MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
No bio...
User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5mo ago
I think it’s a shot in the dark. I don’t see Bibi deciding to go with the deal because he already rejected it, and frankly doesn’t trust tge Palestinian side to really keep the deal. Given 75 years of “Israel signs peace deal, leaves area” and “to the surprise of absolutely nobody, Palestinians have rearmed and are trying to destroy Israel — again” he really can’t make a deal. It’s either an unconditional capitulation followed by military occupation to prevent rearming, or the situation as it existed on 10/6. He knows it, everybody who’s looked at the history knows it. And so I think Trump is offering the deal because he wants to say he tried.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6mo ago
The attitude that his war has anything to do with us. I don’t think it does, and in fact it’s hurting our other interests as we bleed our coffers to support a country too up its own arse to actually negotiate a ceasefire with Russia. He’s bleeding his country of men for pride, and insists that he needs our money to do it with.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
I mean things like that only work until they don’t. The sheer incompetence of the western elites is on display. The entire plan, as far as I can tell is “Ukraine is the good guy here. We arm them to the teeth, let them do whatever they want, and hope they win before something bad happens.” It’s not working, and worse, we’re putting ourselves in an extremely weak position by doing so, and for little strategic gain. Ukraine doesn’t have much beyond farmland. It’s not Taiwan with a big chip manufacturer base. And we’re depleting weapons and risking nuclear exchange to save Kansas.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
I’m not at certain what her price controls are. I know the food production end of things (not the stores) is highly consolidated into a couple of big companies that therefore own most of the food market. Breaking up those monopolies seems like a good way to get grocery priced down a bit. If that’s what she’s actually proposing, I would support it. But she hasn’t been very clear on what her plan actually is.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14d ago
If bombing Iran buys us five or ten years, it’s probably worth it. I don’t think they can restart a program we just blew up and have a bomb in two years.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
15d ago
I don’t think that the meaning is self evidently the same as originalism. There are other ways to derive intent that don’t come directly from the written text of the constitution or case law or any other written all.
The first amendment says “Congress will make no law establishing a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The plain meaning is “no state church, and congress (NB: only one branch of government is mentioned in the text). So what does religion mean, in this context? What does free exercise mean in this context? What happens if Trump issues an executive order enjoining the entire country to the Orthodox Church in America? The text actually doesn’t say anything about executive orders. So you’d have to look to other things: what kinds of things were the people debating the bill saying about the bill, what were they trying to prevent from happening? What did they say when trying to sell the Bill of Rights to the People? What did early case law say about things like various states having official churches? What did they think religion means? These things are not plain reading of the meaning of the text. (Which, going only by the text, only prevents Congress from passing a law to make a National Religion or to forbid a religion from being practiced. That’s what the meaning of the words on the paper say.”
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think to be honest most Americans are, to borrow a phrase from the Chinese, unserious as a people. Their need for an easy life and for getting exactly what they want exactly how and when they want it. It’s the mentality of a child. And I think this harms dating and marriage because being in a relationship with another living person requires work and compromise and commitment that more often than not people are less willing to accept.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I think this version makes sense simply because it just so happens to be a guy from The Atlantic, which is a liberal news source, but not one known for hard news. It’s just doesn’t seem like it’s the kind of newspaper that the Secretary of Defense would have on his phone. They’re mostly culture war journalists, unlike a NYT that pretends to be unbiased hard news.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
It doesn’t matter if your a red tribe Californian as the state has three huge blue urban centers that outweigh the red vote, so the state is a lock for tge blues. The state isn’t competitive, but on a federal level, if you removed those few locked in states, the country is actually far redder than most people actually believe. Further, there are states that are only blue because of a huge blue city in an otherwise red state. Illinois has been this way for decades. 99% of tge state are red tribe. The state is solid blue because of Chicago.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6mo ago
Look, the reason Russia wants Ukraine (and keep in mind it was fine with an independent Ukraine as long as it stayed aligned with them rather than NATO/EU) is because it has no defensive border between itself and Ukraine. Us supporting the color revolution to create a Western aligned government, promising them eventual NATO/EU memberships, and selling them weapons is pretty darn close to what lead to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. We were creating an armed hostile camp within striking distance of their border and then make a shocked face when Russia decides tha5 this is unacceptable. And again, despite all the rhetoric of “Russia bad an$ wants to invade every country on its border,” it’s not making those moves. The threat of “if Ukraine falls, everybody else gets invaded” doesn’t make any sense or at least no more sense than saying that the world needed to stop us from invading Cuba in the 1969s lest we also decide to invade Haiti, Antigua, and Dominican Republic. None of those states were security concerns for the USA at the time, and even the Russian were not worried that there would be invasions beyond Cuba. You can’t just park weapons along a border of a rival state and call them rabid for that either.
Now, further, other than antagonizing Russia, there’s no strategic value to Ukraine as an EU member or being under the protection of NATO. It’s a corrupt state, it’s chiefly agricultural, we don’t need more ports on the Black Sea (we have Turkey for that purpose). Assuming Ukraine had made it into NATO and the EU, what do we gain? What was in Ukraine that would be worth billions of dollars a month and risking nuclear war? I can see intervention in Taiwan. Having a huge chip manufacturing sector is valuable, we need that industry if we’re going to remain competitive in the 21st century. That’s an absolutely vital thing to protect. And my fear is that our ability to do anything when China makes a play for Taiwan is going to be greatly diminished because so much of our money and military equipment was sent to Ukraine, the public will to defend ye5 another invaded country will be spent, and we’ll be unable to do anything as China absorbs Taiwan and corners the market on chip manufacturing.
I think we need to be much more strategic about where we spend our blood and treasure. We cannot sustainably intervene in every conflict around the globe. And since we have to pick our battles, it seems muc( better to do so on the basis of vital security and economic interests rather than the emotional response to events. I just don’t see anything in Ukraine tha5 would justify us continuing to prop it up long after it should have accepted the loss of Donbas, and that’s generously assuming that there was ever any serious interest at all,
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
I disagree. The problem with legalizing vices on the premise that there’s no immediate victim creates social problems that the general public will often have to pay to fix damages. If we allow people to drive around drunk, obviously the risk of eventually hittIng someone is a serious problem and one that could be prevented by simply not allowing people to drive cars while intoxicated. This also avoids the problem of the state having to support the medical care of the driver and whoever he hit for a good long time.
With other vices, it can be a problem for much the same reason. If I’m high I am unlikely to be able to keep a job, much more likely to injure themselves or other people, more likely to be abusive (depending on the drug). These are burdens on the state that the taxpayers are going to have to pay to clean up.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
The issue would seem to be whether some escalation would lead to nuclear war. Russia has been patient up to this point, but Putin absolutely does have red lines that he will not allow crossed without serious consequences, up to and including nuclear war. He’s been pretty smart in my view by not saying exactly where the lines are (which would encourage NATO to get to the point where it’s next to the line, but not technically crossing it. You’d retaliate against NATO for 10,000 troops? Okay 9999 it is!) and creating a bit of hesitation for certain weapons or other aid packages.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I’d be fine with the idea of pure sports if these world class competitions were honest. But these are not honest contests in any measure. Drugs are fairly common, countries that basically pay living expenses (but not directly paying athletes) are common, and now that trans is becoming a thing we have potentially fake female athletes competing with natal women. I’ve yet to see anyone care that much. The sponsors get lots of money, the committee gets paid, various governments get to rally their people around their flag and patriotic pride. I just wish it we’re honest that these are basically professional sports. You can still do everything else and keep your pride. I’m not even against the stuff we consider cheating if we’re honest that this isn’t pure sports. Of course I feel the same way about D1 NCAA. Everybody knows that the NCAA D1 major sports are de facto professional minor leagues for those sports and were for the most part okay with Jermaine the running back getting a degree in football and free foood, housing and cars for a few years.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
27d ago
He’s publicly supporting a group of rioters. It seems like at best to be incitement, and given that he asked the LA PD to go and protect rioters, might well be more serious.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
As a point of fact, the state, like almost all states is winner take all, either by district or in the case of the president, the entire state. So the state goes democratic, and because of that, Democrats get an automatic 54 votes for president.
And the huge locked in states have basically kept democrats in the game much more than they would be if they weren’t guaranteed the entire state of California. Removing the large locked in states means Ds get something like 108 electoral votes in the presidential election rather than the close race we see. Now yes, some of this is organic but because those states are winner takes all, it’s a huge boost to blues to have 150 or more votes locked in before a vote even occurs.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5mo ago
Well yeah. It’s how politics works for the most part. For rich people it’s a sport and they have tons of free time and money to spend bankrolling things that they can brag about at dinner parties. And for the most part that’s all they care about. Palestinians are a popular cause because the Israelis on TV mostly look like Europeans, and the Palestinians are brown. Besides, saying Islam has a violence problem makes them feel bad.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6mo ago
He wasn’t tweeting while he was attacking. Those posts came beforehand. It might well have been a sort of cover story so those who are looking for Jihadists don’t look to hard at him. And Muhammad Atta was drinking late into the night before 9/11 despite alcohol being forbidden by Islam.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
I think it works as an appeal to victimization and greed. The belief that you’re being exploited is something that comes up anytime you end up with any sort of hierarchy. It’s something that humans are just unwilling to accept unless it’s them at or near the top of the dominance hierarchy. So rather than accept that there’s a reason that they’re not at the top of that hierarchy. Incels certainly have theories about what kinds of external factors make them unfuckable. The kid cut from the football team will likely believe in some sort of favoritism hold him back. In the workplace we have a hard time accepting that we actually don’t deserve to be the boss.
The other appeal is greed. If those at the top are unfairly exploiting them, it’s “only fair” to ask that some of those ill-gotten gains go to them. So they stand to gain if they can leverage the power of the state to basically steal from their betters.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
He’s head of a movement though. And the movement is not a bunch of limp wristed hand wringing party loyalists. They support Trump as the guy who’s there to basically clean house of the establishment and in their view restore the republic to its glory days. They aren’t going to sit home and do nothing if that establishment doesn’t allow the changes to happen. They’re at minimum going to attempt (probably successfully) to primary any republicans who don’t give them what they want. And that’s if they’re nice. We also have a fairly good sized militia contingent who might not be so nice about it.
Trump is perhaps irrelevant except as figurehead. JD Vance is probably more aligned with the movement as I see it, and he’s definitely going to work to implement MAGA and Project 2025
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
I mean yes. Prediction markets avoid the two biggest problems of polling. One one side, it avoids the issue of shame and embarrassment entirely. If I’m in favor of something that is unpopular, I might not tell someone especially if I’m in a situation where other people might hear it. And second, they avoid falling for zealots. If the price for Kamala gets too high, people will sell Kamala and take the cash now before the election proves them wrong.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
You’d also have to compare it to the good available in allowing these things. Reduced speed increases the cost of business and increases the commute time for workers. Outlawing bookshelves above a certain size limits books.
Hard drugs provide no real value, and huge downsides. Alcohol has benefits is promoting socialization, but has drawbacks in drunk driving injuries, bad decisions, etc. fireplaces and candles provide backup heat and light when electric power isn’t available.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that every Vice be made illegal. But when a substance or behavior proves itself to habit forming to a substantial number of people to the point that they can no longer be functional members of society, then the rest of society is perfectly within its rights to try to regulate it. The number of people who get addicted to rock climbing or backpacking is pretty small compared to drug use or alcohol abuse.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
In the case of gender, I would argue that it’s at least in part about safety. Men are orders of magnitude stronger than women, and given that most instances of stranger rape occur in private spaces, keeping natal males out of women’s restrooms, changing rooms, and sleeping areas is simply the best way to prevent rapes in those spaces.
Height and weight are more about proof of identity in general. If you match 5/5 of the identifying characteristics listed on your ID, it’s pretty clear it’s your ID.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10mo ago
I think the less the general public knows about spree shooter’s manifestos the better. There’s at least some evidence that spree shooting can be contagious much like suicides and so the less sensational the reports on any given shooting, the less likely the shooting is to inspire copycats. I don’t think it changes if the motives are political.
I do think there’s a place for experts to study the motivations of spree shooters. I want cops and schools aware of the commonalities between the events, likely motivations, and best practices for preventing them or mitigating the damage during those kinds of events l.
I think you’re right about Pax Americana having ended. For most people it ended decades ago. It’s just now reaching the professional classes. But if you drive through the rural parts of the South, it’s already happened, probably 2 generations ago, and these places look like the ruins of a civilization rather than a thriving one. Rusty, dirty, shabby, abandoned buildings everywhere. The people themselves live in poverty for the most part. Urban cores have been war zones for decades and everybody knows it.
I see Trump as a manifestation of the problems of American Empire, rather than the cause. We are not the same steady, stalwart and practical people who built Pax Americana, we don’t have the ability or the willpower to keep it. All that’s left is to tear it up and hopefully squeeze out the few good years we have left.
More options
Context Copy link