Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
What you live in a world where corruption is already rampant and the norm? One where you are going to have to bribe your way through no matter what. Consider yourself in that situation.
What if you don't live in that world, but want an excuse to act like a bandit, so you claim that you do?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
Why on earth would you jeopardise these favourable battlefields to tilt at ideological windmills that the large majority of Americans and Westerners consider sacrosanct? Bad and stupid ideas, but also bad and stupid strategy.
As a poster here (actually back on reddit, but same diff) once trenchantly observed, bigots can't help themselves. The reason people from the New Right keep getting caught out doing Nazi apologia is that the New Right is shot through with Nazi sympathizers. Maybe they're not champing at the bit for an expansionist totalitarian dictatorship, but they often think Mr. Hitler had some interesting ideas about the use of state violence to enforce racial/cultural purity and fight degeneracy.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
If the postulate is that I plan to punch everyone in the face and also have 1000 fists so I can punch everyone in the face simultaneously, the fact that I am only punch one guy strongly calls into question whether or not I actually plan to punch everyone.
We can’t be having presidents going to jail all the time like Illinois governors.
Why not?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
The electoral reality in the US is that many states have a history of very overtly disenfranchising certain kinds of voter. This colors basically everything about electoral reform in the US.
voter ID is a ridiculously low bar that the GOP should be able to hammer home, but the fact that they cant speaks volumes to their weakness/idiocy.
Anyone who deeply cares about mandatory voter ID and is really worried about vote fraud is already a die-hard conservative.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
It is fascinating that not more is done to fix an issue that undermines the confidence in the system.
Because the two parties have diametrically opposed reasons for lack of confidence in the system. In general, Republicans are worried about vote fraud, want to make it harder to vote, and prefer state controlled elections. In general, Democrats are worried about voter disenfranchisement, want to make it easier to vote and want more Federal standards and oversight.
Republicans should push hard for making IDs a free government service.
That would defeat the cynical purpose of voter ID laws and be deeply unpalatable to much of their base. Universal Federal ID proposals are DOA on the Right.
This seems like a willful misreading. Do you think "dominate" means "conquer by force of arms"? Because it's not as if the EU has been putting up vigorous opposition to Russian hegemony absent US spinal prosthetics.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
OP's post is similar in quality to other top level posts here, save for whose sacred cows it brings to the slaughter.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
The "suddenly very concerned" part comes from how 98% of the time American conservatives have somewhere between zero and negative interest in treating mental health as a public policy concern and bring it up only when taking a defensive position after a mass shooting (and generally without any actual policy proposals)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
Did you pay any attention to the details of the case? Because this response makes me think you didn't and are just resorting to pattern matching against a strawman. The NC state government did not pass some facially neutral policy which had disparate impact:
the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices. Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans.
All this right after having a consent decree originally imposed for racist electoral policy lifted. The "golly gee, how did that happen" doesn't fly. If you ask for racial data and then immediately use it to enact policies which are de facto racially discriminatory, the most likely explanation is that it was deliberately discriminatory.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
Well what keeps happening?
People keep trying to disenfranchise African Americans.
So are we to impute those laws were enacted for racist reasons?
There's no imputation required in this case - the disparate impact was very much by design.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
You think there are 400,000 people in pre-trial detention for homicide?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
The Trump admin has the power to crush Harvard. They have HUGE reasons to play ball, the things that the administration can do to them are existentially threatening.
The Trump administration has made it abundantly clear that showing your belly is the wrong move, because it won't earn you the tiniest shred of leniency. When the barbarians tell you to throw open your gates and surrender or be destroyed while you can see the smoke rising from the last city to surrender, you're not going to comply. You're going to hunker down and put out calls for aid.
Harvard has a lot of wealthy and influential alumni, and they may reasonably believe that making themselves a beacon of opposition will allow them to weather the storm more or less intact.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
Trump made tariffs a cornerstone of his campaign, and he's acting on that, so there is nothing to expose.
It's exposed Trump apologists. After years of his defenders insisting we should take him seriously but not literally, it turns out he's a malicious idiot and we should have taken him literally.
I think I've solved the mystery of why the right never makes much headway with Jewish voters.
Christian countries actively ignore it and really couldn’t care less
I hazard the 'Christian' countries he is talking about are actually secular nations that merely happen to have large populations of nominally Christian residents.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
I've been consistent in my view that Trump is not a Russian asset, just a simp for Putin. This is why he's not being very strategic about it - he's not acting like this because he works for Putin; he's acting like this because he likes Putin and doesn't like US allies.
A genuine Russian asset would be doing many of the same things, but they'd be trying to boil the frog and they'd be trying to be less polarizing domestically. As it is, Trump is largely calcifying anti-Russian sentiment without building any counterbalance. The pro-Russian element in the US government is essentially just Trump. And while a mad king can do a lot to trash US relationships, I would presume the Russians would be looking to sever them in a more permanent fashion.
As an American, I'm glad that after four years of pointless struggle under Biden Trump has finally taken bold steps to normalize relations with inflation.
Seriously, these tariffs are an absolutely bizarre own-goal. Yet another reminder that the people with TDS were absolutely right all along.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
A lot of American conservatives seem to be in blissful ignorance about how negatively Trump is perceived in Europe, especially given the bizarre events of the last month.
A lot of American conservatives relationship with the outside world is mediated entirely by Donald Trump and an imaginary snooty Frenchman who lives rent-free in their head. If Trump says he's made America respected again on the world stage after Biden destroyed our reputation, they're going to believe him.
Americans don't have to care what Europeans think, but a lot of them take American global standing for granted and don't grasp that a world much less friendly to American interests is possible.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
This seems like a bog-standard Republican move to gut anything that might inhibit business/financial elites as executed through the Trump admin's position that the president is functionally an elected dictator. They're probably not thinking that long term, but if they are I would hazard to guess they are wagering on an emerging Republican majority an extremely favorable position on the Supreme Court plus an electoral system/political geography heavily biased in their favor to prevent the Democrats from exercising power the same way the next time they win the presidency. A lot of Trump's ambitious executive behavior is predicated on an extremely deferential Congress, which a Democratic president is unlikely to get.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
What are his actual motivations?
He's in the tank for Xi Jinping
The hysterical critics were correct. Donald Trump is a thug who thinks he can extort concessions from Canada because they are weak and the US is strong. Best case he wants to get some symbolic concession in exchange for dropping the tariffs so he can tout it to his guileless supporters as proof of what a tough negotiator he is. Worst case, he's really serious about trying to use economic coercion to force Canada to accept annexation, which will almost certainly fail, but will have the added side effect of absolutely shredding American international standing. Somewhere in the middle is thinking he can force Canada to equalize the balance of trade between the two countries.
I've met people who have that energy, except 90% of them go around wrecking shit and making a mess while effete, low-agency people have to clean up after them. They're also usually incorrigible because they rarely have to deal with the consequences of "helping".
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
the theological ground of these ads is spurious
Does this actually matter to anyone? Religion as practiced by most adherents is a loose collection of rituals and superstitions that serves chiefly as a tribal identifier; to the extent that such people follow their own religious doctrines, they tend to pick and choose what already fits their values while selectively ignoring anything that doesn't. This is why, for example, you can have an explicitly pacifist faith that decries the accumulation of wealth serve as the official religion for a bunch of bling-obsessed warrior aristocrats without everyone's head exploding or decamping to a better aligned belief system.
In the last iteration of the thread, someone articulated the point that right now Christianity is very heavily right-coded and enjoys a fairly poor reputation with young people (not unrelated). These commercials seem best understood as attempts to challenge both of those perceptions. It may not be true to some platonic ideal of Christian theology, but you can say that about most Actually Existing Christianity (it's only relatively recently that they mostly chileld.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
The Romans never would have let millions of migrants enter their territory and use their resources.
...they did.
In any event, it's not really clear why we should consider the Romans a model for behavior.
So often a debate does come down to the definition of a word.
"Invasion" rhetoric is classic Motte-and-Bailey equivocation. Nativists want to borrow the alarming connotations of the word to hype up support for radical measures, then, when their critics point out that there's a slight difference between people making dodgy asylum claims and an armed force sacking El Paso, fall back on "invasion has other meanings". If Latinos are "invading" like Japanese tourists, the claim becomes a lot less exciting.
I think you're severely overestimating the popularity of the Coatesian 'white supremacy' anti-racist paradigm versus normie lib 'don't be a dick' anti-racist paradigm.
(I suspect you also underestimate the prevalence of racism, which leads to further confusion)
I kept thinking to myself who are these white supremacists that they think run the country? If this country was run by white supremacists, they would be doing a terrible job.
Your confusion arises from semantic differences. When someone like Coates or Kendi talks about "white supremacy", they don't (just) mean mask-off segregationists or white nationalists. They don't even mean closeted white racists. They mean the whole accumulation of things which collectively acts to keep white people at the top of the socio-economic heap*. You can probably find a direct quote from one of the above that articulates this without my paraphrasing, but it's late and I'm on my phone, so I'm leaving that as an exercise for the reader.
Crucially, in this paradigm, it is entirely possible for society to be white supremacist despite the fact that everyone including racist white people profess to oppose racism and look at efforts to form explicitly white organizations with intense suspicion. Disparate impact and outcomes are the key indicators.
*though they'll also be quick to note that the US also has a pretty long history of explicitly giving preferential treatment to whites.
What's your source for Federal employees being 95% democrat?
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