Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
She's going to push state parties to organize and conduct election activism under conditions of legal ballot harvesting. Right now, outside CA and a couple other states, the two parties organize around elections radically differently. The Dems understand how to take advantage of the loosened voting rules they have put in place; the GOP does not. The CA GOP, which Dhillon has been active in, despite being a minority party, understands how to ballot harvest and maximize Red turnout under contemporary electoral practices. The GOP needs to play the hand they're dealt; not just bitch about how the rules got changed a few rounds ago.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
But why would a gay man be familiar with how Japanese straight porn sounds?
For the same or similar reason that I know what some gay porn clips look like - if you spent any time on 4chan or similar borderline internet sites during the past couple decades, you were gonna see all kinds of weird shit regardless of whether or not you, personally, are into it.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
The archetypal male dream is to conquer the pristine: to get a chaste/shy/coy/innocent girl to become a naughty freak in the sheets just for him. The female dream is to tame the beast: to change the wild ballsy bad boy to become tender, prosocial, supportive, vulnerable creature but only for her.
I think I'm broken somehow - I've literally never found this a sexy or attractive idea at all, and I cannot grok people who say they do. Not in the slightest. I'm plenty attracted to women, just not the idea of changing their external presentation, or unlocking something "hidden" in them, or "mastering" them. shrug Just completely soycucked I guess.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
You almost certainly have not met, in person, the homeless guy that your hypothetical community philanthropy will reach. A lot of the homeless population moves around and in and out of homelessness. The soup kitchen you volunteer at is probably in a different part of a large city.
I don't know about where you live, but there are definitely distinct individuals who frequent specific places. Most don't just aimlessly wander here, there, anywhere. After all, they have some stuff! It's hard to move!
The same is true of ... homeless people for most?
I congratulate them. Now improve your housed neighbors. And when those are as good as you can make them, then move out to the next group outward, and so on.
those premodern divisions are still "contingent groups of people determined by geography, economic history, shared customs, etc".
Being contingent is not synonymous with being arbitrary. More importantly, those contingencies are important in people's lives.
How can it possibly matter if you have "meaningful reciprocal relationships" that happen to be in the same city as the homeless people? I don't have any such 'reciprocal relationships' with the homeless people, so it sure seems like we're relying on geographical coincidence.
You asked what "your community" is. I provided some yardsticks of what is needed for a community. Geographical contingency can be part of it, because we're physical beings who exist in specific locations, alongside other people. But ultimately it's about cooperating with other people.
This is just the 'chesterton's fence' conservative - defending something, but it's not the thing you claim to be defending.
Thanks for the mind-reading.
There's some vague sense that what the liberals are doing is wrong, but the only levered criticism is that the liberals aren't touchy-feely enough, and should be doing the exact same thing but just slightly more conservative-feeling.
None of that is what I said.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
If you set your asking price correctly, then this should be priced in.
If you know even a smidgen about the financial acumen and long-term planning capabilities of the median American, you should realize that just about no-one will set their asking price """correctly""".
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Overt cultural pressure is less important now that banks, universities, bureaucracies, and schools are, in large part, captured by wokist moral reasoning.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Except your example also demonstrates that "let them do it on their own" is BS. The Azeris had Iranian, Turkish, and Israeli backing...the Armenians "fought on their own" and got stomped. Little countries will always cozy up to big countries, and whoever doesn't have a patron had best find one quick or risk domination by their mobbed-up neighbors.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
My understanding is that it takes a significant amount of time for exploration projects to go from approval, through construction, to production. To what extent are current production levels indicative of investments made 5-10 years ago, and approvals sought 3-4 years ago? (Honest question, I don't know the industry well enough to say off the top of my head or with only cursory googling).
Similarly, should we expect the number of permits granted by the Biden administration to have an immediate impact on production numbers?
And are all permits created equal - e.g. if current production increases are centered in shale fields, are those permits more or less impactful than the permits being granted now?
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Mexicans staying in Mexico are obviously not the ones immigrating, are they?
No, but their brothers, sons, cousins, fathers, or uncles are, and they are benefitting from the nearly $60 billion in remittances sent home annually by those expats - roughly 4% of Mexico's entire GDP.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
The exchange described in Mark 12:13-17 is a brilliant bit of verbal and philosophical Jujitsu that is difficult to appreciate if you're coming from a mind-space where some sort of separation between the "church" and "the state" or "clergyman" and "politician" is assumed to be the default. Something that was emphatically not the case in the ancient world.
Notably, the distinction between "church" and "state," "clergyman" and "politician" was not really a thing in most of the Christian world for a long time, either. Technically still isn't in places like England. And, insofar as you take the Yarvinite position that modern progressivism is a protestant heresy, the tendency is back towards the combination of secular and ideological authority.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
cops that actually enforce quality of life rules
Yes, but you're not going to get this with modern racial and class politics, so it's not useful discussing it as a realistic option.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
"African-American Studies" (hereinafter "AAS" because I'm lazy) is not "African-American History." In fact, properly understood, a student isn't really able to engage fruitfully with AAS until they already have a reasonable familiarity with the relevant history, sociology, anthropology, music/cultural studies, etc. The whole point of the various "X Studies" programs is to be interdisciplinary - to take extant bodies of information, place them in dialogue with each other, and attempt to figure out what insights they may have to offer each other, and identify blind spots in prior, monodisciplinary analysis.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
here's one of the Smart Like Us crew who is dumber than an ordinary person when it came to "I can make yuuuuge money out of trading magic beans"
No he's not; the "ordinary people" are the ones getting rooked into buying at the top of the crypto bubble, or latching onto one of the innumerable scams out there. Running one of those scams, especially one as big as FTX, is harder. Plus, SBF did legitimately stumble into profitable bitcoin arbitrage opportunities; if he had just stopped there, and not gotten out over his skis, he would have still made a lot of money - completely legitimately! - on those "magic beans".
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I have two (anecdotal, sadly) examples - 1. Medicare disputes, and 2. Alcohol license administrative hearings.
(1) When I was in law school, I briefly worked an externship as the equivalent of a judicial clerk in the Department of Health and Human Services' Medicare Appeals Division. My primary job was to work up the administrative appeal case files for the Administrative Appeals Judges to look over and make a decision on. MAD got tens of thousands of appeals every year (despite being the third appellate layer of administrative bureaucracy concerning Medicare coverage decisions), but only had nine or ten AAJs at the time, so naturally we had to triage the cases. The ones without legal representation got priority, so every casefile I saw was an "unrepresented beneficiary."
Their appeals came in on everything from unevenly-scribbled letters, to perfumed stationary, to erratic, bullet-point-ridden emails. The exact same thing happened to them as one might expect - they got steamrolled. They didn't know the guidebooks that were used to make the determinations, weren't familiar with the procedural regulations, and even in a nominally non-adversarial process where everyone involved was bending over backwards to be charitable and understanding of these factors (or at least was making convincing mouth-noises to that effect), they lost, and lost, and lost. I finally checked out when I saw a case involving sticking an unrepped-bennie with tens of thousands of dollars of medical transportation costs because his doctors and durable power of attorney didn't know that a smaller local hospital had just started performing a complex heart procedure the guy needed (in fact they hadn't even mentioned it on their webpage as an offered service yet), and so referred him to a major city teaching hospital which was known to perform the procedure - while the bennie himself was completely unconscious and in such bad health that hospice care had been considered. Too demoralizing.
(2) In my current practice, I work a lot with state alcohol licenses. My state, like most, has a separate law enforcement agency that deals exclusively with alcohol licenses and alcohol-related crime, and within their sphere they are nearly omnipotent. I represent a lot of clients in administrative hearings before the Department where there's some accusation that my client has done something wrong, and so deserves to have their license suspended or revoked. I don't win much (as I said, nearly omnipotent), but the poor licensees I see try to handle the disciplinary process without an attorney? Again, steamrolled. And administrative proceedings, like arbitrations, are supposed to be stripped down, less-legalistic processes accessible to the layman. The problem is that the agency does keep a stack of lawyers around to represent themselves at these hearings (before their own judges, natch), and the laws and processes are written so broadly (in an attempt to be approachable and easy to understand for the laity, mind), that the agency can do whatever it wants. The successes I have are precisely because my legal training puts my clients on something resembling the same informational plane as the enforcement agency.
Now, I'm not a great attorney - Yassine is almost certainly better than me from pure experience if nothing else, and he probably is baseline smarter than me too - but I'm not a moron, and my experience tells me that no modern legal process, no matter how "informal" or "accessible" it is supposed to be, should be touched by a layperson without at least getting some advice or contextual information from an attorney..
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I don't think the argument is from dissuasion, but rather from incapacitation. The theory is that only a small percentage of the population commit crimes, and that most crimes are committed by chronic recidivists. Even if you can't catch every crime, prosecute the ones you do catch hard enough, and put the perpetrators away for long enough, and you'll eventually wind up with most of the truly-disastrous people behind bars, which will have a disproportionate affect on crime levels.
Supah_Schmendrick
16d ago
White Colonization could not have happened in the first place without a much smaller number of White Men subjugating a much larger population of indigenous peoples in all cases. India, relative to its population size, was controlled by the British with an extremely small elite pool.
This is very bad history. Colonization in India occurred not because a few god-like white people showed up and crushed all before them, but instead because very clever and ruthless opportunists, through a combination of skill and luck, managed to co-opt local power structures by backing challengers to weak overlords. The British didn't rule India in their own name; they slowly accumulated alliances and legal rights and privileges through local intermediaries.
There's a myth that the Aztecs interpreted the arrival of Spanish Conquistadores as fulfilling a prophecy of the return of the Aztec's gods.
This is also very bad history. The Aztecs didn't think Cortez was a god - they in fact whipped his men out of Tenochtitlan in La Noche Triste, after killing the collaborator Moctezuma. Instead, Cortez proved himself a diplomat of no small skill, and put together a coalition of the Aztec's subject peoples which ultimately strangled Tenochtitlan, and then entered into negotiated political relationships with the Spanish crown. The influx of more and more Spaniards into the region, coupled with the massive disruption to Mexica society caused by the plagues of the Columbian exchange, was what finalized the ultimate subjugation of the locals.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
The thing that makes this a national story is that Mr. Ballard, through the fictionalized version of his life that is "Sound of Freedom," one of the major cultural figures held up as virtuous and good by Team Red. Thus, it is imperative in the kulturkampf that Team Blue knock him off his pedestal or prove him to be bad in some way, lest Team Red be able to convince people that Reds can be virtuous, or that it is virtuous to be Red. That's what's driving amplification of this story in higher-profile news networks/through non-Red social media networks. Obviously Reds, Mormons, and Utahns have their own reasons to care about this - their idol has feet of clay / adultery is something they care about, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
"Critique of STEM supremacism" is useless because the alternatives tend to be woo
It's not a question of "alternatives," its a recognition that STEM disciplines are still full of people, with the same conflicts of interest, corruptions, status-games, cliquishness, and all the rest. STEM doesn't get you an "objective" view of society because the map is still not the territory, and to the degree that it gets you an objective view of the physical universe you still have to convince all the other non-STEM people that you're right or else they'll just coordinate meanness against you using the same old dark arts as always while you're demonstrating the perfection of your equations alone at a blackboard.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
rather than to its unique founding principles or constitution.
(or it's enviable geographic position, and the misfortune of the prior inhabitants to not have cohabitated with domesticated livestock in cities, leaving them vulnerable to a lot of diseases the Europeans brought with them.)
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I don't have first hand knowledge - I'm a fatass with over-protective PMC parents who wouldn't have dreamed of letting me join up - but I've never talked to an active duty military person or recent-vintage vet who made a big deal out of race issues. And I recall reading various pieces, books, etc. that claim that the military is good at turning racially- and culturally-disparate people all into good little green automata. But YMMV, and of course first-hand knowledge would be appreciated if anyone wants to chime in.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
short of a definition of 'cycle of poverty' broad enough to include "the KKK tries to burn down your parents or grandparent's house in your living memory"
...but not broad enough to also cover "communist revolutionaries force your parents or grandparents to leave your home and community (possibly killing any number of your relatives) so they fetched up, penniless, on a foreign country's shores without language proficiency or contacts, within living memory," or "your parents or grandparents have to sell all your family's possessions (and abandon those they couldn't sell) and emigrate to escape a genocidal regime before they get around to opening the death camps, within living memory"?
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Uh...wanna bet?
Yes. I am not aware of any context in which ideologically-motivated assaults by strangers are the majority, or even a statistically-significant minority, of assaults committed against any sub-population.
The vast majority of crimes against the person (with a semi-exception for crimes like rape and armed robbery where absconding with some benefit undetected are major considerations, and even there only 40-45% are committed by strangers) are committed by people known to the victim. Crimes which result in physical assault with a weapon are some of the least likely to be committed against strangers (as ideologically-motivated attacks would be most likely to be).
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Yes, but insofar as the kids are interested in playing the game, it makes the gambling much less relevant because now you can just go get the card you want.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
The "homo" isn't always just a wink at "homosexual" - it also is a reference to the high priority of LGBT in western diplomatic efforts and high-level initiatives.
I don't know about percentages, but in my portion of a major NIMBY city, development usually does not tear down single family homes, but instead tears down poor-quality 1- or 2- story apartment buildings (often of the dingbat variety, which does not age well at all) and puts up in their place 10-12 story (4-5 of which is above-ground parking) stickbuilt cookie cutter "luxury" apartment blocks with rents that are far higher than the units replaced (because newer and nicer amenities, and often larger individual units).
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