Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
5mo ago
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, author of "On the Consolation of Philosophy," which is referenced in the same post.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
I actually don't know if we're in that situation. It would not surprise me if the Secret Service took incidents involving a Dem VP significantly more seriously than incidents involving Trump.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Dachshunds are also tiny, and yet the name means "badger hound" and they were explicitly bred that way in order to get down in badger warrens and drag those ferocious pests out by the entrails.
Supah_Schmendrick
2yr ago
It should, because if you don't respect someone you're likely to underestimate them, or otherwise misunderstand them, and so be more likely to fail when combatting them (or when trying to reach a peaceful modus vivendi).
Supah_Schmendrick
2yr ago
Maybe. Are you American?
Guilty as charged. I've always been jealous that in my dad's day High Schools offered greek and latin, but now...well....gestures helplessly at the universe.
Supah_Schmendrick
2yr ago
I don't think the Ukranians should surrender. If someone was invading California, I like to think that I would be brave enough to volunteer to fight. I do think that the U.S. needs to take escalation concerns seriously when analyzing the risk-reward of providing various weapons systems, information, training, or support to the Ukrainian war effort. It's not as simple as "oh, someone waggled a nuclear dick around, they automatically win" - its a question of determining whether what we expect to reasonably be able to achieve by the desired policy is proportional to the risk being run of nuclear or other serious retaliation. And that determination requires (1) a clear statement of what the U.S. expects to achieve from its policies, (2) an evaluation of how important those goals are worth, and (3) an analysis of whether those goals are worth the potential costs imposed by Russian countermoves, up to and including nukes or other action targeting civilian infrastructure in the U.S. or in vital partner-countries/treaty partners.
Supah_Schmendrick
5mo ago
It's not a question of "being fully on board with my team;" it's the prioritization of what is fundamentally an aesthetic choice ("these chuds are low-status and have low-status views; I don't want to think of myself as being like them") over purported principal ("people shouldn't impose racial gatekeeping mechanisms on hiring for life-and-death public safety positions").
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
But it's weird to me that the video game industry is so woke considering that the user base is so anti-woke. Why aren't there anti-woke game publishers?
(1) Ethan Strauss's "Undecided Whale" effect: The majority of money spent on AAA videogames is spent by young men. However, women control far more total discretionary spending than men overall, and can be spurred to spend on some games. Therefore, there's a significant incentive for executives looking to expand their sales figures to try and appeal to women, which given the recent massive leftward political shift of young women, often results in the insertion of hamfisted political messaging.
(2) Overrepresentation of Trans and other sexuality/subculture minorities in STEM. This one isn't complicated; transwomen, furries, and other nerds with odd subcultural affiliations around gender and sexuality are overrepresented in programming and among the type of monomanaically-focused near-autist who are more likely to go into intense knowledge-work professions like game design and creation. Thus, they're perfectly positioned to influence products from within.
(3) Standard labor law and NGO pressure-group tactics. See Hanania and Rufo.
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
why does the same reasoning not work to justify the Palestinian Oct 7 attack?
What was the inciting incident demanding recompense on the scale of kidnapping, raping, and murdering partiers at a disco festival?
Israelis and Palestinians are locked into a multigenerational civil war/blood feud that can only end by one side being wiped out
Israel has offered peace multiple times, and when its offers were accepted it honored those agreements. Meanwhile the Palestinians continue to refuse to take "yes" for an answer and insist on further fighting. That's not the recipe for "a pox on both their houses."
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
There is a 0% chance of Jews subject to actual antisemitism not getting asylum in a nice western country without Israel. This has been true for Israel’s entire existence,
That's a convenient elision of the fact that the Jews trying to escape the Nazis were in large part turned away from those nice western countries. Even years after the end of WWII, hundreds of thousands of European jews were still sitting in Displaced Persons camps guarded by allied soldiers because no "nice western country" would take them, and were only able to leave after the establishment of Israel as a national homeland for jews (those "nice western countries" still weren't willing to take them).
And I wouldn't count on most of Europe being too safe for jews in the future. France is already markedly unsafe, and as Britain islamicizes over the next couple decades anti-jewish sentiment is likely to increase.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
The NYT is a Jewish-dominant newspaper filled with Democrats
The NYT is a liberal, secular- and reform-Jewish-dominant newspaper. These people are just about fully-assimilated WEIRD anti-nationalists, and have no more love for the conservative religious right in Israel than they do for the conservative religious right in the U.S.
Supah_Schmendrick
2yr 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
3mo ago
They've been shouting "death to Israel" for a while too; elite colleges being anti-zionist and "anti-colonial" isn't some new development.
Moreover, the anti-white attitudes haven't recently coalesced into the types of encampments, campus takeovers, and outright militancy that the recent Gaza demonstrations have. Do you really think that the folks in the Trump administration would have refused to go after Columbia if it had "just" been anti-white or anti-Christian encampments and campus takeovers? They're pulling funding from schools for permitting single transgender athletes to compete outside their biological sex; I'm pretty sure they'd jump at the chance to take any plausible reason to strike at the universities.
Supah_Schmendrick
6mo ago
There's a big distinction between speciation and a nation that didn't even speak the same language in the 1800s. Almost like gross overgeneralizations are full of holes.
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
If we just want to go one step back, that's easy. Per the first Google hit, Israel killed something like 43k Palestinians since Oct 7 attack, establishing that the alleged appropriate revenge ratio is somewhere around 40:1. So we just need to find ~1000/40=25 Palestinians that Israel killed before Oct 7
That's not how any of this works, and a clear isolated demand for rigor. No-one ever analyzes any other armed conflict using this framework. The objective is not "revenge killings of undifferentiated Palestinians," but the destruction of the armed terrorist group that attacked Israelis - Hamas - either through elimination or forcing them to surrender and disperse, with a secondary objective of recovering the individuals who Hamas kidnapped on 10/7.
More were killed by Israel just in 2022
From your own source:
PIJ has a strong presence in West Bank cities like Jenin and Nablus. During the period between March and May, attacks by Israeli Arabs and Palestinians killed 17 Israelis, most of them civilians, and two Ukrainians. As a result, the IDF increased its raids against armed Palestinian factions throughout the West Bank. By July, at least 30 Palestinians were killed, including journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and 3 of those responsible for killings in Israel. On 1 August, Israeli forces arrested the PIJ West Bank leader Bassem al-Saadi. In the aftermath of that operation, amid heightened tensions, roads were closed in the south of Israel by the Israeli-Gaza border wall and reinforcements were sent south after threats of attack were made by PIJ sources in Gaza. The same day, Israeli communities in southern Israel were placed in lockdown by the military as a security precaution against potential attacks from Gaza, as, according to Israel, the PIJ had positioned anti-tank missiles and snipers at the border to kill Israeli civilians and soldiers.
Haaretz reported on 2 August that Egyptian intelligence officials "are holding talks with the leaders of the factions in Gaza in order to prevent escalation" and that "all parties told Cairo they aren't looking for escalation." On 3 August, Khaled al-Batsh, head of the politburo of the PIJ in Gaza said: "We have every right to bomb Israel with our most advanced weapons, and make the occupier pay a heavy price. We will not settle for attacking around Gaza, but we will bomb the center of the so-called State of Israel."
and many more in 2021
Again, from your own source:
Hamas delivered an ultimatum to Israel to remove all its police and military personnel from both the Haram al Sharif mosque site and Sheikh Jarrah by 10 May 6 p.m. If it failed to do so, they announced that the combined militias of the Gaza Strip ("joint operations room") would strike Israel. Minutes after the deadline passed, Hamas fired more than 150 rockets into Israel from Gaza.
In each of these incidents, Hamas started the violence. FAFO.
Supah_Schmendrick
2yr ago
The difference between the Amish and the Jews is that the Amish don't control banking and media corporations, don't control people's livelihood, what they buy, are allowed to buy or what they are allowed to think, who they are allowed to vote for.
"The Jews" don't control banking and media corporations - specific Jews do - and they're not uniformly Jewish. As I keep banging on about, Jews come in all sorts of different groups, and increasingly they're not even all that Jewish at all.
Supah_Schmendrick
2yr ago
If the legal and enforcement apparati are all filled with the swaggilicious and biased against the objective hard workers, the crushing goes the other way.
Supah_Schmendrick
2yr ago
Evidence? As a Californian (albeit not a particularly vigilant one) I have seen zero incidents of the GOP being dinged for ballot harvesting.
Supah_Schmendrick
2yr ago
I guess I'm a tad bit old fashioned in that I think what "America" the nation-state is and should be is defined in large part by the Constitution which created said nation-state.
This doesn't actually work; it just displaces the substantive questions to various interpretational meta-questions like: "what does 'Necessary and Proper' mean?" and "Is the 'militia clause' prefatory or limiting?" and "what does 'Due Process of Law' mean?"
Supah_Schmendrick
2yr ago
Whites in the US (and in the West more generally) have been the most ardent defenders and practitioners of individualism
Really, they're more remarkable not for individualism (which would presumably manifest as no significant difference in attitude towards different racial groups), but instead for flipping the old tribal paradigm on its head and concluding that their racial ingroup is uniquely wicked.
Supah_Schmendrick
2yr ago
Supah_Schmendrick
11d ago
It's New York so of course the populist candidate is going to be a socialist, but is this really any different than the rise of right wing populists in Europe in effect?
Yes; the RWP rally around a policy - immigration restriction and recognition of islamicate/SE Asian cultural incompatibility with western norms - which cuts both against official ideology as well as the fundamental moral order of the post-WWII first world ideal.
NYC electing Mamdani is literally a 50-Stalins criticism of the existing order. "We haven't socialismed hard enough/real socialism has not been tried!"
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
Yes, it's called "democracy." Vox populi, vox dei. Or something.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
Yes. I think such sentiments are ugly in anyone's mouth, but I also don't think they merit firing.
Of course, back in the days when the U.S. was a real democracy, they merited tarring and feathering, or having the offending printer's press thrown into the local river. But I agree, burning is a bit much.
If he's not getting Russian oil because the Russians are just knocking out vital infrastructure left right and center, he's got a powerful reason not to be very pro-Russian; rhetoric isn't going to keep Budapest warm.
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