence of culture heterogeneity) and enforcing integration policy. Which may piss off some loudmouths but there's no other way if there is to be an ideologically sound platform that does not cut ties with the centuries of American tradition.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
Israel says UN undercounts aid entering Gaza by almost 3x.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
The naive part of me wants to believe they stopped it after 2019, but the realistic part of me thinks they just added more legalese and layers into the process so that when they get caught next time, the blame won't be on them but on some throw-away company which would promptly fold and be replaced by another one. And T-Mobile (and every other provider) would be like "we're shocked! shocked! to find that data selling is going on here!"
JarJarJedi
12d ago
Your phone probably feeds geolocation data to ad networks. The rest is obvious.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
As far as I know, Coinbase still allows you to withdraw your coins to your own wallet whenever you want.
Yes, of course. But: this is only while everything is well. At any moment if something goes wrong Coinbase could stop withdrawals, and you can do absolutely nothing about it - short of suing them of course. Just as with the bank: normally, you just transfer money with a couple of clicks, but if the bank has problems, you have problems. Except there's no FDIC for bitcoin, so you're not protected by anything.
Unless your suggestion is that he find some dude to sell him BTC for cash, I dunno how else he would come to acquire the coins in his wallet.
No, acquiring coins through Coinbase is just fine. But then get a self-custodial wallet (I prefer offline hardware ones, but you don't have to go as far if you don't want to, any computing platform can hold a wallet - though do back up it and/or the keys if you use software) and move the funds there. That's what I do when I DCA - it's very convenient to set it up on the exchange, but once it gets to something sizeable that I'd hate to lose, I move it to my custody.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
Of course, the real situation is quite chaotic and a lot is based on a pile of ad-hoc decisions. FDA got lucky with Thalidomide - if you are very slow in approving everything, sooner or later some bad stuff will slip by faster regulators and it's time to uncork the champagne! - so they took it as the confirmation that not approving stuff is much better than approving stuff for many years after. But it's not based on some well-founded general scientific truth. And definitely doctors and what they think - at least if we're talking about rank and file doctors who actually talk to patients, not the ones that spend their days sitting in committees - have pretty little input into it and very little power in the process, as far as I know. It's not like "doctors were ruling it with their awesome knowledge and Trump came and started banning life-saving stuff because he's evil". It's "doctors did what FDA said to do before, and keep doing it under Trump, and will continue to do so long after Trump is forgotten".
JarJarJedi
12d ago
If for some reason, people decide the economic data has partisan spin
Under Biden, it was routine for BLS to publish jobs data, gather all the press and then "update" it to lower numbers a couple of months later which the mainstream press largely ignored (rare counter-example: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/revised-data-exposes-overstated-job-creation-claims-by-harris-biden-admin-revealing-818000-nonexistent-jobs/ar-AA1pc1Ez). Shenanigans like this is what makes people to decide economic data is being used for partisan spin purposes. Of course, since it wasn't Trump doing it, nobody in the chattering class gave a hoot about it. It is possible that "announce high numbers, than revise it to much lower numbers" is how the process works and in fact there's no way to make it work otherwise - I seriously doubt that, but let's assume it were the case. In that case, an objective non-partisan official should have spent a lot of effort to inform the public that's what is going on, and to make sure the corrections get at least as much attention as the original - incorrect - data has gotten, and that the initial estimates are reported as rough estimates, to be substantially corrected later, and not as objective truth. This is not what has been happening.
In general, I think the chances that Biden administration appointed an absolutely neutral, non-partisan purely technical person to a politically sensitive position which generates a lot of press attention, are close to zero. Thus, for Trump it's completely legitimate to dismiss that person, and appoint his own choice. Of course, it should have likely been done on day 1, but given as anything he does will be presented in worst possible light anyway, it doesn't matter too much. Will Trump's new appointee be better? Hard to say, the history gives equal chance both for a competent worked and a complete disaster. We'll see.
I guess really my question is, if US economic and public health guidance is no longer seen as trustworthy
Never had been. Only now, because Trump, it's being highlighted, and once the other side takes the power again, it will be deemphasized again. The quality of data will not improve from that.
how do you get the right decision makers to use the right data to make sound decisions?
Welcome to the basic problem of socialism. Yes, capitalist countries aren't free from it too, no more that airplanes are free from gravity. The data is dirty, and will probably get dirtier as the partisan politicization of everything continues. Would I like for it not to happen? Sure. Do I have any hope it is not going to happen? Nope. One of the reasons why I have no hope is that almost nobody speaks about it in terms "destroying the integrity of research is a problem". It's always "Trump destroying the integrity of research is a problem" - and once it's not about Trump, then there's no problem, right? And the other side, predictably, adopts the mirror stance, so now both sides are hard at work destroying it and everybody pretends it's somebody else's fault.
Will doctors no longer be allowed to administer medications even though they know they would work
That has long been the case. There are a number of medications which are approved in Europe but not in the US, for example.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
Well, that's an interesting questions - e.g. banks use deposits to issue loans, but what Coinbase is doing with its 2 mln bitcoin deposits? This is a valid question but very different from the assertion @Tree was proposing. Looking at https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/30d?c=e&t=b the trading volume in BTC is in around tens of thousands of coins traded daily, which is of course small part of overall bitcoin mass but still a respectable volume as it seems to me. Over a longer period of months, the volume is in millions, so I don't think it'd be right to assume the BTC market is so illiquid that the prices are substantially caused by lack of liquidity. Of course, I am not an economist, so if somebody more qualified could point out an error in this assessment, I'd be thankful, but that's what it appears to be to me.
JarJarJedi
13d ago
It's an interesting question whether Coinbase is already qualifying as "too big to fail". I'd say probably not yet, but could become before this decade is over. Of course, massive regulatory interventions would accompany that.
JarJarJedi
13d ago
My theory of crypto value is that most of the coin gets stolen every few years.
If by "the coin" you mean bitcoin, it's not true. Currently, about 20 mln bitcoin is outstanding. Known bitcoin thefts, as far as can see, over all history, amount to under 1.5 million, and significant part of it has been recovered. Of course, some thefts may not be discovered until the funds are moved - if somebody knows your keys, you wont know it until they move the coins. But then it doesn't make any difference on the pricing. As I see from reports, e.g. https://river.com/learn/who-owns-the-most-bitcoin/ most bitcoin is owned by individuals, and the largest custodian of bitcoin is Coinbase, which holds around 10% of the supply. Which puts it in roughly the same position as Chase bank (the largest US bank) has in dollar economy.
If you talk about shitcoins, anything is possible, it's a wild chaos and pretty much any wild claim could be true for some subsets of them.
There‘s only like 6 bitcoin left in circulation, that‘s why they are getting bid so strongly.
That's hilariously far from truth, Coinbase alone has over 2 millions, and since it holds the keys for every single one of those, it can trivially recover coins that are known to be stolen. And if they are not known to be stolen, again, there's no difference in economic effects - if the original owner did not intend to move them and also the thief doesn't move them, there's zero effect. One can only wonder - why would anybody bother to steal anything in order to never ever use it?
JarJarJedi
13d ago
I still don't understand the economy. The volume of this can't be large - I never actually witnessed anybody buying anything, I assume that somebody does, but not that frequently. The clothes themselves seem to be pretty standard ones, similar to what I see in every store, not some junk or second hand ones, so they must cost something? How these costs are covered? How are they ensured against loss or theft? How much can they be sold for to make it viable - I mean, I can just go to the store and buy the same, so it has to be significantly cheaper than in the store, but it's not that expensive in the store already. I mean, I can buy a shirt at Costco for something like 10 bucks or less, if price is what I'm after, how much lower can they go and still be profitable on low volumes?
JarJarJedi
13d ago
That's exactly why I said "not your keys, not your coins". If you keep the keys, none of the blowups can hurt you, ever (well, if you keep away from shitcoins and NTFs, of course) - whatever happens, if you owned 1 BTC, you'll still own it as long as you have the key (and nobody else does). If you play speculative games (like, trade shitcoins, etc.) then well, it gambling, and you may lose all your money at any moment. So coming at it, decide if you're there to invest or to gamble. Both can be done, but the way they are done are very different.
JarJarJedi
13d ago
What do you think of "gym muscles"? Referring here to the idea that musculature bought in the gym is less effective than muscles bought by manual labor.
Less effective doing what? Manual labor? Well, yes, you'd do best what you do a lot. And yes, the guy who spent years hitting, would hit better than the guy who spent years lifting metal things, but never actually hit anything. But yeah as others noted, if you work out, you'd get stronger and better in other things where strength matters, even if training for those things specifically would have made you even better.
JarJarJedi
13d ago
Coinbase accounts are custodial accounts, which means they hold they keys and you just see the numbers on the website. You don't actually own any crypto, you just trust them to own it for you. Which may be ok for many people, but if that bothers you then you should get a real crypto wallet and hold your own keys. The danger here is that if you mess it up you could either lose the coins completely or get them stolen from you. Coinbase Wallet is one example of non-custodial wallet, though I am not sure how good it is (I personally prefer offline hardware wallets).
JarJarJedi
13d ago
What is the boring approach do that
Dollar cost averaging. Takes time though (and of course the time to start were like 10 years ago :) You can either buy regular BTC (combined with cold-wallet storage, that protects you from certain third-party risks, remember - not you keys means not your coins) or if you're only interested on hedging and not owning actual BTC, then ETFs of course. There's a bunch of them from reputable providers now (I don't use them but I've heard about them). Look at the feeds - some ETFs for some reason have insane fees, over 1%, which is totally not warranted given they don't do anything but holding BTC. I see no reason to use those, use cheaper ones instead.
Has anyone discovered a way to let it be openly known that you don’t agree with the group problematizing social norm, while still being accepted into the group
This is literally impossible. Not going to happen. If they are into culture where you know what your running club members think about current politics, and on top of that that they belong to a totalitarizing purity-obsessed ideology, you are not going to change their minds. You can either suck it up and learn to make a mysterious face if you don't feel comfortable openly lying, or you find another group to run with. There wouldn't be "just running" with them.
If you can't find any group that is not infected, the only advice I can have for you is to move. There's a lot of life outside of woke clusters, and a lot of very nice, interesting and different people. You are not going to change the culture but you can choose which culture you're part of.
JarJarJedi
13d ago
I've been to LA recently and I wonder if anybody here knows the answer to this: one thing I noticed there is a lot of people selling clothes (and other things but mostly clothes and shoes) on the street. And I mean right on a random street (maybe not random, but looked random to me), not even a tent, nothing, just some hangers or tarps and clothes and shoes on them. A lot of those.
Who are they? Why are they doing it on the street? Where these clothes come from - are they stolen? I have hard time imagining legit wholesaler giving people their goods to just sell randomly on the street - but maybe I'm wrong? What is the basis for this business, how that works? How people wouldn't just steal all the clothes if they steal massively from regular retail shops - are the criminals providing security for them? Or maybe corrupt cops? No regular cops for sure since I haven't seen a single policeman around for all the time I've been in LA.
I've never seen such a thing in any other major city that I can remember. I've seen kinda grey marketplaces or genuine street markets, but those are always in certain designated places and usually have at least some infrastructure, not just randomly deployed on the street. Why this is specifically in LA?
You seem to be doing this thing repeatedly, where you take a specific case, throw out what makes it specific and declare the hollow husk support for your argument. Trump is not just going after "people", Trump specifically is going after people who are involved in criminal mischief, and not just any mischief, but in violent support of foreign terrorist organizations and publicly calling for a violent uprising on US soil. Student visa is not a "get out of jail free" card, and revoking such visas for individuals that commit violence and call for insurrection in the US is a legitimate measure. If they hate US so much, they should be in some other place they'd hate less. Trump never made any move against people who are not involved in such criminal acts, and never objected to the concept of student visas in general.
That's a completely false and libelous statement, and you should be ashamed of proclaiming it, contrary to all known facts, but I don't expect you to be.
Congratulations, you found the coordinating node! What you generously called "the news" is the propaganda organization whose sole purpose is to instruct the woke CEO and the woke professor what they are supposed to be outraged about now. And those organizations have been witnessed many times to push literally identical message all over the networks.
That's really weak. Banks have been scared of porn for decades, and it's not some kind of political anti-gay move you are trying to present it. If that's all you got, you are really scrapping the bottom. The processors are scared of any kind of porn, gay, hetero, Christian, Muslim, whatever it be - they won't touch it. That has been like that since forever. On the contrary, there was recent push to debank any outlets to do with guns (I personally closed all my accounts with Citi because of it, something that is being rolled back now btw), which is clearly politically coded, even more precisely - woke coded. And even more recently they started to debank people personally, for political activities. I hope it will now stop, but it happened. Don't get me wrong, I'd be happy if Visa/MC stop being dumb prudes (and invest in some proper fraud prevention) and embrace the lucrative world of porn. But this example - and especially trying to link it with gay stuff - is super weak sauce.
Most of them are very dependant of govenrment funds and government loans, even those who are formally private. The amount of woke pushed by the governemnt through the colleges, either directly, or by just dangling money in front of their noses, is gigantic.
Formally, yes. Huge amount of leftist NGOs, however, are financed by taxpayer money and often created with that explicit purposes. A lot of local money allocated to various programs - homeless, drugs, migrants, poor, etc. - are allocated to NGOs. Have you ever heard of "GONGO"? That's what most of those leftist networks are, either officially or factually.
Universities that insist on violating the law and discriminate on race, for example, deserve a lot of stick. In fact, I am unhappy how little stick Trump is giving them for being such a bunch of unrepentant racists.
Are you new to this whole thing? We had whole huge scandal where IRS was doing this - it was deciding which organizations to allow tax-exempt status and which not, by political beliefs, and then somehow all the evidence for this turned out to be on some hard disk, that had misteriously failed... Your "can't even happen, it's ridiculous" scenarios are my "already happened and everybody on the left cheered it" scenarios.
I said "burned down", not "destroyed", but yes, it was somewhat exaggerated - never the whole city was burned, just parts of some. But for me, presonally, a lot of cities were effectively destroyed - there are a number of cities to which I previously gladly went - and even considered living there - and now have to avoid, because they turned into shitholes. San Francisco, Portland, parts of LA, etc. That's my problem, of course - and thousands of other people who feel the same.
When the whole movement endorses the outbreak of violence, and fuels it, and incites it, and says absolutely wild things like "in the middle of raging pandemic, we must lock people up in their homes and arrest people for surfing on the beach alone, but mass protests are completely fine because that's what the science says" - then it's way beyond just "nobody likes to admit mistakes". It's somebody likes to make the mistakes way, way worse abd double - no, throusand-fold - down on them. And keeps insisting those weren't mistakes but the righteous deeds.
You know, willful ignorance is not as strong argument as you may believe it to be. Maybe watching "the news" does not make you as informed as you may think? Maybe "the news" are not telling you something that they don't want you to know, and you should lookup up beyond them if you want to be informed? Provided that you indeed want to be informed, and not just reassured your side is good and all is good, of course.
Babbit was definitely a victim, especially if you apply the same criteria as the left had been applying to other cases. But even by any sane criteria, there was absolutely no need to kill her. As for other Jan 6 participants, there definitely were some violent ones - at the same level we see at any leftist protest where they regularly and routinely clash with the police. Since this was pretty much the only case where the right did what the left by then has been doing for several years (including occupying government buildings, and not for minutes, but for days, and sometimes burning them down) - they blew it up absolutely out of proportion - including falsely claiming the protestors killed policemen - in an explicit effort to diminish the mayhem their side has caused and deligitimize any claims from the right. They had a lot of success in that - the treatment that Jan 6 protestors got - even those who did not do anything violent - has been horrendous and ruined any semblance of respect that FBI by then had. That is one more illustration of how awfully skewed the political life in the US has become - the left does something hundreds of times, no consequences, the right does it once - it's an historical event and Congress enacts a live TV drama, orchestrated by Hollywood producers, to make sure nobody ever forgets that, and everybody who is even minimally connected gets the book thrown at them. There's a huge difference.
THe right never did even a tenth of what the left has been doing recently. However, when the right did have the power, when they did bad things - like censorship - they were wrong. They don't hold that power anymore, and haven't been holding it for a couple of generations at least. If they ever hold it again, and try to use it again for evil - like, I don't know, ban porn or something - then it would be righteous to oppose them. It's not the problem that is currently has any real importance.
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