Tractatus
4d ago
The only metric of "voter turnout" is "votes cast," so ballot harvesting generating 10 million fraudulent votes is the same as 10 million extra people actually standing in line to vote, as far as turnout is concerned. Pointing to 2020's high "turnout" isn't evidence of legitimacy.
I mentioned arguments to the contrary being perfunctory, and we see a lot of this in this thread. Note that "well, Biden may not have been popular, but maybe they just hated Trump so much?" and then the argument stops right there. People publicly called Reagan the antiChrist, I watched prime-time network movies about how totally-not-Reagan was going to get us all killed; I watched every celebrity in the world shit all over GWB, also insisting he's going to get us all killed. Arguing that Trump was so uniquely hated that he drove record-shattering numbers of voters against him (while also driving record-shattering numbers of votes for him), and furthermore accomplished this feat with virtually no help from the Biden camp, who did precious little campaigning to build his own support, again requires me to ignore everything history has taught us of how elections actually work, of what motivates voters to vote. We have to have selective amnesia to think "well, maybe they just hated Trump that much" carries water.
Tractatus
5d ago
Is there anything we can do to nudge the public into accepting that yes, Governor Cuomo can effortlessly curl 100 lbs dumbells the way you or I can effortlessly life the tv remote? At this point, it seems like "the weights were clearly fake" is completely unfalsifiable.
itsallsotiresome.jpg
Telling me to my face that a campaign that consisted of: -a clearly on the decline Biden, who had been a joke in all his previous attempts, -who only had any credidibility due to having been elevated the the Vice Presidency by Obama (who famously loathed him) as a sop to certain factions within the Democratic party, and who did little to nothing to support his candidacy -who had to have the rest of the party candidates drop out - save for Warren, to split the progressive vote - and rally behind him to stop Bernie Sanders from gaining traction -who routinely "called it a day" by 8 am, held few rallies, and couldn't manage to get anyone to show up when he did -with a running mate whose popularity was so abyssmal she couldn't even make it to the first party caucus
Was, in fact, secretly such a charismatic candidate that he shattered voting results, even above that obtain by historically transformative candidates, is to insult my intelligence. That simply does. not. happen. To ask me to not even question this is to insist that I ignore everything that I have ever seen about Presidential campaigns, to forget everything I know about general voting trends, to just have amnesia about how elections work, and how voters vote, in general. Such a claim falls well within the "to even claim this happened is evidence you're lying" territory; it may as well be the poster child for "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
To go on to claim that in spite of more than doubling the number of write-in ballots - and thus, the number of people voting remotely for the first time - we managed to get ballot rejection rates down to levels practically indistinguishable from zero!. In most cases, we were able to reduce the rate of rejection by five-fold! I guess we were all wrong about the Boomers!
Wait, no, we weren't; such a claim, again, flies in the face of reality. This simply does. not. happen. Ever.
But wait, there's more! I am also to simply ignore Georgia closing up polling stations due to a water main bursting, sending observers home, then dumping votes that went 100% for Biden that were totally already counted before Republican observers were given the boot, nothing to see here, it's honestly disturbing you'd even think to question such a thing, really. I am to simply take in stride that observers were kicked out, and windows blocked from outside observation, totall normal, totally legit, only a loony would think there might even be the barest scintilla of a possibility that something untoward was going on. Why, it's only fair that the Dems would insist on obstructing any attempts to crack down on obvious avenues of vote fraud, as such actions are prima facie evidence that Republicans are just sore losers, as there can certainly be no justification for such efforts!
But this is all old hat at this point; this "debate" has been had with you on the reddit, and here, ad nauseum. You will never offer anything other than the most perfunctary of rebuttals, with a sneer for anyone who disagrees.
Tractatus
12d ago
Comparitive advantage only holds true in very limited circumstances that, quite frankly, simply do not exist in the real world; perfect interchangability of goods produced, infinitely elastic consumer demand for the goods in question, no risk in sudden changes in demand, and limited parties.
Hypothetically arguing that because America can produce wheat, and Japan can produce cars, so who cares if the Detroit auto industry collapses because "Comparative Advantage baby!" ignores that Detroit can't just immediately shift to production of wheat;even if they could, what happens when excess production pushes prices so low that it's simply not worth it to employ them as farmers; what happens if another country can grow wheat more efficiently (and these all just barely scratch the surface of the actual problems with Comparative Advantage)
Tractatus
1mo ago
I'm on desktop (Opera browser), and it goes straight to the highlighted section for me as well.
That said, Bauer is one of those insisting that the Holocaust can only refer to Jews murdered by the Nazis, so the pushback against the "other undesirables killed in the Holocaust" feels a little unseemly, particularly insisting that only those killed in the known camps count (why not include massive numbers of Poles and Romanians killed in town, but not the camps?)
Tractatus
1mo ago
"Use of herbal and mechanical contraception is well-attested as early as very ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia."
Attested to by women of all stripes and social status, or attested to by women caught in status traps?
That cities are population sinks doesn't tell us that humans evolved to avoid having offspring (again, such a thing would be impossible for natural selection); we see frequently in history that the moment you get cities, you get reduced fertility as people get caught up in status games, behavior which doesn't happen muich in lower-scale societies where social trust is much higher, and social pressure can much more easily tamp down on defectors. This is because cities - civilization in general - are not conducive to healthy families, not that humans inherently don't want families.
Tractatus
1mo ago
None of which suggests that women would evolve to not want children, which violated the most fundamental law of natural selection - alleles that lower reproductive fitness get weeded out. It's a tautological - anything that hinders reproductive fitness had better be making it up somewhere or it's gone.
Tractatus
1mo ago
They weren't "late to discover wokeness" - they've been complaining about it - or its forebearers - since before I was born. They just were completely incapable of stopping it, for a variety of reasons that would probably take several large books to adequately address and provide supporting sources for. The TL;DR is that the circumstances of post-War America - chiefly, increasing technological and organization scale, along the mass suburbanization of America - meant that the Right largely couldn't articulate a real, workable answer to the rise of IdPol, because they believed in the conditions that would inevitably lead to its rise, and they didn't even know it. To paraphrase The Last Psychiatrist, the Right wanted to debate the conclusions ("schools should teach family values! the government should support traditional marriage!" etc.) but accepted all the premises, and the entire form of the argument (that we should have mass society that encourages hyperindividualism, that accepts it as given that kids are supposed to go to college far away and then have their own lives, etc.)
Tractatus
1mo ago
“...pregnancy and childbirth are just an absolutely brutal experience for most women, and it’s totally natural and inevitable that they should wish to avoid going through it.”
It is absolutely impossible for natural selection to cause a species to not want to have children. No, it is emphatically not natural that women would desire to have no children, and instead have to be forced into it, throughout all of human history. The "logic" proffered borders on absurd; "well, people tend to avoid pain and inconvenience, so logically it must be the case that they would also avoid such in childbirth as well!" reasoning from first principles while obstinately avoiding all of known history that shouts otherwise. One would think we would see evidence of such "nature" prior to the Sexual Revolution, were it so.
There is a massive blind spot in both the linked article, and the post here, which is the refusal to contemplate that perhaps it is the modern paradigm - that having a family is bad, but having a career is good - might, just might, be [what was psyopped into existence] (https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/03/dont_hate_her_because_shes_suc.html). Make note; the system didn't just have convince women that having children was negative, but it also had to convince them that this belief came from within; that's why all the talk of "revealed preferences" only reference the modern era - a couple generations back at most - but not the "revealed preferences" of the past couple hundred thousand years.
I'm 5'8", well into middle-age, and not anywhere near my physical prime.
Were I to show up under center for any NFL team this Sunday, and then proceed to put on a record-breaking performance, putting up numbers the likes of which legendary passers like Marino or Rogers in their prime could only dream of, nobody's going to wait for the "smoking gun" of wire transfers to every team owner, emails from Goodell directly to officiating crews, etc., before proclaiming that the game was obviously rigged.
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