JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
How much somebody saying "some unlikely shit happened once to one person our of 9 billion people" should cause you to update your worldviews? Not an easy question, I think.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
I had no idea what Hinge is (except from the context it's clear it's a dating app) but the whole thing read a bit suspicious. I wasn't ready to declare it fake because so much of it was outside of my experience, so I might just have been having entirely wrong ideas about how VCs or Hinge dating works, and I'm pretty terrible in reading people anyway, but also the post felt like having an agenda-pushing vibe so I wouldn't be surprised to learn it's all fake.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
My point is pro-establishment Jews vote Democrat, so Vivek, being a Republican candidate, can have no currency with them. To gain any possibility of their approval, he'd have to run as a Democrat for starters. Since he doesn't, he has to address some audience where he has a chance.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
I think signing on the R ticket and declaring we give too much money to Ukraine and Israel is a really bad way to grift
Why is it bad? For Ukraine, it is increasingly becoming blue-coded issue, so running against it on a red ticket is at least a safe bet. Jews are dominantly voting blue, and big Jewish donors are already spoken for anyway, nobody of them would have any interest in some start-up nobody that they had no idea of his existence a month ago. So he loses nothing. On the contrary, in this very forum we can witness a certain group of people who, let's say, do not harbor any warm feelings towards Jews, and thus would gladly support somebody dunking on Israel. This group may not be huge, but it's still some money. Again, from the fundraising angle, maybe not the best strategy ever, but certainly a solid one. If he already going for polarizing candidate - which he seems to do anyway - taking positions with significant unserved red audience is not a stupid move, grift-wise.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
The necessary question, though, is whether that perception is due to the actual insanity of Trump and Republican abortion laws, or because of the perceptions of Trump and Republican abortion laws created by the Blue consensus machine.
One might, for example, compare the abortion laws promoted by Republicans with ones common in Europe. After all, European policies could not be made by insane MAGA Trumpsters? One could check how many countries practice "no limits up to the moment of birth" abortion, and for those that have term limits, what the average terms are and how they relate to Republican proposals. But the US mainstream press is largely completely disinterested in that discussion. Because it is almost completely owned by one tribe, and for that tribe it is more convenient to present any Republican policies as utter insanity which no normal people would ever discuss.
they want a "functional" Red establishment to moderate the crazier Blues
And I believe them. But when it comes to actually doing that, turns out that each move of the Reds to "cooperate" is met with vigorous "defect, defect, defect, defect!" on the Blue side. Try to make late terms abortion limited, by any reasonable term? Maybe let's try to find some middle ground here? Nope, no restrictions at all, Roe gives us this power and we intend to use it to the max. Well, how is that working for you? Try to find solution to a migration crisis? Nope, any border is racist, we'll refuse to follow the law and call it "sanctuary". I can hardly remember a moderate cooperative move for Republicans where it ended up with them not getting the shaft. What exactly is the point of keeping conceding? I'd get if it were in the interest of peace - this smells an awful lot of blackmail, but to heck with it, if we get peace - but there's no peace. It only gets worse.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
It's not surprising to be that Dems are claiming that again and again - "if only you nominated a normal non-extremist candidate, we wouldn't call him Hitler, but you always nominate Hitlers!". This is a simple and time-tested tactics - "we're not political or ideological, we are just defending common sense from those crazies". The oldest trick in the book. What is astonishing there are still people on the red side that fail to see through the con. How many years of this happening again and again, with literally every single candidate, one needs to understand the pattern?
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Right on cue: https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1694896172853293076
I guess there's one conclusion here: Vivek is serious enough candidate to qualify as literally Hitler. Which is a prerequisite for any Republican candidate of any importance since 1940s. So congrats to him on that.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
It won't be the same job though. Prigozhin enjoyed certain measure of autonomy - especially when it concerned matters outside of Russia. That was a deliberate component of plausible deniability - when Russia needs something that acts in Russian interests, but is not obviously and directly Kremlin's arm. And also could be kept lean, mean and outside the general corrupt military system. Whoever becomes the head of whatever becomes of the group, would pretty obviously be a Kremlin puppet, because how else could he ended up there? Which means they are no longer outside the system.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Sure thing, there are many things that are worse than a technocrat golden boy. But when doing something like electing a candidate for president, we're not limited to consider only worse things, we actually can consider better things.
Throw up their hands and say we should wallow in stupidity and despair because it's hard
The problem is not that things are hard. The problem is when people try to "fix" things without realizing how hard they are and why they are hard. Each problem has a simple, clear and wrong solution. And that's the one the golden boy would rush to, breaking through all Chesterton fences on the way. Should we admire him for his zeal, can do attitude and energy? Maybe. Should we entrust him with our destinies because it's better than wallow in stupidity? No way.
Capitalize on feels > reals to grift off the masses
Saying it like it is is a great quality. The problem comes when you start thinking that what you think it is is really what it is. Because more often than not, that's not the case, and lack of epistemic humility, combined with a healthy disdain for status quo and a bias for action, can lead to great things - or to spectacular epic failures. I'm not sure that "exploding lottery ticket" is the right model for a future President. And if we need somebody explosion-prone, we already got Trump anyway.
Technocrats are unelectable, sure, but it doesn't mean we should stop trying.
I'm not sure we should even start, until they unlearn phrases like "science is settled" and "trust the experts".
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Trump seems to have an very good genetics, and his father lived to 93. So I'd give a food chance of him making to 90. Past that it all depends on how good the medicine gets in the meantime...
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
I do want to see the Democrats grapple with trying to attack the Republican nominee without falling into the pit of accusations of racism or attacking a minority person.
When Larry Elder run in CA against the lily-white Newsom, it wasn't a problem at all. They just defined him as "blackface of white supremacy" and were done with it. You shouldn't assume their hangups about race and identity are anything that should be taken at face value, as sincere axioms sine qua non - of course they can declare a black person a literal racist hitler, if that's necessary to keep the power. And they've got many PhDs in racial studies who would be glad to explain to you, with abundant quotes from highly peer-reviewed sources, why it is a scientific fact.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Looks like another one of the many, many golden boys who had success and decided that 1) all problems have solutions and 2) they know how to figure them out. I predict he wouldn't even do well enough to be crushed by Trump. Though maybe he'll attract some of "like Trump, but not a boomer, because boomers are so passé" audience. I don't expect this audience to be huge.
a campaign centered on truth and national revival
Oh, that's a relief. I was thinking for a minute he's going to run a campaign based on lies and destruction of the nation, as all other candidates always do, but looks like he found the golden recipe here. It's a pity nobody ever tried to run a campaign based on that before, but now I'm sure his success is assured.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
What's the grift? He's already pretty rich
The next step in the pyramid after money is power and admiration of the masses. But it doesn't really matter. In fact, a selfless adherent to an idiotic ideology is far more dangerous than a mere grifter. Or, as immortal C.S. Lewis said:
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
1yr ago
The reason may be some compromising material, military secrets,
That would make sense, except - what compromising material is possible about Putin? Short of discovering something really shocking - like he's literally a cannibal who eats babies (not that cannibalistic dictators are anything new by this point...) - all possible materials about Putin have already been published. Everybody knows he's a grotesquely corrupt, murderous psychopath - it's just most Russians don't care and many prefer it this way.
As for military secrets - I think Western intelligence sources already have most of military secrets Prigozhin could have access to. It's unlikely he had access to something like nuke launch codes or other really important stuff - he's been a cook with a side business, after all, not an army general.
the threat of a second "march of justice" from the Wagner PMCs
And then what? Without a leader and a goal, the worst they could do is spill a bit more blood. Blood costs nothing in Russia, nobody cares about it. Especially now, when Putin has proven his power over them, they can not be seen as a viable alternative power center by anybody.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Russia: to nobody's surprise, a plane in which Evgeny Prigozhin, his lieutenant Utkin (aka "Wagner") and an assortment of smaller criminals travelled, suffered a sudden unscheduled disassembly, leading to the death of all aboard. Exactly two months after the Prigozhin's clown coup. I don't think anybody has any doubts about who did this or why, the only discussion seems to be how exactly - was it a bomb, a missile? Also, the future of the military group formerly lead by the deceased is now uncertain - will Putin take over their assets - thus negating (im)plausible deniability, will somebody else appointed by Putin take over, or will it be disbanded completely and the members will have to find their own ways as they please?
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
The first colonists didn't set the policy however (and they scarcely would wipe out or subjugate the whole the native population, either). The system that sent them - and came after they came back and reported they found something they can name by European name with added "New" in front - did. And I don't think "humanitarian" is a correct word anyway - at least not how we understand it now. "Paternalistic" or "nanny state" would be more appropriate term - and as we know, all these impulses did not disappear, they just turned inwards (mostly).
Colonialism as a civilizing effort was a later rationalisation, and not a convincing one.
How do you explain multiple evidence of the people performing colonialism themselves saying that's what they wanted, and not saying what they wanted was actually to wipe out the aboriginals completely, never actually trying consistently to do that, and spending a lot of effort on things like converting them to christianity, making them follow European customs, etc. etc.? They just knew in the future people would want to rationalize their actions exactly matching the way they are behaving, and obligingly laid the ground work for that, while not doing anything to achieve what they actually really wanted - which is wiping out the natives?
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Yes, it is a simplification, if we're talking about motivations of huge number of people, of course there's a variety there. But - if we talk about the leading ideology of the colonial project, I think there was such a thing, and I think it was the ideological and moral basis for the actions of many people and governments. And I think it's possible to say that the drive to wipe out the original population was never a main motivation there - though once can not ignore that specific homicidal and genocidal actions did take place. But it wasn't the overarching goal of this project, that's not what Europeans tried to do.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
The point of colonialism was never to eliminate the colonized nations or wipe them out. At least not the late colonialism, and I'd argue this is mostly true for most of European-based colonialism in general. The point was to lift the nations being colonized from the darkness where they dwell into the light of civilization. Now, there are many people who may argue this approach is problematic for many reasons, but that's what the colonizers tried to do. Of course, not entirely for free - in exchange, they expected the use of the resources of these nations (just as they use resources of their own nation), and have combined power of them plus colonies be much larger than them alone, and also maybe certain measure of gratitude and deference. Again, I am not discussing there if it was right for them to do that - but only that this is what they tried to do. You can not blame people for not doing properly something that they never intended to do in the first place. It wasn't "mercy", it was the whole plan from the start. Surely, if somebody objected, there might be some killing needed to be done, but again, only in the service of this larger goal.
If Biden's allies were working to impeach the DA prosecuting him
Biden allies did impeach Trump for trying to find evidence (as we know now, numerous and abundant) of Biden's crimes, and Biden himself did cause firing of a prosecutor who was investigating Hunter's shenanigans (among other things), and publicly bragged about it.
You would be demanding the gallows for treason.
No, actually removal and conviction of at least two members of Biden RICO - namely, Hunter and Joe - would be well enough. No need for gallows. But we both know this would never happen.
I say all of this as a conservative who has no love for the Democrats, or naive ideas that the system operates with perfect fairness at all times
We're so far from "perfect fairness" that we don't even know which direction it is and our GPS refuses to route us there. Right now we're at "could we maybe get to prosecuting at least the crimes that we have abundant public evidence of, and admit this evidence is real and not "Russian misinformation"?" and the answer seems to be "no, we will prosecute Trump instead for telling people to watch TV". The road from here to anything even on the outer borders of Fairness County would be long and arduous, and we're not seeming to have any desire to embark on it.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
This is why before JK Rowling became a "TERF", leftists would compare themselves to the Wizards and their political enemies to Voldemort
Well, JKR herself thought Trump is worse than Voldemort: https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/674196610683940864 - so her followers are certainly keeping up. And I mean, why not. In her world, Voldemort only murdered countless people (the exact count have been never made, but different sources agree it is probably hundreds at least, maybe more), and attempted to be a magical dictator of the world. Nothing compared to the evils Trump unleashed on us. Then again, Voldemort killed Lord Voldemort himself (with a little assist of little known boy by the name Potter) and Trump never did anything like it, so the advantage is clear.
Is it possible to make it so I won't get posts from people I have blocked when doing the janitor duty thing? I mean, I support the right of people whose day is not complete without whining about the Joos to whine to their heart's content, and having blocked them, I don't care about it any more. But when my whole janitor duty screen comes out composed of whining about Joos, it really doesn't make me happy to contribute my time to it (which I am otherwise happy to). Also, the Joo-whiners probably won't consider me a fair arbiter of the quality of their contribution anyway, so it's better both for me and for them if I don't score their posts.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
but - "abandoned"?
Well, that was a messy time so no answer would cover everybody. But if we would simplify and condense the story a lot, once Israel declared independence, the surrounding Arab countries immediately declared a war to it. To be sure, by then the war between Jews and Arabs was already ongoing for a while, but there wasn't any official entity to declare war to, and invasion into territory which is officially part of the British Empire is not something one does lightly (or at least did back then). Once it was no longer British, just Israel, it was go time.
However, the territory was inhabited by a lot of Arab people too, and living in the middle of an active military campaign is no fun. So the advice that was given to the Arab population of Israel was thus: move out for a bit, we massacre all the Jews quickly, they stand no chance obviously, and you can come back and live happily ever after. And so some did. To be frank, the Jews weren't exactly stopping them and begging them to stay. Then, as the war progressed, it turned out that Arab armies are not exactly winning. More like losing miserably. And some Arabs who stayed so far started wondering - if we planned to massacre all Jews when we win, what would the Jews do now that they are winning? Obviously, not treat us to kumbaya feasts. We weren't even hiding our plans. They must be very angry by now. So, more people moved out, in fear of Jewish retaliation. Again, the Jews weren't exactly begging them to stay. Then, of course, there were also cases where Arab villages, especially ones who took active part in fighting against Jews, were expelled from their villages when their side lost, that happened too. And the rumors about war atrocities - which were happening, as they happened in any war, and were exaggerated in retelling as they commonly are - contributed to this too, thus if in some village the men were fighting against the Jews, they sometimes chose to take their family and flee even before Jews come in, because they heard some tales what may happen otherwise (true or false). Again, some among Jewish leadership saw it as a positive factor so they were encouraging such rumors and reactions to them as much as they could. Some of them thought they may have to do some kind of population transfer or exchange anyway, once they win the war, so if it's happening right now it's even better, less work later.
Of course, alongside with all that, there were also, as I mentioned, cases of forcible expulsion too. So this does not describe every single case.
This makes them sound like they just sort of flaked out for no good reason.
Well, as I described above, they had plenty of reasons. Having to stay in the "refugee" status for three generations is much less reasonable though.
Weren't these people fleeing some pretty scary massacres
Deir Yassin is one of those atrocities that I mentioned above, and even though it wasn't a typical occurrence for that war, it certainly contributed to the atmosphere. But it wouldn't be accurate to say most people would be fleeing same events that occurred at Deir Yassin - some of them may have been concerned it might happen again, but for most of them it's not what has or was about to happen.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Though stories like this: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/tsmc-delays-us-chip-fab-opening-says-us-talent-is-insufficient/ (yes, I know the difference between Taiwan and China, but it's beside the main point) make me think it may happen not only because of China getting better, but also because of the US getting worse and losing the hitech edge in service of myopic political considerations. The smart thing would be to say "fuck the unions, chip producing facilities on US soil are vital, especially given how vulnerable Taiwan is" but that's exactly the opposite of what is happening.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
I think what affluenza people in the US call "western materialism" many people in China would call "non-shitty standards of living at last". The generation that experienced the last famine in China is still alive, I think. I would expect them and their descendants to want to be a bit "materialistic" about not experiencing it again?
Having sizeable income shows much more than just pure money numbers. It shows social skills, certain level of IQ (yes, there are exceptions, but there are always exceptions), likely a reasonably stable job, to some measure your social circles, your available budgets, etc. Having no information at all about any of that creates a risk, and the risk would not likely be justified given how many alternatives there are around.
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