my enemies’ lawfare, my rule of law
It’s hard to take the lawfare accusations seriously.
-
there are tons of high level republicans who are not subject to prosecution, with the obvious explanatory difference being that they, you know, didn’t commit crimes
-
dem DOJs go after dem politicians for similar violations
-
the same DA goes after normal people for similar violations
This looks like a case of “man does crimes, gets prosecuted for said crimes.” The only remarkable thing is that this man is a former politician with a loser cult of personality.
Let me flip it around: can you honest to god hand on the Bible imagine a scenario in which Trump committed a crime and you don’t call the resulting prosecution “lawfare?”
Edit: I also suspect that the venn diagram of people calling for Trump to lock up Hillary over the made-up email thing and people calling the prosecution of Trump "lawfare" is close to a perfect circle.
Tomato
1yr ago
It feels like the left, or at least the leftists in my life, are taking an infantile tactic: we better win or we'll whine and complain for 4 years.
From my position as a moderately liberal griller this sounds like exactly what the right did after Trump lost: whining about stolen elections, utterly and embarrassingly paralyzing Congress, leading half the country into a fact-free conspiracy fantasy land, and so on.
Scott was absolutely correct here in how it played out.
?? Biden has been extremely moderate and a bunch of far left cultural elements seem to be coming to heel. What’s going on in the movie you’re watching?
Tomato
1yr ago
It really is incredible that this is has widespread buy-in among serious people living in the west. Apparently an explicit ethnostate is something we should be aiming for and defending. Their ultimate aim is to establish explicit rules around this:
- Establish "the right to exercise national self-determination" in Australia is "unique to the Aboriginal people."
- Establish Aboriginal languages as Australia's official languages and downgrade English to a "special status."
- Establish "Aboriginal settlement as a national value" and mandate that the Australian state "will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development."
You can read more here. Imagine if something like this actually became law in a nation purporting to be a liberal democracy.
Tomato
2yr ago
I ask this earnestly and seriously: I’m about to have a son. What specific things should I do to protect him from what seems to me like an obviously predatory movement. I’m not really interested in hashing out whether this is predatory or how to fix it on a social level. I want to know what specific things I, as a soon to be parent, can do.
Tomato
2yr ago
I've honestly never really understood the obsession with "merit" and college admissions. Like what exactly are you solving for if you think that you should just accept the most meritorious students? The discussion really seems to be wrapped up in some notion of rewarding hard work or talent. But why should we reward that as opposed to something else? Why treating Harvard admissions like a prize the right thing to do?
As a society the people we should be sending to Harvard are those who will get the largest Harvard marginal treatment effect. I guess it could be the case that the kid with the highest high school GPA will get the largest treatment effect, but it's not really obvious to me that this is true. Maybe it's the legacy white kid who will be able to build out his connections; maybe it's the black kid who had to endure a shitty high school and by a gritty miracle ground out a 1300 SAT score; maybe the 1600 SAT score asian kid is going to do great no matter where he ends up.
People need to do a bit more work in connecting the dots here IMO.
Tomato
11mo ago
I think a lot of the pushback here and from other rightwing online spaces is way too deep in woke/anti-woke culture war slop to really understand how this sounds to normies.
“White dudes for Harris” is full of normie white guys like The Dude, and the conversation reads to other normies as “hey I’m a white guy, I like Harris, and y’all are having fun. Can I take a break from grilling to come help?” Most white normies just don’t really think much about being white and haven’t had their world view poisoned by weird culture war grievances.
The fact that rightoids can’t help but interpret this as some skirmish in the upcoming race war really gives away the fact that the hypothetical White Men For Trvmp movement is a totally different and more sinister phenomenon that people should be worried about.
Tomato
11mo ago
You’re pretty clearly waging the culture war in your favor here especially in the way you frame and dismiss the “women things.” Take abortion, for example. I say this as someone who is probably more anti-abortion than the median American, but indeed post-Dobbs there is less protection over a woman’s ability to get an abortion and further erosion has been made possible in the future. It’s not a made up thing. You appear to be characterizing this issue as not a “real issue” because you don’t recognize abortion as a right. I mean, fine, we can argue on the merits of whether abortion is a cognizable right but whether a woman can get one matters to lots of women and it’s a live political issue.
A key quote from the article is “Young men just want freedom, recklessness, adrenaline.”
Lots of young women would like to be able to get abortions in case they get pregnant while having fun casual sex. Why is the male version of this something cool and fun while the female version of this cat lady hectoring?
Tomato
1yr ago
Why does Israel get the “they’re not stupid enough to do something like this” benefit of the doubt while everyone was parroting the 40 beheaded babies or whatever that clearly insane story was?
Tomato
1yr ago
You should have kids. It’s incredibly, unbelievably rewarding. Unless you’re literally on track to be the next Lincoln, having kids will be by far the most meaningful and impactful thing you do. And kids need a stable family life, so you should get married first.
Tomato
10mo ago
#TamponTim definitely falls in the online weirdo category of insult. The problem with this line of attack is that Walz comes across as so extremely normal that if anyone gets into this kind of argument with him the optics are that he's a guy you trust to coach your kid's football team and some deranged looking guy is next to him talking about grooming kids. It just doesn't matter who's the accused and who's the accuser in a situation like that.
Tomato
1yr ago
Americans really don’t appreciate how good we have it in terms of our pool of immigrants. Immigrants in America are awesome. Low crime, hard workers, values that mesh well with the native population. Even our “bad” immigrants commit crimes at the same rate as native whites and are much better behaved after adjusting for income.
https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/mythical-tie-between-immigration-and-crime
Some thoughts:
-
There are probably many factors specific to the US (and probably Canada too) that make this true, but the big ones are probably (a) geography and (b) extremely positive selection caused by various policies and reputation.
-
It’s hard to understand how badly informed most Americans are about our immigrants. Besides the data linked above my anecdotal interactions with blue collar Hispanic immigrants is unbelievably positive. My experience with white collar immigrants is that they’re just like me but with an accent. The most anti immigrant people seem to have had no interactions with immigrants as far as I can tell.
-
Besides the obvious “they’re taking our jobs” economic fallacy (immigration creates more demand for labor too), the whole “elites don’t mind immigration because immigrants don’t compete with them economically” is prima facie absurd. Have you seen the composition of google’s workforce? Other elite institutions?
-
US immigration is freaking awesome but Europeans should be careful about generalizing because everything in Europe seems set up to attract a much much worse pool of immigrants, from an ultra generous welfare state (real or imagined) to geographical proximity to regions with lot of emigrating bad hombres.
Tomato
1yr ago
Have you done it? Anecdotally in my locality (SF) basically every late-20s/early-30s woman I know fits the bill. I have a bunch of female friends like this actively searching.
Tomato
1yr ago
Colleges have always been super anti-Zionist. You don’t have to be a Ben Shapiro weirdo to know that.
The only thing that seems different now is that the Nikki Haleys of the world are explicitly saying that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism, so the activist college students are saying “ok guess I’m anti-Semitic too.”
It’s the same phenomenon that people talk about here re: racism. You call everything racist and eventually people start saying “ok guess I’m racist.”
Tomato
11mo ago
I feel like this is a bad idea because LLMs appear to be a dead end beyond helping you write code. Like they can’t handle 9.9-9.11, so I don’t think they’ll be good at something that needs a lot of real-time precision. Maybe they’ll go after another approach but given that a lot of SF VC’s plans appear to be to get Trump/Vance into office and then get huge handouts for whatever they’re currently working on, it seems like this’ll be the way it’ll go.
Tomato
1yr ago
Some of these are legit (like fertility) but if you’re giving up on having kids because your potential wife slept with 6 guys before you or is liberal, it’s an incredible self-own and you’re shutting yourself out of the most joyous thing you will ever experience in life over really tiny details. Obviously nobody is forcing you to compromise but I really hope you and others reading this don’t sacrifice your happiness on the alter of weird twitter dating discourse.
Tomato
1yr ago
Related, how long do I have to wait before I can start calling LLMs a nothing burger? Everything that has come out of it seems so small and near-pointless. Marginal productivity increases at best. When does the fun stuff start happening?
An interview in the New Yorker with settler/activist Daniella Weiss, The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers, is making the rounds on Twitter.
Tl;dr:
- The purpose of West Bank settlements is to make a two-state solution impossible.
- Palestinians can remain in the West Bank if they agree to be second class citizens without political rights.
- Israel’s rightful land extends from the Euphrates to the Nile.
- I don’t care about Palestinian children, only my own children.
I like the interview and I respect how honest she is. She doesn’t pretend this is about Hamas or terrorism or anything; it’s her tribe versus someone else’s tribe and her tribe should do whatever it takes to win.
Some thoughts/questions:
- How mainstream is her view? My impression is that a lot of Israelis/Israel supporters implicitly think that ultimately there’s no long-term solution other than the killing/displacing all the Palestinians, but aren’t willing to bite the bullet and explicitly advocate for genocide (or know they should be more circumspect about it.)
- The Netanyahu government seems like it’s on her side at least through benign neglect. Why does her cause have so much political power?
- Does a settler/activist like her count as an enemy combatant? On one hand she operates under the colors of being a civilian. On the other hand it seems a little unfair for someone who is actively working to conquer your land to declare rules like “no sorry you’re only allowed to shoot at the guys who have rifles and body armor otherwise you’re a terrorist.”
- For moderate pro-Israel people, is “kick all the settlers out of the West Bank” something you’d be willing to accept as part of a broader peace deal?
Tomato
1yr ago
Can any republican supporters here or people who feel they can speak for republican supporters post their reactions to/opinions of this saga?
From the perspective of a moderate dem, basically pro-Biden guy, this really cements my view that the new crop of republicans are embarrassingly unserious clowns with no skill or interest in governing, and the people who elect them are just burn-it-to-the-ground sour grapes losers.
I know the “Russian interference” or “Chinese interference” is a dumb conspiracy theory but if I were a KGB guy this is exactly the kind of outcome I’d be aiming for.
Does anybody actually like what’s going on?
You know how the evil super-intelligent AI (ESIAI) is going to manipulate us in sneaky ways that we can’t perceive? What if the ESIAI elevated an embarassing figurehead/terrible communicator to the forefront of the anti-ESIAI movement to suck up all the air and convince the normies in charge that this is all made up bullshit?
I’m sort of kidding. But isn’t part of the premise that we won’t know when the adversarial AI starts making moves, and part of its moves will be to discredit—in subtle ways so that we don’t realize it’s acting—efforts to curtail it? What might these actions actually look like?
Tomato
1yr ago
As a dirty dozen but not politically obsessed elite, I unironically believe most voters are just uninformed and not really equipped to think about certain important issues like climate change or immigration. The typical voter can’t articulate what an externality is or reliably identify one in nature. The typical voter has empirically incorrect ideas about immigration and its connection to crime and the economy. I’m not in the politically obsessed “we should cheat at elections” camp but I do firmly believe the current US government is doing an outstanding job all things considered and people who disagree either have incoherent ideas about what’s going on or are politically motivated and think that because Trump isn’t president, the economy must be bad. I think Biden is old but I don’t care because the deep state is benign and competent, so I hope he and his crew win.
Tomato
11mo ago
It's not cool and fun when men engage in casual "fun" sex
No offense but you need to touch grass
Tomato
11mo ago
Biden’s decline is now yesterday’s issue. This was a powerful issue for republicans 3 hours ago and just like that it’s over.
Tomato
1yr ago
At the risk of endlessly repeating myself: the media has done its job of detecting a potential counter elite (rationalists et al.), figured out what its sin is (spooky eich-bee-dee racism) and is now just churning out hit pieces to marginalize any organization that might come out of it.
I think this is giving “rationalists et al.” way too much credit. They aren’t a potential counter elite that’s a threat to the real elite. The media writes about them out of anthropological curiosity, in the same way they write about isolated tribes in the Amazon. Like there was a big NYT article about rationalist date-me-docs and the tone was the same, “ha ha aren’t these people weird and interesting” that underlies all these pieces.
Of course the tone is more negative now after SBF. But sorry, yes, if a guy in your movement does an enormous fraud, has a high-profile trial, and goes to jail, your movement attracts negative attention. But this isn’t tearing down a threatening counter-elite, this is an anthropological piece about how that weird Amazonian tribe that turned on its neighbors is still being weird.
Tomato
1yr ago
The problem is that "is liberal" tends to be an effective proxy for "is a gynosupremacist".
Almost no women IRL are like this. I’ve been on hundreds of dates in big liberal cities and I don’t think I ever met someone who meets this description. It’s a type of woman that exists basically only online and perhaps in some weird pockets you’ll never encounter in person anyway.
As for the virginity thing, I dunno, sleep with a virgin to get it out of your system. It’s just not important.
The premise that “24 year old female virgin” is a rare specimen is in itself pretty interesting.
More options
Context Copy link