MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1hr ago
I am shocked, shocked to find a Trump administration official saying the thing that is not.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1hr ago
It's roughly the number of people who will give the most trollishly partisan answer to a poll question regardless of what they actually think. Scott Alexander's post on the Lizardman constant in polling says 13% of Americans, including 5% of Democrats (so c. 21% of Republicans by elimination) told pollsters that they thought Obama was the antichrist - which was not a popular anti-Obama conspiracy theory at the time. Of course the 21% includes 4-5% of lizardman responders who are in effect engaged in for-the-lulz nonpartisan trolling. But "15% of respondents use polls for partisan trolling on top of the lizardmen" is pretty much correct.
Unless you think "Republicans who are so deep into politically-driven heresy that they think their political opponents are the literal antichrist" are a problematic group, I would treat "Democrats who support the Charlie Kirk assassination" with the same skepticism.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
British police uniforms are a very dark blue, to the point where they look black in dim light. It is a sufficiently from standard US police uniforms that I think the "Union Army surplus" theory is more plausible.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
The ceiling painting in the Painted Hall in Greenwich, London is an allegorical depiction of the Hanoverians bringing the blessings of liberty to Europe and trampling Tyranny (as represented by Louis XIV) underfoot. The angels blessing him hold fasces, which was seen as a sign of ordered liberty at the time, by analogy with the Roman Republic. The docent who provided this explanation was not embarassed by it, although some of the other tourists were.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
The point isn't to change the way the outrage machine responds. The main point is to change the way normies encountering ICE/CBP in the street respond. The secondary point (which I agree probably won't work) is to change the way normies who watch the viral videos respond.
At the margin, does the Trump administration want Minneapolis wine moms to feel like an unpopular law is being enforced in their city, or does he want them to feel like a defeated people resisting a successful belligerent occupation? I don't know, but I think the question is important.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
Of course, Niemoeller is hardly the closest friend of the regime the Nazis murdered, that dubious honor likely falls to the SA leadership around Ernst Roehm, whose loyalty to the cause only bought them a quick death.
I would say that Strasser was a closer friend to the Nazis than Rohm, who left the party in 1925 because he objected to Hitler's strategy of legality and worked as a mercenary in South America for a few years before it became clear that the legality strategy was working after the 1930 election.
Niemoeller was a curious character. His background would make him a natural DNVP voter, he publicly opposed the Nazis almost immediately after they came to power (initially because they extended their anti-Semitic policies to ethnic Jewish converts to Lutheranism), and he would go on to cofound the explicitly anti-Nazi Confessing Lutheran Church with Dietrich Boenhoffer. So not exactly your typical Nazi. But he was an enthusiastic NSDAP supporter, even when they were in the wilderness in the 1920's, and the Volkischer Beobachter promoted his book. I understand why he spent most of his life after getting out of the concentration camp on an apology tour.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
The operation in Minneapolis is a joint ICE/CBP operation. (I think the CBP element is part of the Border Patrol, but I might be wrong on this point). CBP have a cop-like blue working uniform that would be completely appropriate for this operation, although it is mostly used by CBP Field Operations. Border Patrol still use the green paramilitary-style uniforms that they used before integration into CBP, which are not ideal for urban policing but are a lot better than the grey cammo I am seeing on my TV screen.
If I was trying to make Minneapolis look like dispassionate law enforcement then I would put ICE and Border Patrol in matching uniforms similar to the CBP Field Ops uniform but with the appropriate agency badges. Call it the "urban operational duty" uniform to distinguish it from the existing green Border Patrol "rough duty" uniform that they wear when patrolling the actual border. But if, as I suspect given what MAGA Twitter wants to see, part of the point is to look like a paramilitary operation against the blue tribe, then the grey cammo makes better social media copy.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
In a surprisingly apt example, The Great Silver Bubble says that movies were cancelled in 1979 because the Hunt brothers had created a shortage of film by buying up all the silver. The amount of heirloom silver melted down so short sellers could overpay for it and deliver it into the Hunts' longs was also socially destructive.
The good news that time is that the Hunts ended up paying for their fun - the unsuccessful attempt to corner the silver market cost them 1.7 billion dollars (6.5 billion adjusting for inflation, 17 billion adjusting for GDP growth, so a loss that would embarass Bill Gates but not Elon Musk)
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
"Bus them over" was based on a particular population of obviously-net-negative but sympathetic-to-Blues migrants (namely newly-arrived "refugees") which no longer exists because of better border enforcement under Trump. In addition, it was a group of people who couldn't legally be deported, so centrist Democrats couldn't call the bluff and say "If you want them deported, why are you bussing them over instead of deporting them."
The red tribe are no more going to bus their own illegal employees to Massachusetts than deport them, for the same reasons. And even if they did, established illegal residents with jobs, homes, families and friends in Texas wouldn't go to Massachusetts voluntarily, and shipping them involuntarily to Massachusetts would look as bad (and be almost as bad, or worse if you care about the law) as shipping them involuntarily to Mexico.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
ICE (and CBP - Minneapolis is a joint operation) is arresting every illegal immigrant who comes to its attention, including schoolchildren. They have said they are doing this, the media say they are doing this, and supporters of the operation (including on this forum) say they should be doing this.
The argument about whether it is possible to be out of legal immigration status innocently has been done to death, but if you think the answer is "Yes" then ICE are absolutely rounding up innocents, and this is what the core MAGA vote want. The claim that Trump-era immigration enforcement is focussed on "the worst of the worst" is a lie for the benefit of low-information normies. MAGA think ICE are deporting them all and this is good, Minnesota Nice thinks ICE are deporting them all and this is bad. So mocking the "worst of the worst" lie is an entirely normal thing to do.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
I agree that Americans have more of an excuse for caring about the I-P conflict than other Westerners do.
"The UK should butt out of the I-P conflict, and individual Britons who pick a side either have dual loyalties or are idiots" is probably my most dangerous political opinion in polite company.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
Mostly ignoring Gaza is a sign of a healthy forum culture, unless your forum has a mission that specifically includes paying attention to obscure third-world humanitarian disasters. The Israel-Palestine conflict is boring, notoriously intractable, and has a low death toll relative to a mid-tier African civil war. It gets far more press than it deserves because it somehow became a proxy for the US culture war.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
Zero fahrenheit was supposed to be the coldest precisely replicable temperature Fahrenheit could create in his lab - the freezing point of saturated ammonium chloride solution. (Ordinary salt brine actually freezes at -6 degrees fahrenheit, but Fahrenheit didn't have access to sodium chloride that was pure enough to make this temperature replicable). The upper fixed point was supposed to be body temperature at 96 degrees fahrenheit (in the spirit of Imperial units, using a number with lots of factors including powers of two, rather than one that looks pretty in decimal), but it turned out not to be consistent enough, or easy to measure with the thermometers fahrenheit had access to.
The scale was restandardised to 32 and 212 as the freezing and boiling points of pure water after the Royal Society endorsed the Celsius scale.
But "Freezing point of brine is about zero, body temperature is about 100" is the original motivation of what the numbers are in degrees fahrenheit.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
I think it's the sense that they would rather lose as long as they satisfy their own personal feelings of being a good person first and foremost.
The one thing Christianity isn't about is your own personal feelings. If the God of the Bible is real, and his only-begotten son Jesus Christ died on the Cross for our sins, then this matters. Different strains of Christianity differ over the precise relationship between "being a good person" and faithful acceptance of the gift of Jesus' sacrifice, but the end goal is mutual love between God and Man, and "If you love me, you will keep my commandments". (John 14:15). There is a lot of moral and social teaching in the Bible (although very little about secular politics), and if you find that 100% of it agrees with opinions your allies have adopted for secular reasons, you are engaging in motivated reasoning.
It's like a desire for martyrdom or something
Many people who are sincerely religious desire martyrdom. Read the lives of the Saints, or the sermons at your local Salafi mosque. The reward they seek is not of this world, and trying to point out the worldly unwisdom of what they are doing invites and deserves ridicule.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
It seems quite different to me - the Church as Bride of Christ is portrayed as in a subordinate relationship to a male figure, whereas Britannia, Columbia, Lady Liberty, Marianne etc. are generally portrayed as powerful in their own right with no man in the picture. Both Britannia and Lady Liberty are usually portrayed as, in effect, reigning queens while Columbia and Marianne are portrayed as successful rebel leaders. Obviously all of this is downstream of the thoroughly pagan portrayal of Athena as patron goddess of Athens, including the statue in the Parthenon.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
In this case surely Britannia would be the canonical example?
As an interesting aside, both the US (Uncle Sam) and the UK (John Bull) have male personifications as well as the female ones, which most countries don't.
Also, can Americans on this board comment on the relative visibility of Columbia and Lady Liberty as female personifications of the US - the America that is presented to the rest of the world uses Lady Liberty a lot more, to the point that the Columbia who appears onscreen in the opening credits of a Columbia Pictures movie looks more like Lady Liberty than traditional portrayals of Columbia.
I'd be happy to double down on "he was destroying the fabric of our society", in that he was a major player in the campaign to delegitimise the 2020 election by telling blatant lies to his gullible co-partisans. I think the full adoption of his political programme (which was not moderate) would have done a lot of damage to the fabric of American society, but most people with strong, genuine political views think that about the other side. But I think the claim that Charlie Kirk was motivated by profit and fame is unlikely - there are a lot of pure grifters in politics, and they don't behave like Kirk.
The simplest explanation for Kirk's behaviour is that he genuinely believed that doing the work of politics (talking to voters, organising coalitions, training cadres etc.) was important and pro-social. I can snark about Kirk being the kind of Christian who thought that Republican electoral success was more important than the commandment against bearing false witness, but his faith was clearly sincere and was clearly driving his politics in a pro-social direction as well.
The world would be a better place if there was more room in politics for men like Charlie Kirk. The problem with Kirk's politics is that to make room for more men like Charlie Kirk, you need fewer men like Donald Trump.
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