Tanista
2d ago
I don't think ICE officers lack a pension like legionnaires so it's a non-issue.
I just don’t know what’s happened since 2022 that would make such a big shift make sense!
Elon bought Twitter?
It feels like a pat explanation but now I'm honestly wondering why. Maybe an instinctive dislike of Great Man theory on my part?
There's an entire criticism going around right now from people who would know like Ezra Klein that Twitter was especially bad for progressives in that it made the links between journalists, activists and politicians way too tight and allowed very easy coordination (this is how you get people providing arguments that rioting is bad getting fired during the Summer of Floyd because ??) . This allowed liberal cancel culture to reach a fever pitch but also led to overplaying their hand on culture issues and it naturally backfired when someone else took it over.
It was the regime's coordination center and the rebels got it. Of course it should go badly.
In today's era of disposable pop culture, where Marvel Studios are delighted if people are still sharing GIFs of their latest capeshit instalment so much as one year after release, that kind of durable cross-demographic cultural staying power is hard to even wrap your head around.
What was the home video market like in the US? Because, for us, The Matrix was one of the first DVDs we got which gave it even more staying power but we were generally a bit behind the West (especially on TV)
If you can only own a few you pick movies that are either classics, have good special features or really "popped" on screen.
Nowadays you can cycle through terabytes of movies at will (hell, even if you had no internet 6-in-1 DVDs are common in any random street market in Africa) and I don't know that anyone cares about the BTS stuff. You can't sit with a movie for months to years.
As for gays, they've adopted a strict "no compromise" policy that I don't think is popular IRL
It's getting more popular amongst Republicans but I think that's wholly because the gays have either abandoned their movement or refused to Sistah Soulja the trans side.
If they totally surrendered today and treated trans like NAMBLA...maybe Republicans would give up and rebound. But that's impossible (the best they can manage is just silence) so who knows when the backlash will bottom out?
Tanista
7d ago
I've seen some guides for getting cheap Ozempic but they seem specific to the US. Is anyone here in Canada? Have you gone through the process to get some and how did you find it?
Tanista
8d ago
pay scouts money like actual sports and remove weight cuts.
I don't think the UFC can compete with things like wrestling for lower weight classes or NFL on the high end. It'll never be as prestigious or profitable. And it simply doesn't have the number of fights to absorb all of the combat sports.
The best part of its model is that it leeches off other, more entrenched sports' scouting and training practices. What it should do is try to attract more athletes who want to cross over (like UFC fighters do with boxing) but the UFC is now in the WWE position and has no reason to innovate.
Has anyone ever described the motivation for watching fights, or what people get out of it ?
It's the motivation for watching any sporting event + a few additional benefits:
- It appeals to the apparently ineradicable male urge to debate Star Destroyers vs the Enterprise/Lebron vs Kobe/whatever. It's basically a simulation to find the best styles/fighters and to see how they match up. You can have the hypothetical discussion in a barbershop about how good a karate guy matches up against a Muay Thai guy or how useful aikido is or you can watch UFC.
- It's all of the benefits of watching any competition except fighting is the competition, the last argument. There's just a sort of additional, primal oomph. As Rogan says, you lose a basketball game you say "I'd kick your ass". You lose the ensuing fight and you just lost. An MMA fight is the last stop, not just fighting but fighting with the smallest set of constraints America can stand.
Like, you ask me, the entire point of UFC is to set up the most interesting fights/matchups possible and encourage the top contenders to fight as hard as possible for a win, and generally avoid safe, riskless approaches. Big purses and other monetary incentives are a good method. Bring in the best talent from across the globe and get them to give their best performance.
This was the line when the UFC was growing and needed to compare itself positively to boxing. It's quite clear that, after the sale and the ESPN deal, the UFC simply doesn't care as much about this. It's nothing new: the strict USADA testing was implemented to clean up its image for a sale (GSP begged for it and was ignored until it was to the UFC's benefit) and then they eventually did away with it because why risk stars popping constantly? It's actually perversely rational: the UFC looks worse than sports that don't test so why bother?
And you can understand why. This isn't the WWE where you can script and the public often doesn't reward you at all for good fights. Mighty Mouse did incredible things in the ring but nobody ever cared. People would rather watch Sean O'Malley or whoever fight.
Making competitive fights is how a champ like GSP who brought along Montreal/Canada (one of the few countries that'll pay for PPVs) get knocked out by Matt Serra. Or 1m+ PPV seller Ronda Rousey ended up getting beaten to within an inch of her life by a Brazilian lesbian with a thick accent. She's probably not going to charm the audience on Colbert or get put in many films. The division - which was attracting normies who wanted a role model for young girls - never got as big again.
Now that they have no credible competition they've settled for squeezing money from their existing base and resting on their laurels.
But also the actual fighting is getting to a point where the 'optimal' style is somewhat predetermined. Unless you're a talented kickbox-wrestle-jitsu practitioner, you're going to get stomped by someone who is more well rounded than you, no matter how good you are at your particular niche. Maybe that's how it should be, but its just a fact now that "MMA" is not literally "mixed martial arts" but really it is a style unto itself, it isn't really about pitting different styles against each other anymore.
I don't think this is the case. People have been saying for years that MMA is destined to be dominated by "true" mixed martial artists like Rory MacDonald who've trained in blended styles from the start. But Rory never became champion and there's still a ton of people with a specific specialty they build on when they get to MMA
It may be that this should have happened but the very problem we're discussing prevents it: if you're a very athletic youth and you have options why would you want to focus specifically on MMA to make 10/10? There's a reason a lot of the top people are former wrestlers who've hit their ceiling and HW is so bad a division athletically (an athletic HW is probably going to gain more in other sports)
Tanista
9d ago
People think Hasan is like Rogan which is so telling. He's hot and fit and popular so it's the same thing apparently.
If you know anything about either creator's character and biography it's insane to think people who admire Rogan would look kindly on Hasan.
I'm not yet convinced.
But, even if we grant it, there's also a motte-and-bailey here. Fat people are not just actively shamed, they're ashamed because they know being fat means they lack of some virtue or competence.
It may be that actively shaming them is not that useful, but it never stops there. The next demand is to dismantle or obscure anything that rightfully makes fat people notice their position on the grounds that society, and not their own understanding of reality, is shaming them. Then we start actively lying or excusing bad behavior which is probably even less effective.
The somehow both feminist and red pill take is an important element of this was that independent female status-seeking was much more constrained so the benefits of half of Europe being exploded flowed disproportionately to men.
Lots of parents deputize the one kid they think is reliable. The wisdom can be debated but it doesn't really contradict the playground cop thesis. The US also bribes countries like Egypt on the other end which fits as well.
As for letting them squabble... this'd work if a)everyone didn't already agree that the use of nukes is a taboo to be maintained and b) there was no chance of it spreading to the exact sort of groups that got Iran into this mess and c) one of these nations didn't continually insist it was in a religious war with the rest. That gives people reason to deny you a nuke.
People were protesting and demanding ceasefires almost immediately after October 7. I assume this was because they expected destruction.
At least on the left some personalities like Cenk Uygur - whose geopolitical acumen I don't value particularly highly - were explicitly condemning Hamas because they thought Israel would just absolutely wreck Gaza in response. (This bit faded as Oct. 7 became more distant and now it's mostly Israel criticism)
A lot of these people overestimated the damage (they assumed much heavier starvation much earlier on) they didn't downplay it.
Maybe the most moralistic version. But even the most detached and amoral babysitter has reason to keep their most deranged wards away from the knives.
In MMA News: Jon Jones finally retired, now that his attempts to hold on to the belt without fighting the interim champ Aspinall failed. Apparently he asked for a ridiculous payday, got it (which is a miracle in and of itself) and then promptly changed his mind. In the perfect capper for anyone who knows anything about Jon Jones, he had another hit and run right before announcing retirement. In terms of objectively successful prospects who nevertheless blew it by being incapable of staying out of trouble he's up there.
Good news: the division can finally move and Aspinall can actually have a career as champ. Bad news: the UFC is now functionally boxing with its own Joshua/Wilder HW mess despite not having any rival promotions and apparently Jon Jones is trapped in a time loop.
Hope they book Aspinall's next fight ASAP.
The US claims to have an interest in non-proliferation and international order. If Iran gets one, Saudi Arabia gets one. Israel already has one.
So now, instead of one independent-minded nuclear power, you have three in a region of the world a huge amount of oil and trade passes through. Lots of chances for drama. (Also, harder for the US to threaten a nuclear nation)
Maybe nothing happens. But it'd just be better to not deal with this.
Yeah, the lesson from this whole thing is not so much "have nukes at all costs" as "if you're gonna fight a war uncoordinated vassal swarm is a bad tactic because the AI will get defeated in detail". The second lesson for those who object is "swinging on someone a few times to save face is consenting to a war, prepare accordingly".
Iran simply miscalculated the strength and wisdom of its proxies. If anything, this is an argument for a durable conventional deterrent. North Korea probably wouldn't find itself in this situation even without nukes.
Yeah, one wonders how much of the Democrat's lack of dominance in new media is just cause the new media outlets that'd parrot the party talking points are just...the old media. So you look at a scary chart where the right is routing Democrats but it doesn't account for the people who just still trust the telly.
Left-wing new media has to spec to capture dissatisfaction with the Democratic status quo which is why there's no unanimity. Right wing media can at least be united by being against the left wing culturally.
I'm wondering, I suppose, whether there's a way we can employ shame in a truly good way as a society?
Yes. No different from prisons: early, consistent enforcement to establish a deterrent against escalating degeneracy/crime past the point of no return.
Tanista
28d ago
It's when the "debate" went far beyond semantics and social kindness that trans people became seen as more than just troubled individuals who deserve sympathy.
One additional factor: it's when transness began to be seen as contagious. I don't know if that makes the eventually-anti-trans position look better or worse but there it is.
Tanista
28d ago
I was trying to help B against C, but accidentally helped A against B instead" (with A=cis women, B=trans women, C=conservatives) is an easy mistake to make, even if your distinction between A and B is solely based on who is the target of C's enmity?
But they don't just help against "conservatives". The movement against maximal trans rights in Britain didn't run through conservatives but apostates who were themselves lesbians and former feminists in good standing.
I'm not OP, I do think in this situation things likely just dissolve. But if transwomen were making some sort of demand that made them distinct from women (the male version would be being forced to tolerate Sam Smith's ridiculous name shenanigans), without a clear indication of who wins on the stack, you'd at least think sometimes the bulk of the movement would sometimes just side with the women who don't want to deal with it. Especially since they couldn't appeal to the alleged suicide epidemic.
(Are you in fact trying to make a serious argument there, or are you just attached to the snappy sound of this line of polemic for your side?)
Yes.
Tanista
28d ago
If transwomen and women were identical you'd imagine that progressives would at least be accidentally on the side of women a few times.
We did it the opposite way. You just didn't fight women. It was made clear that you were a bitch for even attempting it (let alone attempting it and losing). Do it enough and some men would step in. The implicit message was clear.
Then again, we hadn't ceded our entire teaching apparatus (if it even counted as one) to feminists and bureaucrats. There may be advantages to backwardness
I don't see how this is possible when you can't even stop birth tourism from people flying in. Are they only going to work for four months or so?
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