ThenElection
No bio...
User ID: 622
ThenElection
8mo ago
More bread and circuses. Americans, it is very clear, prefer to identify themselves as being in perpetual conflict with near symbolic enemies than far actual enemies. It's an indictment of democracy that people prefer to project their emotional hangups onto political figures (either as avatars of good or evil, depending on partisan valence) than to view them as flawed mortals to be pressured to achieve national objectives.
Although we might benefit from having angels as our political leaders, that's unrealistic. And I don't think anyone can plausibly say we deserve angels.
ThenElection
10mo ago
Under a Democratic SCOTUS, the team looks out for the team. Under a Republican SCOTUS, it's just the opposite.
ThenElection
10mo ago
"Who has it worse" is not a productive or answerable question. There are different lived realities to men and women, and whether someone is affected worse by those different lived realities is highly individual.
The OP's entire frame of argument is a mirror version of the frame propounded by most feminists, who have as a uniting theme the idea that women have it universally worse than men. And it inherits all the faults of the feminist frame.
ThenElection
2d ago
Just gotta know the right people and right sketchy warehouses to go to.
The point, though, was about the complete lack of anything to do in most parts of the US, not about how Bay Area nightlife compares to NYC and LA.
ThenElection
2mo ago
I agree with everything you said, and no one should have to worry about making sure there isn't a homeless encampment a block away from a Four Seasons.
That said... 2cim isn't some yokel from Kansas City visiting San Francisco for the first time with her corn-fed husband and kids unexpectedly finding herself surrounded by syringes and shit. She is absolutely aware of the issues with San Francisco, and she's quite capable of finding and staying in parts of the city that are liveable.
ThenElection
30d ago
All taxes are distortionary.
Hate to be that guy, but land value taxation (or really taxes on anything that's inelastic in supply) doesn't have that problem. Probably the most compelling argument for it (plenty of arguments against it, as well).
ThenElection
4mo ago
Is your main point of contention that vegans bundle together a lot of beliefs that should be independent, likely motivated by a core moral dislike of killing animals? Sure. But the vast majority of people do that; beliefs are tribal, and that's far from unique to vegans.
I'd be curious to see a link to the vegan post you mentioned; did he jump from point to point as you describe here, or did he focus on the (likely wrong) "veganism is good for high performance in sports" argument only to have a bunch of posters bring up unrelated points?
ThenElection
9mo ago
Has a political movement focused on encouraging ethnogenesis ever had a good outcome? I don't mean a politics that organically develops around a preexisting ethnic identity; I mean a politics that recognizes the weakness of an identity and believes that the use of government action to solidify that identity can solve real problems.
I also mean more than the politics of historical fascism (though those have always had disastrous outcomes). Maybe European nations in the 19th century, in a kind of turning peasants into Frenchmen kind of way? Perhaps, but that was a gradual process taking centuries and itself caused plenty of disasters. Many Eastern European nations would have had a better 20th century if the pursuit of minor identities hadn't torn apart the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And the most common outcome is for ethnogenic movements to just fizzle out: see pan-Slavism.
ThenElection
1d ago
Yes, please.
ThenElection
3mo ago
China has a material advantage in the local theater, but the best it can hope for is getting its neighbors to commit to neutrality (and at least Japan will not, and it still has meaningful shipyards). The US also can shut down Malacca.
Everyone's economy will be f'ed, but if China can't win in the span of ~9 months, it has lost. That said, I don't reject the possibility of it winning in that duration: there are just too many uncertainties to call an outcome.
ThenElection
6mo ago
Accept is the key word that needs some refinement. Migrants are entirely free to try to change society in their image. Their host society is entirely free to say "lol no." So long as both non-violently accept the outcome of that negotiation, it's all above board.
The issue many rightists have is that their host society instead goes "meh, just let me have my McDonald's, reality TV, and video games, and you can do whatever you like." That's arguably a bad outcome, but it's entirely on the natives for allowing the situation to develop like it did.
ThenElection
6mo ago
It's consistent: if it isn't clear, I think both Israel and Hamas are the prisoners who murder an innocent guard for no reason, just to make a point, which is reprehensible.
That said, it's a bullet I'm willing to bite: if either Hamas or Israel had a solution that killed thousands of innocents that actually managed to solve their problems, I'd consider it morally acceptable. (That said, I'm rooting for Israel's vision for the region over Hamas's, but I classify that as an aesthetic preference, not a moral one.)
ThenElection
2mo ago
I agree. But by the same token, too many men are falling into the same trap: "I'm mediocre because the world is biased against me, giving unfair preferences to everyone else."
Sociologically, one or neither (or both!) may be true. But if you embrace victimhood as part of your identity, you're dooming yourself.
ThenElection
2mo ago
An internal locus of control gives you better outcomes, regardless of how valid a particular complaint is. Even if it is insanity, it's a useful insanity.
I have no idea if the particular woman in the example above actually faced unfairness or not (she probably has; at some point we all have). But I do know she'd be in a better position, financially and psychologically, if she spent less time introspecting about how mean and terrible and unjust the world is to her and more time embracing her agency.
ThenElection
2d ago
Bay Area housing is expensive because its workers tend to be far more economically productive than most areas in the US.
Reason not to be reactionary: it allows me to live in the Bay Area, with the alternative being stuck in the same shithole podunk town where I grew up and the only nightlife after 9PM is hanging out at the local Walmart.
ThenElection
6mo ago
massive net positive of arabs staying put in their home towns.
It's been three quarters of a century since their grandparents lived in those towns, and the vast majority of Palestinians haven't ever even seen their "home towns," which don't even exist anymore in any meaningful sense.
ThenElection
9mo ago
Going with the spousal example, it's not equally optimal for both to choose red and both to choose blue. Both choosing blue is superior to both choosing red, because the very act of both choosing blue is indicative of stronger bonds and itself reenforces them.
I take a view that "genocide" rhetoric has been diluted to be meaningless.
No moral politics can accept genocide. But nowadays genocide is thrown about so casually that it's a meaningless term. The Jewish genocide, the Palestinian genocide, the Xinjiang genocide, the white genocide, the trans genocide.
Genocide is the mass slaughter of people based purely on their ancestral heritage. No one--not Israelis, and not Hamas--either publically or privately wants or plans for genocide. There are bad things outside genocide different sides may want, but they are desires centered on power, not murder as an end in itself. The fact that Hamas wants an Islamic caliphate from river to sea (to sea and sea again) is about as far from actual genocide as can be imagined: if Jews peacefully accepted Islamic dominance (and ideally converted), Hamas would be plenty content and wouldn't kill anyone.
Israeli culture, despite its flaws, is better than Palestinian culture, so many people want it to win. But they're uncomfortable acknowledging that some cultures are better than others, so they feel the need to frame Israeli desires as desires to avoid genocide. They're not: they're a desire to maintain Israeli dominance over Palestine because the alternative is worse, and that's a good thing.
I think Barbie is just a (good) movie, and it's a mistake to read too much politics into it. Although the media commentary on it and the typical moviegoer probably reads the narrative through a typical feminist interpretative lens, it allows for other ones as well: Barbieland isn't some egalitarian utopia, and the movie doesn't try to portray the Barbiarchy as some ideal state. There's a bit of dialog that overdoes it a bit, but it doesn't dominate the movie. It's only the most shallow interpetation to think it's all about how awesome girlbossing is.
It seems to me that the resolution of the conflict remains wide open.
The resolution, yes; the outcome, no. Appalling amounts of lives and infrastructure have been destroyed, and whatever lines end up being drawn up on the map, the people of those countries deciding the lines will be dead or impoverished. It's only a question at this point of how many dead and how impoverished.
It may be up to the Ukrainian people to decide whether it's worth fighting on, but I'd point out that in that poll, 42% favor negotiations to end the war. I'd be curious to see crosstabs: are the young men being forced at gunpoint asked to sacrifice most well-represented in the small majority who favor continuing the war without negotiations?
Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.
The verses suggest that these names are simply identifiers for preexisting categories. But the categories were made for man, not man for the categories. The question is what's most useful. On the one hand, I don't think anyone is deceived by a term like oat milk (though I'd be open to evidence that people are actually confused by that), and it's taken off because many consumers genuinely do find it a superior product to cow milk for coffee. On the other hand, it was not milk as people understood it when it hit the mass consumer market (antiquated definitions notwithstanding), and if it were instead required to be called "oat emulsion," consumers wouldn't have touched it with a ten foot pole. That would have been a worse outcome for consumers, so it would have been bad to put restrictions around use of the term milk, at least for oat milk products.
My main decider for whether a restriction is good or not is how often consumers end up deceived, regardless of whatever other labelling exists on the product. I do know my dad has mistakenly purchased a "chik'n nugget" type product, so I'd come on the other side for that particular labeling.
I think there are particular ways companies can navigate this. New World winemakers managed to create differentiation from lower tier producers by respecting the champagne appellation.
ThenElection
2mo ago
Last year, over 800 people died in San Francisco to overdose. Compare that to 56 homicides and 27 traffic deaths. Or, heck, the ~700 COVID deaths from 2020 to the end of 2021.
Addicts have a shockingly low lifespan. And fentanyl is the key component of their mortality: approximately nobody dies from crack or meth, the usual drugs of choice. Which isn't to say they're not damaging or that I don't want to see them off the streets, but fentanyl stands out as particularly evil.
One hypothesis is that it's due to the allegations of sexual abuse from his sister. But she made them a relative aeon ago, they didn't gain traction, and this isn't the kind of departure you'd see from that. Plus, another employee/board member was removed.
My guess is fraud or IP theft.
ThenElection
11mo ago
The fact that you're using this number as a measuring stick tells me that you probably earn vastly more money than I do.
Quite possible. That said, in my experience there are rapidly diminishing returns to more money for dating once you get past, say, 100k/year. Going from 50k/year to 100k/year is far more valuable than 100k/year to 500k/year.
Google doesn't exist.
It's just a bunch of people, sending messages to other people, with its components arranged in a particular way that has created self-sustaining income streams (largely based upon luck and having stumbled on ads and executing on them effectively before anyone else). Even if Google did have some deep ideological principles, it would be unable to translate them into some kind of transformative cultural force.
From that, principal agent problems dominate. There's no way for individuals' actions to cohere enough for any collective Google agent to arise. Google doesn't want a woke fascist state, or to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, or even to make a profit. It's just a bunch of bureaucratic fiefdoms posturing to other fiefdoms to get a bigger cut of ad revenue. So an individual can get an edge in getting a bigger cut of ads revenue by leveraging woke arguments: who's going to say "well, it's stupid to ban Gemini from generating white people"? Because it certainly won't actually help them in getting their own bigger cut.
This kind of falls under your 2), though calling it stupid assumes a bit too much an entity that uses its agency in an obviously counterproductive way. How to distinguish each possibility? In isolation, the Gemini debacle doesn't give too much evidence (although it weakly indicates against 3; if demoralization was the goal, Google wouldn't have walked back the image generation). But if you place it in the broader constellation of issues that plague Google, 2 is the simplest and most consistent explanation.
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